A review of the Legion season finale – and thoughts on Season Two as a whole – coming up just as soon as I repeat the story about the time I cut the head off a Minotaur …
Late in “Chapter 19,” David Haller‘s friends stage an extreme intervention for him, confronting him about his increasingly erratic and destructive behavior. They offer him a choice between getting healthy or being executed to prevent him from destroying the world. David is indignant that he’s being put on trial while the monstrous Farouk has been set free, and rages at the thought that Syd and the rest want to turn him into “something easy, something clean.” He uses his powers to escape Cary‘s force field, declares himself God to Lenny and teleports away to parts unknown.
The climax isn’t an exact unintentional metaphor for Legion Season Two itself – but it’s close. The series isn’t evil so much as it is fairly drunk on its own creative powers, where trying to be even slightly easier and cleaner might do it and its audience a world of good.
That Legion prizes style over substance isn’t news. This was clear even in that wonderful first season, but the style was so dazzling, and the story propulsive enough, that it didn’t much matter that the characters were largely hollow archetypes. In many ways, Season Two was even more stylistically audacious. If there wasn’t any one sequence as dazzling as the black-and-white “Bolero” montage, there was so much incidental weirdness (the chattering teeth of the monk’s catatonic victims, the Vermillion’s mustaches, the Jon Hamm-narrated lectures about the nature of delusions, David having a dance-off with Oliver and Lenny) that the show was certainly never dull.
But all those flourishes rendered the season’s main arc irrelevant, illegible or possibly both. Every time it seemed like there was a clear goal in mind – the race to find Farouk’s body, David secretly aligning with the Shadow King at the behest of Future Syd, David seeking revenge in the wake of his sister Amy’s murder – the story and characters would be brushed aside in service of whatever weird idea Noah Hawley and company wanted to dramatize next.
A cool image delivery system is just a hard thing to maintain over 11 episodes of television, without some kind of clear foundation in plot or character to support it. Season Two would…
