#Wellntruly's Way Long Legion Recaps

[wellntruly]

LEGION Recap: 2x07

I feel like I’m gonna need to balance this one with a loooott of reassurances, because I really don’t want to seem unfavorable toward a show I really love.

I mean Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal on NBC. *taiko drum hit*

I love Hannibal. Ob-vi-ous-ly. I think it was bloody brilliant, pun intended. To this day it’s still the network show that’s really in a class to itself in terms of completeness of artistic vision---in its case, a horny erudite goth art film from the 80s. That show went for it. It was unabashedly poetic, visceral, heady. A serial killer show from a queer auteur that was somehow feverish and languid at once, an operatic homoerotic Grand Guignol black comedy. It was magnificent.

It was also opaque af, often lost in the weeds of its own moral morass, and viciously lonely. On the first watch this was kind of a boon honestly, I was into it, found this an intriguing well to plumb. On the second watch, in all openness I started getting worn down and vaguely demoralized with it all. I think it was genufa who once pointed out that it’s clear Bryan Fuller was writing the show while pretty depressed, particularly the first season. I think that’s sure the hell true. And the thing is, it’s good art, putting out a twisted, mythic deep dive into issues of identity and disability and monstrousness and love is Good Stuff, but oh my GOD everyone on that show is so isolated. Connection is fraught in this world and mostly inadvisable, given what always seems to come of it: loss or betrayal, frequently both at once. These characters can’t trust each other any more than you can trust what you’re seeing on screen, and hahahaha you can’t.

But again, all this isn’t bad! It’s incredible, actually. Everything serves the story, it’s all so intoxicatingly immersive and I love that. I just kinda, got enough of it, by the end. It’s just an issue of taste. (I know.) I ate a lot of it and now my knee-jerk reaction when I see something that looks like another plateful is just, uh---shoot that was one of the best meals of my life, but I.....don’t think I’m that hungry, actually. For this. Right now.

And when the new chapter title card that began this Legion episode read “MORAL PANIC” and I jotted down “lol sounds like Noah Hawley wants to relive the Hannibal fandom circa 2014”, that was, incredibly, before he sat Farouk and David down to have a conversational confrontation at a dark dining table set with bowls of exotic fruit and surrounded by fine art.

So alright, hand me the Ancient Roman ipecac I guess, gotta make room for more of this.

Season 2, Episode 7: ‘Chapter 15’ - Or, the One Where Tarra Barfs Up a Lot of Hannibal Feelings

The moral panic that Narrator Hamm’s latest educational segment is concerned with is of the “society over-reacting to an imagined threat and thereby becoming the real danger” variety, illustrated through parents flipping a lid over their kids’ love for a dark comic book (featuring The Devil With the Yellow Eyes) and some 17th-century Salem Massholes killing a woman they’re convinced is a witch. One interesting thing this touches on is that it actually doesn’t even matter that there’s no proof of the horrible thing people think is happening, because its secretive, hidden away quality is part of what they fear about. Like with conspiracy, lack of evidence won’t convince them it isn’t real. God that’s frightening.

The white space then gives way to Farouk, wearing mechanic’s coveralls and still lookin’ good, tinkering with his cool, sand-colored Egyptian car.

It’s just a lot of drawn out Stuff, a vat of pink goo in the engine, a coin he pulls from his mouth to start some contraption, but I happily watched the long baroque-adelic snail-strewn Italy portions of Hannibal, so like I mind.

Then David’s voice comes in with a whine and crackle like over an invisible PA system---Amahl Farouk, please come to the ticket counter: “I’m calling you out” (bless), and then y’know speaking of HANNIBAL...

Farouk: “You’re upset. Let’s talk.” David: [*snarls like a dog*]

Oh my effing god.

memory-for-trifles: “So where are their ortolans? WHITHER THE ORTOLANS, HAWLEY”

I mean honestly he really ticked off everything else, given that he’s got David trembling and raging across from Farouk just calmly lording over the head of the table, lying, manipulating, claiming that Amy didn’t care about him and he was never sick, and when David’s not having any of that, smoothly switches to trying to convince him that it’s actually David’s fault that Farouk killed her, rather David’s will, Farouk is his ~agency in the world~, because he was just carrying out David’s wishes, mapped out from his stewing vengeful thoughts during dark times when he was locked up.

I just

I feel this weird buffeting in my head right now, because half of my brain is all pleased because it’s a ho for recognizing story patterns, while the other half also sees this pattern very well but is like that vulture in The Jungle Book going “aw now don’t start that again!”

Just. Thought crimes are not real crimes your abuser is Not going to *rescue* you your real nature isn’t secretly monstrous please I can’t keep doing this.

But David, beautiful David, just furrows a look at Farouk waxing on about how killing feels good to gods and they make their own rules or whatever, and announces: “I’m not like you. I’m done. You, and me---we’re not friends.” The light from friendship won’t reach us for a million years, U MEAN. I don’t have your appetite, goodBYE. Wow can’t believe David Haller seems to have accomplished in three minutes the emotional journey that Will Graham spent three seasons on.

Annoyed and retaliatory, Farouk rematerializes David at a kiddie table, where a little girl pulls her head back at him in High Affront, and if that wasn’t enough emotional destruction for one person to handle, he’s also wearing short-pants. No I’m kidding, the true attack is that Farouk torments him with a figment of Amy. As soon as David sees her he just breaks down, still in such high key grief over losing her, oh this poor boy! He hugs her unresponsive head to his chest and cries that it’s not true, that he never wanted to hurt her (gaaahhhh, Chapter 14 feelings 😭). But this isn’t his sister, this is just a phantom. Who starts laughing, a creepy, non-her, too-wide-for-her-body laugh, round eyed, pounding her fists on the table, until finally David bellows “NNoooo” and shakes the room, waking up in the Cerebrorb with Farouk’s laughter echoing in his ears.

That night David tries to get to sleep, which mostly means lying awake arguing with himself in typically David fashion:

- Stop it, we can’t torture him. - - Why not? - - First, it’s horrible, and second, he’s just a mind does he even feel pain? -

I love him. Primary, emotional nope, also: logistical nope.

Syd asks if he wants to talk about it, and that’s also a nope. Fine, then she just wants to point out that Farouk wants him to be distracted and emotional, and he can’t let him. His sister just died. Syd are you sure you’re not Betsy Tough Love?

Anyway, good time I guess to turn this into a love triangle between David and the two Syds!!1!

Basically, Syd casually tells David that he should just go talk to Future Her if he’s not going to talk to this her, and David’s like hey theoretical question do you think you could you feel jealous of yourself?, and Syd’s like now you’ve done it, now I realize I don’t want another me to get it on with my man, jfc Haller, and they have to establish some ground rules. There are so many better situations in which you two could be deciding on sexytime ground rules, but instead we have this. The darkest timeline.

David assures Syd that he loves her, her, and Syd smiles and settles down to sleep. David is then momentarily suspended on this precipice where she hasn’t said it back, and Syd just sleepily teases him “Shut uuup. ...I love you.”

He’s just like, bolstered. Why is this kid some sort of Mountain Goats song. With a little bit sunlight / and a little bit of tender, mercy.

Meanwhile, Farouk is revealed to have in fact been building himself an Astral DeLorean, and proceeds to strap on an old fashioned flight cap & goggles and drive his car into those spinning screensavers. Back To the Fuchsia.

He arrives in that strange skipping room, where he and Future Syd can hold a conversation free of time & space and also just, suspended of all sense and meaning, apparently. They talk, for one hundred years, there are metaphors flying everywhere, only flying implies speed, which this does not have. What it does have is two characters slowly walking around a symbolic chair being CRYPTIC in some SHADOWS.

See this is why I’m gonna get myself in trouble with this recap, because oh my god what this episode is doing is BAD HANNIBAL. Just spooling out endless incomprehensible allusions and ~insinuations~ in a dark ass room!!! Seriously I had to pause, screenshot, and lighten this frame to even see what was in it

LIKE IT WAS 2015 AGAIN.

Anyway, it’s David. The Great World-Ending Threat. Did we already know that or does it just seem perfectly in keeping, now that someone’s said it and we remember every time someone on this show has informed David that he’s A Weapon or the next Shiva or whatever and he was like are you sure because I only care about my Syd and my sister I’m sorry? But they said no kid, you’re a world-breaker. And now look what’s happened. Smdh.

A break, and then we return with: LENNY, in the hexagonal cell-room they’re keeping her. Sometime earlier that day maybe, because Syd’s going to arrive shortly and her hair is down, but when we next see her in this episode she’ll still be sleeping in bed with the braid she did while she was talking with David---you can’t trick me Legion, I keep an eye on these things I will keep this timeline straight.

Lenny is standing by the wall, filing at something I think, the mood more that she’s just looking for something to occupy herself than that she’s thinking of this as a serious attempt to break out. She moves over to stand in front of the mirror, and snaps her fingers by one side of her head. It brings back a flash of memory, Amy screaming on the table. Ohh. She snaps on the other side---another. 

She snaps a lot.

Sydney interrupts this, with a knock on her cell door. Lenny smiles to herself when she sees her, like she knows this is probably not going to be good, but it was always gonna have to happen sometime, and it will be a distraction from the screams under her skin. She just slings right astride the elephant in the room and jokes about their shared connection with David, ironically playing at the weird opposed non-girlfriend vs. girlfriend thing to call out how dumb THAT would be, but unfortunately: we’re doing it! They are Opposed.

Syd, voice light and terrifying, informs her that she knows what she’s doing here, and it’s not going to work. “You’re not Lenny, and you’re not Amy. You’re the song they play outside a hostage crisis to keep the criminals from thinking clearly.” Ooh good line.

Lenny huffs a little appreciative chuckle. “I hear what you’re saying. And I agree. We’re gonna be best friends.”

But Syd will not play in this space, she is not here to make friends. She will not budge from her position at all, which is to impress upon whoever & whatever this is that she and her man are not be messed with, ya feel? I do Syd, this is very you and I love when you’re scary and protective. But what you don’t know is that a minute ago Lenny was standing there alone having flashbacks to being ripped out of Amy. I Believe Her.

In a sort of reckless, why-not-go-for-it rush, Lenny grasps the bars on the door and confesses to Syd that Farouk raped her. Repeatedly. Keeping her in the basement of his mind, his captive. Syd does not respond.

“But, y’know whatever, um,” Lenny says, moving back into the room, jolty. “Bros before, hoes, right? Girl power, I guess.” Fuuuck. She flops back on the bed and starts snapping her fingers by her ears to drown in screams.

So yeah, here’s the other thing that’s Hannibal-like in this episode, that quality I talked about up top that I feel coming in here and which has me in dismay: they’re making us doubt what we think and feel about these characters, turning everyone all shifty and adversarial with each other and with us, the audience, because we’re being made to mistrust everyone as much as they mistrust each other, and I don’t really enjoy that much! Pleease let me have my friends who like each other and work together! I mean there’s a reason why my next big shows after Hannibal were Stranger Things and Star Trek---I needed a balm in which to soak my friendship-loving heart. And we had love and support on this show, my god we have Cary “I’ve got you” Loudermilk, and if you drive everyone apart and take that community away from me I’m gonna be like this guy with his sherbert!!!

Anyway it’s also a Hannibal episode in how I have watch it in dark room with my brightness turned up to max and whenever I escape out to take a note I am BLINDED. So of course this whole next sequence takes place in the middle of the night and begins with Ptonomy standing in pitch blackness taking a call on a tin can hanging from the firmament. I mean, admittedly that’s a great image. Something sorta like David’s distorted treacherous whispers are on the line, black oil pours out of Ptonomy’s ear, and he wakes up with a gasp. Only he’s NOT awake yet, it’s a WAKING NIGHTMARE, #HANNIBAL. One of the Vermillion crawls up his body from under the covers, #THAT ONE PORNY HANNIBAL FANART BRYAN KEEPS ON HIS PHONE.

Jeremie Harris can do a real good night terror scream, there’s something in the quality of it where you know hearing it that this person is screaming in a dream, not real life. Out in the hall we hear him screaming at the image of Fukyama hovering over his bed, his basket bursting into hellfire flames. This is similar to the imagery that filled Ptonomy’s head in Chapter 13. The gooey spikey Delusion that crawled into Ptonomy Wallace’s ear appears to be engendering a fear of Admiral Fukyama and the Vermillion, and it’s reached the end of its incubation period: he’s infectious.

That night, Ptonomy walks the halls, whispering to an egg, setting it by people’s bedside, and then whispering in their ear. There is a GREAT song scoring all this, sleek, boppy, Spanish.

Ptonomy gets: Syd, Kerry, and Clark. Clark has his own threatening dream, and it’s probably the best thing that happens in this whole dang episode. He’s walking down a dark hall in Div 3, and whenever he turns around the music HALTS and three Vermillion are posed a few steps closer behind him.

Baaaahhahahaha, it’s this episode’s musical interlude and I LOVE IT. Yes, yes!

When Clark at last flinches awake---the moment the Vermillion grab him, ooo dreamlike---there’s an empty eggshell cracked open on his nightstand. But that’s not all that’s there!

HUSBAND! Bring 👏 back 👏 the Clarks 👏

In the dark canteen, food boats still running along their quiet little wavelets, Ptonomy and Clark hold a whispered, hunted conference.

Perhaps my negative feelings about isolation and distrust are best illuminated by contrasting with the elated joy I feel watching Ptonomy and Clark, addled though they are, conferring together about their suspicions. TOGETHERNESS! I love Hannibal, but I’m Team-ups Wellntruly: the true Fuller show of my heart will always be Pushing Daisies.

And one good thing about this episode is that after spending most of the season pretty counter to our peeps, this experience may bring Clark back into the fold?? I mean depending on how it shakes out, but it sure is rewarding seeing him urgently reveal to Ptonomy that Fukyama can hear and see everything, that he wants Ptonomy to know this, that it isn’t safe. “How long have you known?” Ptonomy asks. “Long enough,” Clark replies. Fuck I love it.

Meanwhile, we learn where David was during all this: back in the strawberry Cerebrorb, going to talk to Future Syd. He lies back into a wash of memories of him and Amy as kids, oh babe.

“Did you know?” he asks Future Syd as soon as he sees her.

“Sorry, stay focused,” she replies.

David, eyes broken and glittering: “She was my sister.”

Syd tries again, the glitching stuttering coming in really strongly and it’s somehow such a powerful effect on the mood of it: “I’m sor-sorry-I’m sorry. You have to stay focused.”

Face.

me, in this kind of lost despairing bewilderment: “On what?” David, same: [also same] me: [*gently fistbumps him, then wraps my hand around his fist, then just pulls him in and wraps my arms around his whole self*]

What Syd wants him to stay focused on is saving the world, yes even by helping Farouk, the Farouk who just killed Amy and cleaved his heart in two (and the world myriad, depending on how you read Chapter 14). David looks at her in despair. “You’re not Syd,” he says. “You’re not my Syd.”

She steps up to him, her voice cracking open: “I wanna be.” And sure, she’s working for Farouk right now, but, can’t it be both?

She wants her David back. Ohhh my god, oh Syd! And she’s such an interesting calculating girl, her views on love…. damn this is not just any one thing!

Future Syd kisses his hand, and David falters then pulls away, explains that he can’t, he promised. He’s so earnest. It kills her. Her sweet David she used to have. She uses this pain as fuel to do what she has to do, which is to mockingly pretend to be kind, guilt him down the path she wants him to take. “You should go. If you don’t want to help. No I understand. It’s too much. I’m asking too much. Go. I’ll be okay, the world. Just, live.” That one’s real, really felt. “Make good choices,” she adds. Sydney Barrett you always make me laugh, every version of you.

David wants comfort SO badly, he’s trembling out a nod almost before she asks if they can Say Goodbye, and kisses him.

Back in Division 3, Present Syd has her own Fukyama dream.

[*gestures*] I like this.

She sees the Vermillion putting Fukyama to bed, and outside the bed curtains, an old woman sits in a rocking chair, knitting. “Shhhh” the gran whispers, a finger to her lips. Me, quietly: the fuck?

The gang wakes Syd up from her reverie, sitting in Fukyama’s chair. “What is happening to me?” she pleads, an echo of Clark’s earlier “Am I losing my mind?” Oh boy!

Ptonomy, Kerry, Clark, and Syd hop in one of those million-mile elevators here, for a group panic attack. Clark, sweating under the ever-flucuating amount of silver in his hair, is just like THEY TELL STORIES, OF THE FACELESS ONE, OF PEOPLE BEING EATEN BY HIS BASKETESS, HARK, WE MUST ONLY SPEAK IN WHISPERS OF THESE UNSPOKEN TRUTHS, and everyone is like HARK, HARK, HARK. The lift passes through some weird force field and they all feel very distressed, each voicing short personal fears/thoughts like little one-off mantras (“Kill or be killed”, “Paralyzed”, etc.) and Amber Midthunder wins this sequence handedly, omfg. Fiercely to herself: “Woman up.” A second later, centered: “Destroy :)”

Returning from the lab, David steps on an eggshell, then looks down the hall.

“Aahhh” I said. Like a word.

I think something is taking shape in my head here, about this show being not a metaphor, but an allegory. No I am not exactly clear on how that differs, I just want to let this idea float in the background like a soap bubble and not look directly at it just yet. There we go. It’s drifting. We’ll come back later.

Ptonomy and Kerry, the OG Away Team of this series, armed with a gun and a hatchet, respectively, are stalking the halls. They encounter a pack of Vermillion, and lo it turns out they’re definitely androids, spilling wires and blue light when broken open. Meanwhile, Syd and Clark have fought their way to Admiral Fukyama’s chambers, and demand that he show his face. Clark even swings his gun up to send a shot into the ceiling and swiftly re-level it at him, a move that unfortunately: always thrills me. GOD I love the times when Clark breaks good, he’s so frayed out and intent about it, like he reached the end of his rope and found there nothing but moral impulse and a large iced coffee he downed in one go.

Faced with this, Fukyama carefully removes his basket. Oh he’s just some scarred, scared guy. But to them, the Sick, they see a monstrous Delusion, crawling up out of his collar. “What are you waiting for, kill it!” Syd shrieks like they’re in a monster movie (yet another wonderful delivery by Rachel Keller), but luckily David teleports in and intervenes in his classic whimsical style™

David: “What are you doing?”

Luckily for him, he can in fact just put everything on pause and try to figure this out. Honestly, let’s join him.

Okay. So this is the TV show where all the mental illness get a visual monster you can physically pull from your head. Amazing. Fableland. David plucks out the Delusion creatures wriggling behind Syd and Clark’s foreheads, his face alive with this sort of mystified satisfaction at being able to hold insanity captured between his fingers.

But Ptonomy’s Delusion had longer to grow, and has become a MASSIVE monster---the metaphorical-made-literal Big Bad of the back half of the episode. And if it seems like this is kind of an odd time to play out the culmination of the Delusion threat, David agrees, and tells the creature so in a fabulously Dan Stevens speech that begins like

and includes such gems as “You picked a reeaally shitty time to attack us” and “I’m dealing with a Lot, heere. With the Shadow King. And well this, this isn’t--helping.”

And because David can, in fact, do pretty much anything when he’s got his head on straight and a direction to go in, he shrinks the creature down, traps it in a jar, and e’splodes it. And so ends the tale of the Delusion, and maybe also Jon Hamm’s Educational Segments? He sure does provide a hokey summation of all his lessons while panning over a line-up of our whole disheveled team.

But honestly Hamm, what have we learned? That we never needed to distrust Fukyama after all? But like…..can we trust Fukyama? Listen by the time the Vermillion were uploading Ptonomy’s dying mind to a tree-computer I was just like [cheerful checked out David Byrne voice] “I guess I’ll think about this later!”

Ron Howard: “She has not.”

***

Wellntruly’s Way Long Legion Recaps Season 2: Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 // Season 1

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[wellntruly]

LEGION Recap: 2x09

Guys! I’ve let my own self down! I complained about something I thought was a failing in a piece of culture before letting the whole work play out! A cynical and nearsighted look that I usually define myself against, and now see what I've done. To quote a frequent Jen adage @ myself: Oh ye of little faith.

On that, Jen joins us again for this one, aka ALL THE SIDE CHARACTERS: THE EPISODE. Wonderful, we loved it. It was again rated Mature, this time for language as well as SEXINESS, the latter we certainly tracked, so hang on for that. Jen also continues to deliver the goods from FX’s closed captioning.

Jen: “Oh I will. I didn’t let you down with the ‘digital screeching’ did I?” Me, laughing: “No you did not.”

Pop a bottle of champagne over being renewed for Season 3, and JOIN US.

Season 2, Episode 9: ‘Chapter 17’

Where ya been, Bird? we asked. That question, it turns out, was on the other characters’ lips as well. Melanie’s conspicuous absence through much of this season was deliberately that. And now we get to see what she’s been up to all this time, the answer mostly being: retreating from the world and her own feelings into the oblivion of recreational drugs, and in the darkness of her room, gradually opening herself up to something very dark indeed. So far has she set herself apart and adrift, that outside a small handful of check-ins, the other characters have started to forget about her for long stretches of time, which the show mirrored.

And in this episode, we’ll all find that to be to our great detriment. META.

The Melanie Hours begins with a rewind of her beaning Clark at the end of the last episode. The additional detail I have picked up this time:

that Melanie’s cardigan makes it look like she’s rocking a Julian Bashir neckline. A delightful detail for your girl!!

As she drags Clark off into a side corridor, the screen scales down to a square and turns over into a shadow and goes away, god #visuals, and then:

Me: “WELL THIS IS SURE GREAT FOR MY TIMELINE.”

Legion Season 2: It’s Been Two Weeks

About a fortnight ago, Melanie gets high in her room to some tunes.

Jen: “The Flaming Lips! Haven’t heard them in a while. Seems appropriate for vaping from your elephant.” me: [laughing helplessly] me: “I just…hadn’t quite thought of it as ‘vaping’ before.”

Everything seems to be on some sliding, layered dissolve for Melanie, as she loses herself in the same drug that took David for a time. Things steady out long enough for her to have that astonishing and damning conversation with Syd about “their men” from 2x01, repeated whole and entire, and then Melanie slips back into her private dissociative drama.

Shadow!Oliver has been singing ‘My Bonnie’ for a few episodes now, and it’s developed a certain ~sinister edge~, becoming apparent now with him softly singing it as he darkens Melanie’s doorway in 2x02. Wow that far back??

He comes to her bedside, and Melanie sits up—calmly pulling a gun on him.

YOU ALWAYS WERE MY HITCHCOCK BLONDE 💋

“Sugarplum, I must confess bewilderment,” says Oliver, hilariously. “This isn’t you.”

Melanie: “How would you know?” DAMN. DAMN.

Oliver tries to smooth this all down, bring things into the Lethean rhythms of pleasure he likes to live in, the ignorance in bliss, by dreamily asking if she remembers this same quality of light on that rooftop in Bombay.

“It’s called Mumbai now,” Melanie blocks. “One of many changes since you’ve been gone.” I’M LIVING. I am living after 1995.

Oliver assures her that he always comes back for his best girl, at which Melanie counters that the girl he left isn’t here anymore. He disagrees, his dark eyes turning her to the mirror—at which point Jen went from exclaiming over this show’s good real takes on relationship struggles to exclaiming at this show breaking out some true vintage clothing.

Gracing another well-cast Younger Self!

Oliver promises that he’ll always recognize her, “What are years? Just trips around the sun”, and kisses her. With a glow, Melanie is brought inside his head, into that Old Hollywood pool in the center of Oliver’s mind, the stasis oasis Farouk has built for himself, where he enjoyed storing Lenny. Young Melanie reclines on a lounge chair by the pool, eyes closed peaceably, and idly listens to Farouk, sunning himself near her, ask if she’s seen a monk in Division 3. “Le moine qui garde”, he expands, which interestingly they do not translate. “The monk who guards/keeps.”

Yes, Melanie tells him. Yes she has seen the monk. Later in this episode, the one we are revisiting in the margins, she will tell Fukyama that Oliver & Farouk are searching for a Mi-Go Monk, but not that she told them he could be found here. Wow. Wow that’s FUN, because at that point the show was positing that David was a double-agent, David thinking he was but couldn’t be sure, while Melanie, who we didn’t think was, WAS. Neat.

Back at the dreampool, she turns to look for her husband. Ah, there he is, holding a martini glass on a diving board wearing dress slippers.

Listen the thing is, sometimes I do get Melanie’s Oliver struggle, because I look at shit like this and I’m just like “this is one of the top five images I’ve ever seen.”

Later, Melanie and Oliver visit one of her own memories, sitting by his side as he lay frozen in the diving suit, missing him desperately. Oliver peers at the setup with a sort of academic curiosity, and then lightly remarks that what she should have done is burn him, to break his link to his body. “If you had, I wouldn’t have been stuck in that horrid ice cube.”

“Burned you,” Melanie repeats, her voice wavering.

“Mm!” he confirms. “I could have danced through a cosmic field of multidimensions with no outer limits to speak of. Would’ve been beautiful.”

“Well what about me?” Melanie asks after a moment, small. “Us?”

“You could have tagged along,” Oliver amends. “To the beyond. Where the real action happens.”

As much as we’re learning the true depths to Melanie’s longings and hangups, there’s such sound characterization of Oliver happening right now, and Jen nailed it perfectly:

Jen: “Oliver Bird is absolutely the person who would become the nightmare they’re worried about David becoming. He has the ego and detachment you need.” Me: “Y E S. Like what @scribensalea was saying, about how he’s the closest thing this show has to what would be like, our traditional superantihero.”

It’s Oliver. But that’s the thing: it’s not Oliver! It’s David. And all the fears of what could befall him come from what the Olivers would be prone to, the old guard of smug fabulous telepaths. David’s dad. Oliver, of course, should also be even older than he is, well into his 60s. He’s an Xavier contemporary, under his younger Jemaine Clement face. And it’s the way these men have behaved that’s informing the way people are looking at David like he’s a waiting threat. But he’s not these men. He lacks that ego and detachment. He’s just a sweet confused kid inheriting the sins of his fathers. I don’t think they fit him. Maybe it’s even more than just generational---David’s most formative relationships have never even been with men at all, actually, they’re always women: his sister, his best friend, his partner.

“New Symptom Alert,” the PA system speaks as we drop into another of our 13 Days Of Div 3, “a growing sense of outrage.”

Melanie is pacing her room, ineptly assailing an apple with a paring knife. Oliver has gotten into her head, along with who has been tagging along with him in this beyond: Amahl Farouk, casting shadows in every mind he enters. Melanie is beginning to doubt her reality. God….she’s Mal. Her husband has Cobb’d her! MALANIE.

Distracted, she hardly seems to notice Kerry sitting on a chair, asking when she’s coming back to work. (Jen: “We miss you Mom!”) Instead of answering, Malanie just tries to see if she can convince Kerry that this all might be a dream. This is when we begin to discover that Kerry, perhaps owing to her unusually…shall we say sheltered? existence, is a preternaturally literal person, which is a fucking WELL of comedy.

“I’m real,” Kerry assures her.

“How do you know,” Melanie protests.

“Because when I hit people they fall down.”

Me & Jen: “BAHAHAAHAHA” Jen, a psychologist: “FAIR ENOUGH.”

Melanie however is not swayed by Kerry just annihilating Descartes with one blow, and proposes that Kerry could be a fantasy of Cary’s, her other half. That would be rather ontologically interesting, as that would make her a self-aware figment.

“Deep down,” Melanie theorizes, “he’s yearning to be a strong, sensual young woman.”

Kerry: Kerry: “’Kay I’m gonna go. You’re clearly having a senior moment.”

Not to be deterred, Melanie switches track, now proposing Cary is her fantasy, that he represents Kerry’s desire to have authority.

Me: “...Cary?” Jen: “Haha, what B-rate delusion of authority that would be.”

Melanie then starts rambling about how reality is a choice, incidentally she was married, and Kerry just goes “Yeah to Oliver. I met him.” But Melanie has started to forget that he’s not just hers, and asks happily “You did? Isn’t he handsome. For 21 years he lived in an ice cube.” I love…this show.

Melanie thinks living in an ice cube sounds wonderful. Kerry impolitely disagrees. All those years focused on saving the world, Melanie muses, she overlooked the most crucial fact of all. Then she pauses.

Kerry: “Oh you’re gonna make me ask.” Jen and I have straight up lost it at this point.

Melanie: “There is no world to save.” THERE’S our Bummer Guru.

And that’s pretty much the sweep of it for the Melanie story. Time for: The Cary & Kerry Show!

[the most snorffeling cackle of a laugh]

Simultaneously, the Loudermilks are both struck with a series of images—grabbing a case, driving a car, a blue neon octopus? ?? Kerry vaults down from the mezzanine to ask: wtf. Cary suddenly recalls his and Clark’s encounter with David earlier, and we are treated to a slo-mo flashback of him just like, smiling gently and trustingly as David is about to beam him with telepathic instructions, #authoritative. (Me & Jen: [giggling])

Cary continues to smile with this like, hilarious displaced pride in David as he explains to Kerry, who is not grinning, that David implanted this plan in their head, and they’re gonna go. Kerry’s like FINE, and they set out.

Narrowly avoiding the guards, they make their way to that fucking..linen closet in the hall where Div 3 keeps all their top secret world-ending weapons on some open shelves. Like it’s not even LOCKED. Incredible. Love this place. What a fly-by-night operation.

The Carries then go running in slow motion through a spray of water sparkling in the sunlight as some D3 groundskeeper waters the verge. (Me & Jen: [cheering]) Man I missed these pink beanies too! I don’t know if we’ve seen much of this echelon of Division 3 employee since the pilot. It’s so Life Aquatic. It’s so top notch.

And NOW: Lenny time. Lenny Lenny Lenny time.

She BURSTS in to this ramshackle druggie den ready to bask in acclaim and adoration at her triumphant return, but everyone is too dazed out to notice. Ain’t that just the drug strug. To be fair Len, you’ve been gone what, six years at this point? Well, I guess we don’t know how long she was in Clockworks with David. He was there five years, but she could have been admitted at any time within that.

Anyway,

Jen: “Another costuming win for FX’s Legion.”

Lenny slings off her coat and into a chair, across from this bleached blonde sprite of a girl intently painting someone’s toes. “Are you the new Barbara?” Lenny asks happily. In fact she’s the new Janine, who was the new Barbara. Great! New Janine, new, has no connection with the name Lenny though. Trying to master this latest disappointment, Lenny tries again: “The Cornflake Girl?” DAVID called her that! Did Lenny try to make her high-dy hole nickname happen in the mental hospital? God she would. And David would just cheerfully use it with zero historical context.

Referencing cereal seems to awaken some sort of recognition in New Janine, and she smiles up to gaze fully on Lenny’s face. “I like your eyes,” she coos.

Simpery, Lenny responds: “Thanks. They’re new.” Omg.

That’s when the beardy man getting his toes done finally registers who has sat down at the table, and at last rallies the reception she was after. “Wake up hopheads!” he declares, “The Queen is BACK!”

Me: “Oh oh: she’s royalty. Like the King.” Jen: “[GROAN] LEGION!”

To celebrate the return of Her Majesty herself, the Original Crackerjack (The Toy AND the Treat!), they throw Lenny a welcome back party, and everyone Gets. Down. I’ve been calling this show a kaleidoscope for over a year, and now: they give me a scene styled like an actual frickin kaleidoscope. Featuring, *gasp*, faucets of Amy in the crowd??! Yeah we’ll surely be having to get ALL into that, but first—

Me: “Is this the sexual content.” Jen: “Maybe?”

Jen: “Oh now this is looking…sexual.” Me: “Yes this sure does look like…content.” Both: [laughter] Jen: “This is definitely Content.” Me: “Some Good Content.”

But never mind about dealing with Lenny seeing Amy through her borrowed eyes later, how about NOW, in the midst of things.

How about this slides fully into Gauzy Erotic Unsettling Sexual Content, Intercut With Violence And Identity Horror Content, in a scene that would make Bryan Fuller very proud. You know if he wasn’t already thrilled to have apparently been the vanguard for the Kaleidoscope Lesbians.

Oh and there’s also whatever is going on here:

WHAT.

I hope you are enjoying this, a very picture-heavy portion of this recap, because it’s ooooonly gonna continue! In the morning, Lenny wakes to find Amy standing at the foot of the bed, asking if that’s how she did it? Scaring David in his sleep? And just—

GOOD FRAMES. Sure, this white bedding is wildly inconceivable for this property, but man what a HELL OF A SPACE. I love it. Colorful mosaics covering up the black mold just underneath. Billowy draping to frame their royal bed. White light filtering in through comic pages pasted over the windows. This feels like an idea a set designer comes up with, and it’s packed with all these meanings and art allusions and has at this point transcending practical realism, sure, but the director is just like yeessss because they work in a stageworld and it’s always partly figural, always partly for the aaahh.

Lenny, getting over her initial fright, awkwardly half apologizes for the whole…situation. She lets Amy know it’s a nice body, and Amy just casually goes “Yeah?”, god Katie Aselton. Then she suggests that Lenny could give her her body back. Lenny does not know…how to do that, per se.

But if Amy’s her ghost now, she better get ready for a Ride. “What I did to New Janine there is a kid’s birthday party compared to the Caligula shit I’ve got planned, ‘cause it’s been straight up years since I’ve let loose. Between the hospital and…so. You know. Strap in!”

“Are you a good person?” Amy asks. Lenny chuckles, thinking it’s a joke. Amy repeats: “Are you a good person?” Oh YAY, I love the way this show plays with repetition. Remember short-circuiting David in Chapter 8, “You don’t have to be afraid.”

I also love looking at this scene. God, echoes of Angels In America.

“Are you a good person?”

“I’m not the worst,” Lenny says. Then reflective: “Not the best.”

“Are you a good person?”

Starting to fray, Lenny asks why it even matters, she doesn’t, and Amy just crawls over her on the bed, keeps asking, “Are you a good person? Are you a good person? Are you a good person?” until Lenny screams.

New Janine startles awake, and Her Majesty tells her not to worry—with wide-eyed staginess: “I was just practicing my monologue for the school play!” Tell me aboooout it, A PLAY. I mean god this scene is, it’s playacting. Take how New Janine clearly has a lot less of her marbles than Lenny, and that Lenny finds this charming and comforting because that means you can make up whatever reality you want with her. They can be the Queen and Countess of the breakfast cereals. They can imaginify themselves a kingdom, where nothing is ever real.

Anyway, New Janine then reveals that she was apparently once in a production of Waiting For Godot. Excuse me while I get up so that I can then collapse theatrically to the floor, what.

Lenny: “Did he ever show up?” New Janine: “No Ma’am.” Lenny: “Men.”

Then Lenny goes “Doink!” and boops her nose. I am just, I am very happy today.

Meanwhile, the Loudermilks have made it to the Blue Octopus.

THIS ALSO LOOKS SO GOOD. I know I’ve talked before about my love for when this show looks like The Double, but I love when this show looks like The Double. Blue! Yellow!

They climb out of the car to stand in the blue lot, and wait for Godot.

It just looks so goooood.

Kerry voices her issue with them bringing this dangerous weapon out here to pass off to who knows who, and Cary says they just have to trust David. Kerry is unconvinced, because maybe David’s plan is stupid. She spies a restaurant across the way and hones off to drown her frustration in some soda.

Jen: “Jacques Brel!” Me: “…Is Alive And Well And Living In Paris?” Jen: “That’s what’s playing! It’s in the captions.” Me: “I love this.” Jen: “‘Man singing in French’”

Back with the junkies, New Janine is poking at a huge bubble in the ceiling with an umbrella while the bearded guy tries his hand at philosophy, and Lenny eats PRESUMEDLY cornflakes out of a pot with a spatula while seeing flashes of this fucking presh blue octopus. Also: the World’s Angriest Boy In the World, sitting across the room on the coach. Yikes she has him now too????

Lenny asks Beardy if he’s ever seen an electric octopus, but he just starts talking about ocelots, which is never helpful. New Janine keeps poking at this bubble, which is making Jen & I highly anxious, please stop girl, this is gonna be so gross.

But when it finally bursts it’s just a perfect lens of clear water, falling down as Lenny sees herself in the desert.

Lenny opens her eyes in bed, Amy lying next to her asking if she’s had a bad dream, her hand on her cheek. I seriously cannot get enough of this Amy & Lenny stuff, GIVE ME ALL OF IT. As Lenny scrambles away, Amy kind of snuggles into her pillow and remarks that she was never herself in her dreams, WOW relatable!! Girl let’s talk shop. Lenny just looks down at her. “I’m sorry,” she says sadly, then straddles her to smother her with a pillow.

“No you’re not,” Amy says, now standing on the other side of the room.

At this point Jen & I got extremely interested in the very high level of execution on this Post-it note mosaic. Is it giant eyes?? OH WAIT OH SHIT:

Yo

Amy informs Lenny that she needs to do what she’s told, by her, who is relaying from David. David needs her.

And that gets Lenny’s attention in a different way.

“Are you prepared to do whatever it takes?” Amy asks.

“For David?” Lenny pauses, then, with deliberate casualness: “Yeah.” She loves him! Which Amy announces with a smile. Lenny: “Don’t be stupid.” I am BEAMING into my hands. My babies. Best buds!! Ohhhhh thank god, I was so worried they were gonna try to take this from me. You’ll have to pry this platonic queerass M/F love story from my cold dead hands.

Lenny asks what about Sydney, whom she calls Miss Perfect, to Jen’s and my great amusement (Her?), but Amy explains how a person needs more than just one other soul they rely on and maybe we as a society should stop pretending everyone needs to find just one romantic partner and that’s it no one else in your life. Or, no that’s what I’m saying. What Amy actually says is: “She can’t do what you can do.” Which isn’t not my point.

I’m love her.

Amy fades away again, and Lenny gazes at the spot where she was standing. On a hunch, she goes over to peel off the comic pages, to discover that LOL AND BEHOLD: the Blue Octopus is glowing right across the street.

At which point New Janine materializes in the bathroom doorway, hand on her bare belly, and dreamily announces: “Your Majesty? We’re going to have a little prince.” Haha W hat. Oh New Janine, our poor perma-high princess.

Across the way, Kerry & Cary sit in a Chinese restaurant and discuss the likelihood of it having cream soda (low). Cary admits he’s worried about Melanie, who hasn’t been herself lately.

Jen: “Have we talked about Cary’s crush on Melanie because I ship that also, if it doesn’t work out with Oliver.”

Meanwhile Kerry is taking everything at her usual face value and thinks he means Melanie has been replaced by an imposter. Cary corrects that she’s “feeling blue,” and Kerry is mystified as to why Melanie is feeling like a color. It’s actually a Very Good Line on Cary’s part, because that’s the color of that drug! Anyway that’s not the point, the point is Kerry’s amusing miss on all idioms and metaphor. Eventually, Cary, getting suddenly emotional, or more than he usually is, confesses that he’s worried Kerry will be alone and melancholy like Melanie when he dies.

“You’re not gonna die,” Kerry assures him firmly. A regular David Haller this one.

“No?” Cary asks.

Kerry: “I would stab Death twice in the heart before he could get you.”

WELL THAT’S IT, MY HEART IS PUDDING.

Cary: “While an implausible and…rather gruesome image, it’s a comforting one nonetheless.”

Jen & I are then interrupted from being all goo-prone and sentimental by the Loudermilks spotting a black-clad figure walking toward their car.

Just a side-bar, I tremendously appreciate how Lenny was seen in at least three other get-ups while at the halfway-to-hell home, but made sure to put back on her fringy crop top and high waisted pants that she saw herself wearing in David’s vision board. I hope to god David picked this outfit for her. Imagine David Haller understanding that women love women in high waisted pants and being like “perfect look for Lenny” as he pulls on his latest pair of floodwater trousers and striped socks.

Anyway Lenny’s found the car she’s supposed to take, but is stymied by the missing key. No matter, the door swings shut, the car glows green, and it vanishes— to arrive in the desert, on fire.

It’s just THE BEST ENTRANCE. I’m so glad I’ve been able to swoon over it for two episodes.

Back in the parking lot under the sea, Kerry stares at where the car was in bewildered dismay. But Cary just pulls this entire tricorder looking thing out of his back pocket going “Don’t worry, I put a tracking device on the weapon,” and I fully lose it. IT’S SO BIG. THIS IS SUCH FUNNY PHYSICAL COMEDY. WHERE WAS THIS ON YOUR PERSON. God, wonderful flashbacks to Cary pulling all those pairs of glasses out of his coat in Chapter 7. Bill Irwin: Actual Vaudeville Clown.

Surveying the sand wastes she’s landed in, Lenny does this lovable little two handed snap as she remembers about the weapon and wheels back around to grab it out of the trunk before the whole thing is flames. God I love Aubrey Plaza. Girl gave premier deadpan on the seven years of Parks & Rec, but she gets to do soooo much on this show, and she kills it.

Weapon case in hand, Lenny scans around again and then sees…..this

Jen: “…is that a giant soup pot?” Me: “LE CREUSET”

Actually upon closer inspection, it looks like maybe an enormous pink drain plug? There’s like, a pull chain… [shrugs] Alright!

Back at Division 3, Melanie is talking with Oliver as she wanders the brutalist halls in her pajamas, reporting what she sees and knows. See the flaw here, Olives, is that you’ve aided and abetted her madness, and what she sees and knows is none too sure these days. Malanie has become fairly well convinced that nothing in her life is real, that it’s all a dream. She is just as certain that David is coming to face them alone. Wow, maybe the kid’s plan is working.

“Yes, yes I am sure. If I exist, then with certainty.” Ahhh. What a line.

The truest danger that faces telepaths is the same danger that faces dreamsharers (and my heart-sinking love for it is why I’ll always be way over-invested in the very silly X Men franchise and even sillier Inception). It’s the dangerous idea that really, it is all in your head. Everything is. Pain is in the mind. So is love. And if what you can experience in your head is as real as anything else, why not stay there.

In her mind, Melanie sees Oliver’s ice-bound lounge hanging in the Astral Plane, and softly cries out. Please, she wants to join him there. But, a question: “Violence? Why does it always end in violence.” Ohh.

Melanie Bird hits Clark over the head. Then she walks down a dark curving hall, into her lost husband’s arms.

Programming note: I have written Legion fanfic! I do not want to oversell this: it is less than 800 words of gen vignettes. While my recap style is probably best described as “verbose as fuck”, my fic style is spaaare as hell. It’s like I’m coming at it like poetry instead of prose or something, I don’t know. Anyway I write fanfic exceedingly rarely, so I’ve made my fic feed the most exclusive level on my Patreon, at the donation amount I thought was rather a reach. So that’s where it lives, if you are an interested Medici sort.

***

Wellntruly’s Way Long Legion Recaps Season 2: Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 // Season 1

Other loose Legion meta: astral ‘splaining

[wellntruly]

Wellntruly’s LEGION RECAPS, Season 2

Loved Season 1 of Legion and ready to gallop right into Season 2? Well reign your steed a sec, partner! This season was more of a mixed bag, and then at the end just senselessly set the whole thing on fire and burned seemingly the majority of the audience, lay and profesh critic alike.

But this need not be your fate!

I Watched S2 of Legion So That You Don’t Have To Suffer

What follows is a guide to the season, by someone who lived it. You should feel more than free to just cherry pick which of these episodes sound good to you---this season is nowhere near well-constructed enough that you’d even be losing much cohesion by doing this. Plus, this very act will be like giving a rousing middle finger to Noah “you incredible dumbass” Hawley, by showing how disastrously unsupported his ~twisted development~ was with how you can entirely cut it out with only a few strokes. That’s just bad writing, my dude!

Anyhow. That was some godawfulness, but there is still Legion joy to be selectively had if you want it! Or you may not, knowing what callous damaging bullshit the creator pulled, and that’s fine too! Different people are gonna feel better about engaging with things in different ways. You do you. Your media life is a Choose Your Own Adventure.

On that, here’s my choices from this one:

2.1. ‘Chapter 9’ - [full recap]

It’s the season premiere, of course watch it! Sure it’s a little shaky, which will prove indicative of this whole season, but it does so much of that Legion stuff you like that you will be way too excited to mind. Come for the waffle boat, stay for the telepathic dance fight. LEGION.

2.2. ‘Chapter 10’ - [full recap]

I’m torn on this one, because so much of the things that start in this episode make me wrinkle up my nose in retrospect, because they ended up getting warped into The Bad End. But at this point, in their fresh new dawn, they felt like they might go somewhere interesting. They kind of still do to me, so that’s also interesting. If I were to try rebreaking this season I’d probably keep all this, and just take different paths from these starting points. Anyway to follow the metaphor: your mileage may very. I’m gonna steer you away from any of the “conclusions”, such as they are, so consider whether you are a person who would enjoy an evening of one act plays that were all just Act Ones of full plays.

2.3. ‘Chapter 11’ - [full recap]

Yes watch! I would say this is the most S1-like episode of this season? That’s not my roundabout way of saying it’s the best of this season (though it’s one of my faves), just that the rhythms are adventure-y and it’s inventive and characters are cute with each other and also there are Dramatic Monologues where they Say Some Shit.

I was going to give you a quick catch-up if you skipped Chapter 10, but I’m looking at this and straight-up I don’t think it matters. All the characters are confused and just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks, so having more of that beforehand wasn’t clarifying, it was just More. And while David has what seems like a big pivotal conversation with Farouk in the previous episode, in this one he just spontaneously decides to go talk to him about it again (so clunky I’d commented on it immediately), so it really doesn’t matter if you missed the first round.

Wow this process sure is not shining a favorable light on this season’s writing!

2.4. ‘Chapter 12’ - [full recap]

There are two episodes this season that very boldly pause the action to take a detour through someone’s head in an episode-length character study. I recommend both of them, for reasons of artistic viability and (from?) unusualness. Also because this one, Syd’s, repeatedly returns to an ice planet and an Egon Schiele gallery and that is so perfectly calibrated to my interests it’s absolutely absurd.

That said, I recommend you watch the final scene in the igloo as an odd Lynchian dream that’s basically just a mood excursion. From the very start it was kinda perplexing and alarming and didn’t seem to fit quite right, at all, and the only time it’s gonna come up again (in a way that just kept making the original moment feel so shoehorned and reverse-engineered) is in the last two episodes you’re definitely not watching. So don’t give it any weight, just abstractly watch two people act over a flickering fabric campfire.

2.5. ‘Chapter 13’ - [full recap]

An either/or episode, if I’m trying to accurately guess the tastes of the general audience, not just myself. (It’s a yes for me, but I am me.) This is a slow-scary tone poem. The word they use is “dread.” You should watch it if one, ideally both, of the following criteria are met:

- you are interested in slow & scary, no matter what horrifying thing it may lead to - you are interested in LENNY BUSKER and feel like friendshipping her and David’s weirdo love story extremely

If you watch it: don’t worry about Ptonomy here, it’s part of a sub-plot we’re excising.

If you don’t: there IS one critical plot point in this ep you’re gonna need if you go further, so maybe skim my recap?

2.6. ‘Chapter 14’ - [full recap]

I’d call this is the most politically daring and affecting episode this show has ever done, and I genuinely don’t know how to reconcile this with the fact that the people who wrote this also wrote the irresponsible, exploitive way the season ended. This is a multi-timelined study of having mental illness in America, and also one about the evil of billionaires, and most of them about David’s relationship with Amy. It is the most critically acclaimed episode of the season, easily.

2.7. ‘Chapter 15’ - [full recap]

And then there’s THIS nonsense. It’s a mess and will only be expanded later into TRUE GARBAGE, skip it. Although if you want to read me gettin’ real salty, this recap had the highest per capita snarky jokes, plus me going deep on my relationship with Hannibal.

2.8. ‘Chapter 16’ - [full recap]

If you’re only going to watch one episode after Chapter 14, make it this one.

You may find yourself wondering what the heck is up with Ptonomy, Future Syd & Farouk, this effing dessert, etc, because so was everyone who HAD seen every episode! Don’t worry about it, shrug merrily, and instead enjoy what this episode has to recommend itself: the first appearance of David’s pansexual pride socks, strategy boards, parachutes, and one of the most off the wall brill choices this series has ever made: establishing that occasionally Syd and Clark get together to talk about boyfriends over drinks. I JUST.

2.9. ‘Chapter 17’ - [full recap]

And if you’re gonna watch two....this is definitely the other one. We’ve since learned that this was the additional episode that was added to the season order after FX saw the show, evidently because they realized that all the side characters had been so underserved that it affected plot comprehensibility. (Hey that wasn’t all that was hindering that, my guys!!!) Anyway that does mean I’d like to significantly qualify the opening to my recap.

Regardless, worth it if you like the side characters. I LOVE ‘em.

CORRECTION: I don’t know what I was thinking of course you should be watching Chapter 17, which gifted us so much, including the image above from Lenny’s Lesbian Thespian Adventures.

2.10. ‘Chapter 18’ - [full recap] and 2.11 ‘Chapter 19’ [nope]

Save yourself. I don’t think I have the energy or interest in going over all the ways this is just abysmal, they are too numerous. If you must know what happens, I wrote a recap of Chapter 18, and Alex McLevy at The AV Club wrote about the finale pretty daaanng well. 

Anyway, I choose to scorn this choice deeply, and wrap up the season somewhere else in my head. The beauty of imagination!

[wellntruly]

LEGION Recap: 2x10

I love this show very very much. That is how it has the capacity to disappoint me sometimes. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t care, you know?

Anyway. I might like this last episode even less than Chapter 15. A little hard to say, as it let me down in the same but also some opposite ways, so that was fun! I’m kidding it was not. This one belabored, incredibly, those SAME themes from 2x07 I find so tiresome and unhappy, Embrace Your Evil Nature and Distrustful Aloneness, combined them into one in fact, until I was just one big sigh, sighing into the phone at Jen, while she narrated her eye rolls. And then, in a great & terrible switch, where Chapter 15 had a tendency to go so obtuse and nonsensical that it was like no one could see the script properly in all the GLOOM, Chapter 18 was just knockingly obvious, a ham-fisted giant green hand, and that too proved not a great look!

But also as with Chapter 15, there were parts I truly and deeply enjoyed (hint: they were all the parts with Lenny). And I will say that something did come together for me during this episode that I found very neat and interesting indeed, and spilled out a dense paragraph of very classic sort of meta on it in my excitement.

So you do have both sorts of things ahead of you, positivity as well as negativity, as Jen and I watch Chapter 18 and have some Opinions.

Season 2, Episode 10: ‘Chapter 18’

me over the phone: “Okay. Okay are we ready for this.” Jen: “I am clutching this juice box to my chest.”

The juice box:

me: “...Is that strawberry flavored tea that literally says ‘You are loved’”

(Note that Jen made sure to clearly state that she “released the intellectual property of this picture” to me, because Jen uses lawfulness to comedic effect like some sort of fictional marshal.)

ALRIGHT OKAY WE’RE READY.

Lightning splits the sky, and stays there. Jen: “It’s like that crack in the wall from Doctor Who!” That crack let time through, yeah? I think it was time, or the universe, or something. Maybe something similar here, as the camera comes up on a tent glowing small in the darkness, which we think to be Syd & David’s tent from the end the previous episode, but no: inside Lenny lounges indolently (.....pregnantly?) on a fur in a slinky gold dress surrounded by bones, while David sits astride a throne with his tall shock of Legion comics hair and holding Syd in a crystal ball in his hand. Um, necessary visuals on all of THAT:

Haha lord.

Potential takes on what this could be, in ascending order of how I like them: - a potential future universe, depending - a Star Trek-style Mirror Verse running parallel to this one where this is the horny evil state of things - Syd’s nightmare

Lending credence to that last, my preferred take, is how much this tableau speaks to Syd’s distrust of Lenny and her fears about David, and also how it places her in an orb, an echo of where David found her future self. The vision ends with a long hold on her face, in this sort of trapped despair. If someone has seen your future, how determinate is that? Is she stuck on a path toward a doom she cannot escape, unable to change anything?

We transition to the tent we expected, Syd sadly skimming her hand over David as he sleeps, staring down at his peaceful face. Radiohead is playing, so there’s that for your #mood. In her head she turns over her own ‘Previously on Girl Talk With Sydney & Clark’, “I’m going after him” repeating throughout like a soundtrack. (Repeeeaaating) (Like a soooouundtrack)

Syd gets up and decides to just take a solitary look around the landscape this morning, which makes sense because she’s Syd. She then becomes spectacularly dense, which does not make sense, because she’s not David. *badumpsh*

But ohhhh my friends, the idiot balls are flying thick in this episode, starting and ending with Sydney Barrett, like she has landed in a game of idiot ball dodgeball and she is LOSING.

Syd spies that giant pink drain plug Lenny had seen, and yes, oh look, there’s the drain. On cue, a fuzzy little bunny comes sailing out of it on a FUCKING HOOK, the line still running RIIIGHT back down into this plummeting pit, The World’s Literalist Bait In The World, but she just scoops the rabbit up close in her arms (Syd? the girl who…switches bodies with any animal she touches? you’re saying this is her impulse? wow what key aspect of her character won’t this dumb plot set aside!) and then just SITS THERE like THIS

Every part of my being screams out in survivalist panic at this shot. YOU ARE GOING TO GET— yup, the hook yanks back and catches in the flesh of her hand, and she’s dragged screaming into the hole. 

I have been calling David ‘bun’ since Chapter 4 and this baited-bun-as-bun-metaphor-for-David-as-metaphor is a) hilariously recursive and b) a decently accurate bit of foreshadowing for what’s going to befall Syd this episode, vis a vis getting reeled in by swallowing a David-shaped lie, so hey at least that part of this scene resembled good writing.

And the veerrrrry scary flashes of Syd screaming until she chokes as she falls through the darkness & the credits is VERY GOOD. VERY FRIGHTENING. I love the way this show uses cutting to hyper-heighten the terror.

At last Syd lands on solid ground-beneath-ground, in a dim chamber full of these round tables of varying heights, looking like giant phosphorous-lit lily pads. And in the corner, Melanie, in Full Misandry Mode. It’s fun until it’s a caricature, so let’s enjoy that period while we can: “Have you heard the one,” Melanie sings out in greeting, “where the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result? You know what made me think of that? Men.” *badumpSSH*

She also gestures ironically at the word/whole concept of “gender” when she refers to her and Syd’s own, which is a treat. But after her biting points about the timeless, ceaseless threat of masculinity, this thread starts to go downhill toward somewhere cheaper. And of course, it was all wrong from the moment we saw her, because how & what the hell would Melanie be doing out here, and behaving like this. Clear. Driven. Driven specifically to confront Syd about things.

This set is nice btw, I like it. The lights slowly blink in the Stranger Things roots.

Melanie, who is certainly not Melanie right now, but perhaps a bitter Galadriel, take Syd to one of these wide pedestals to show her David in the blue depths. She informs Syd that of course David doesn’t really love her, not in a real way. All he truly loves is power, “being chosen by God”—so okay this is def Farouk—and “no piece of ass can compete with that”—deeefff Farouk.

Syd just looks up into the distance, then wanders away remarking with casual realization: “I’m in Hell.” Reader we laughed. This is the direction it should have gone, somewhere Syd-like and funny and very Legion, but no. No this was only a glimpse of the brighter path.

We are in Hell, where somehow the blatantly manipulative smoke & mirrors Shadow!Melanie is using are supposed to be…convincing? Jen and I were not convinced, from the jump, and incredulous that either the audience OR Syd were supposed to be.

Jen: “Yeah this is just a deliberate assault on Syd’s core beliefs.”

Shadow!Melanie, with the air of a malevolent magician doing a TEDTalk, just keeps pulling up new slides of David and explaining how in fact, this person that Syd fell in love with, whom she has been fighting to protect, is just a liar who loves 2 maim. Everything you thought you knew is wrong, up is down, right is left, David’s monster was a gift (Farouk shut the fuck up), oh and we’re saying David is mentally ill again, which is now just a conjugate for Evil. Caaannn we not. Sure the person pushing this viewpoint will eventually very clearly be shown to be The Shadow King, not someone whose opinions are supposed to be, on the whole, good ones, but still. Perpetrating that idea at all IS an evilness.

But actually, despite how much of the conversation will be about him, this episode isn’t really about David. We now shift to him searching the desert for Syd, struggling through a yellow dust storm that perfectly matches the blue snowstorm that brought him into Syd’s mindloop, just in case you were wondering what we’re doing here.

This Is An Episode About Syd

David makes it through the glowing blowing wind and finds the empty rickshaw, and up on the slopes: the monastery. Le Desolé. He comes out of the storm to storm the castle.

Inside, Oliver sits at the head of a long table with a martini. “Chill baby there’s no boo-hoo here I thought we could just talk in private,” he rolls out. What an actually very fabulous mash-up of Oliver and Farouk’s vocal tics. But David bodily throws him out of the chair and drags him a few yards to another one. Shadow!Oliver quips not to hurt the vessel, but otherwise just sits there, arms loose in his lap. He’s not fighting back, which should have been a siiiiign, David. You’ve never shown yourself to be stronger than Farouk. It’s a feint, a false retreat.

Well, and a taunt. “I know something you don’t know,” Oliver singsongs, then mimes zipping his lips and throwing away the key, which rings invisibly to the floor some yards away—a small joy.

David is sick of everything, and furious. He’s spent a lifetime being tormented and abused, people he loves have been hurt and killed, and now his beloved Syd is missing, and it seems that ONCE AGAIN this selfsame asshole is responsible for it. But ‘don’t hurt the vessel’—so he goes inside Oliver’s head, brings this fight to the telepathic front, where he can confront the core: Farouk. In fact a mind can feel pain, that’s what minds DO.

Craning threateningly over the Oliver-form now chained to a mental chair, David starts quoting Syd’s philosophy she laid out at the end of Chapter 12. All that stuff about how pain and damage makes you strong, not love, you gotta be fierce to protect love, so that’s why he’s gonna torture him to find Syd. Well, I had a bad feeling about that speech, and look: that feeling came truuue. Syd you have created your own terrible future, haven’t you. The whole Syd Continuum trying to prevent this, and only just helping it to happen at every step. That’s quite a tragedy.

Or it would be, if only this had more impact. If only this show wasn’t trying to have their cake and eat it to, so that I just end up tossing the whole thing from me in distaste.

“That’s my armor, baby,” David agro-preens, “I’m the lunatic you turned me into.”

Alright. Dan Stevens can, in fact, be very properly scary if he wants to be. This is…not. This scans so dorky. So that’s a choice that was made about how he’s portraying David’s new hardness. It don’t fit. He’s just pulling this on, someone else’s armor, and it will work for now, but it clanks when he moves.

And I’m just so…..tired. I’m tired of having to do this. I’m tired of that unpleasant feeling of a show proposing something that would nullify all these positive emotional experiences you’ve had with with it and a character, try to get you to doubt them. Like, excuse me, no, I found value in that. And you’re trying to, what? Tell me I was a sucker for believing in goodness? BullSHIT. I hate that as a message and I hate that as a TV experience, because I’m also so tired of having to haul up a mental catalog of why they’re lying, even while they’re saying it! Because they never commit, they always try to have it both ways. And I am TIRED of getting thrown out of a show to go through this one-sided rebuttal where I’m just like “Evidence that disproves your edgelord “twist”: it’s every minute of your show even including elements of this regrettable moment.” Dumb unsupported negativity. [Vine voice] IT’S NO GOOD, DUCK.

So. In Oliver’s head, ~Evil David~ magics up a screw gun, demands to know where Syd is, and when no answer is forthcoming, starts drilling into his thighs. It is inspiredly horrific, I’ll give them that. Jen points out that this gruesome creativity is what brings people in to the mode of thinking that their ideas, and therefore themselves, are specially damaged and sick; if it was just a basic gun or whatever it wouldn’t have the same effect.

Back in the lily-iPad room, Shadow!Melanie shows this unfolding like u see. Syd protests but with no real conviction. Hey you know what makes that bullshit I don’t like even worse? When other characters whom you also love and respect fall for it. Groan. Groan groan groan.

Okay, enough of that, time for something I like VERY MUCH:

me: “It’s the THIRD time I’ve gotten this scene and EVERY time it’s good.” Jen: “EVERY time.”

Lenny, my girl, my light, carries her weapon case over to the circle of monks (?) wearing safes (?) on their heads, sitting in a silent meditative ring around the edge of God’s Drain in the Desert. Like a balletic long-limbed frog she pops a squat in their circle, and after a beat asks, “Hey what are we doing here?” I am— Ohh my god I love her so much.

When the monks don’t answer, Lenny joins them for a moment, cross-legged in the dirt, then just sighs and decides to check out what’s in this case. “Hello,” she greets it mildly, and pulls out this massive gun from the depths. Jen, laughing: “It’s like a Mary Poppins bag!” It is, and it’s a delight.

Lenny returns the weapon to its case, then turns to a monk next to her. “Excuse me, um. Do you know where a girl could find a monastery?”

Well I feel bolstered, let’s see if I can wrap that interlude around me like a blanket cape and sail through this next section without getting dragged down!

Back in the pit, Syd’s gonna be sick. She wonders how watching this torture doesn’t seem to be affecting Melanie, but doesn’t pursue that line of thought any further than voicing it. Syd, my savvy skeptical Syd, come on, please, please come back.

Shadow!Melanie moves into showing Syd other images of David, her & David, David & others, all ripped from their context, rearranged into a disingenuous narrative that blatantly plays riiiiiight into Syd’s darkest fears.

Jen: “All of this makes me more worried for Syd’s mental health, that she has so many insecurities that this sort of transparent manipulation is working on her.” me: “Jen can you repeat that I wanna get that all down.”

We really don’t talk much about how Sydney Barrett was also committed to a psychiatric hospital. That she also has battled some forms of mental illness, and based on what we saw of Clockworks, was surely not getting proper help there. This Is An Episode About Syd.

Anyway, something I’m much more amused by when re-seen in this context: Farouk and Future Syd’s conversation in Chapter 15 being so inanely clunky sure makes more sense if he was playing to the cameras, as it were, knowing he could use it to manipulate her later. Or, earlier. For her. God this sure is a loop..

But here’s why we’re really here, why I’m still talking about this scene instead of already throwing it over as a bad job: Shadow!Melanie finally gets to the point where “Legion, the World Killer” is said out loud to describe David, and that’s when they show THIS

And I was like JEN HEY. Because this is an image from when David was hashing things out on a chalkboard with his rational British side, trying to piece together what Farouk had been doing with him since he was a baby. His plan to inexorably shatter and remold David until he was a mutant monster, who will wreak chaos and fear and break the world, and then Farouk can finally get back at his true enemy: David’s dad. By showing this again they’ve shown their hand, because look how all of that has proven to be JUST WHAT FAROUK’S BEEN DOING, ALL ALONG. Future Syd’s world IS the future Farouk wants, and David almost had it all figured, even down to the monster raging on the horizon over him and Syd being in love, because that’s no good for Farouk’s plans. Wow remember when one sequence in S1 laid out the entirety of S2, and we FORGOT. It was always there, but the show spent this season distracting us by continually looking into the future for answers, instead of looking BACK. See now that IS a good twisty reveal! Man, we thought of it as a good thing, getting Farouk out of David at the end of the last season, a step in the right direction. But really, that was just the next step in his plan, and we once knew that too, the Lenntity had to convince Syd to help him get out! He needed to be outside in order to work what he wrought this season. Finding his body would be an upside and he did want it, but the race was also a perfect distraction from the other plan he’s always been working. Because even in his body Farouk was bested by Xavier when they went head to head—getting his body back again isn’t going to change those original odds. He needs a different avenue to victory. And a true killing blow to Farouk’s old nemesis, is the pain of his own kid destroying everything. Xavier took his kingdom; Farouk will take the world. It’s why he truly does want David to realize the fullest scope of his Heaven-shaking power, why he keeps bringing it up---he wants to deploy David to win the fight he couldn’t.

So I enjoyed THAT moment.

Theeennn this episode promptly turned on me again by equating mental illness with evilness once more, and even has Shadow!Melanie call David a psychopath, which is inaccurate for even this altered version of David that Farouk is trying to present to Syd. C’mon you guys. You were spot on in sketching out the experience of having bipolar disorder last season, and now you’re pulling all this malarky?

Jen, an affronted therapist: “David could be schizophrenic, and he’d experience hallucinations and low impulse control, but that doesn’t mean he’d be evil. He could even be schizophrenic and a psychopath, though that….[pauses trying to think that through]..that would be really hard to determine. But still doesn’t mean he’d be evil. Having a mental illness does not make you evil.”

And that’s the word on that.

Okay let’s get out of the Drain again. (It’s a good joke because that place is also a drain on my positivity!!!)

“Great shot,” I announce. “I’m going to cap this later.”

The Loudermilks have ARRIVED. Cary’s weapon-tracking device genuinely sounds a lot like a tricorder, really truly, and Kerry has picked up a German Shepherd to help track Lenny. Instead they just find: the big ol hole. Only this time, a bunch of monks come scramble-climbing out of it and it’s veeerrry creepy. They have these ball looking things on leather thongs, and they raise and swing them over their heads, which emits a SOUND, unexpected. It’s like a more electric bullroarer. In this moment, Jen and I discover that of course we had both read that long article about the mysterious acoustic maybe-weapon being used on diplomats in Cuba, which we had each wished had included more information on the SOUND ATTACKS and maybe less of the dense politics.

All of the Div 3 security team are laid out by the frequency, and Cary is on his hands and knees in the sand, and Kerry, wincing, just attacks them singlehandedly to a Jane’s Addiction song. Dooo love a Kerry dance fight! Eventually she’s laid waste to all of the attacking monks, and stands surveying her field of victory.

And that’s when another battalion comes climbing out of the hole, slightly sped up in the film, ooo good effect, so eerie!

In the monastery, Oliver is bleeding from the eye.

Me: “Oh Jesus.” Jen: “Dislike.”

This is the way his psychic torture has physically manifested, and that’s horrifying and well-played.

He collapses out of the chair, and then it’s like a spell has been lifted. Painfully he gets out “she’s with Farouk.” and David, David is stricken.

“You see it? His true face.”

Oliver apologies, said that Farouk made him. Like a delayed action telepathic control? I guess? Sure. The trouble, the devastation, is that it seems to have not been Farouk at all that David was torturing, just an Oliver unable to speak. Oh noooo. Oh no.

Meanwhile Farouk-Melanie plays with Syd’s hair while again hovering close over her shoulder (yeah I wonder where you got that line about the devil on his shoulder, criminy), going on about how David can never change, this is Who He Is, blah blah, everyone is secretly mean and we should all just be alone.

Then Melanie’s beastie wheels in from the shadows.

me: “Please pet it” me: “Yaayy”

“I’m ready,” she tells it in Farsi. It’s….Farouk’s then? Like his demon familiar? Is it of the same stuff as like, The World’s Angriest Boy In the World…?

David stumbles out of the monastery to collapse against the doorframe and feel terrible. He’s a torturer and his sadistic enemy has Syd. A helicopter blows wind and dry leaves at him, but he doesn’t even register it, eyes distant and iced with tears, exhausted, demoralized.

It’s a D-3 copter, and Clark made it after all! With a gang of Vermillion and D-3 guards, and that giant tuning fork thing. Under Clark’s direction the Vermillion all turn their heads in unison to truck it off to the highest point, facing east.

Outside the lily pad chamber is a warren of tall hallways—a fucking labyrinth, a real one, for the fucking real Minotaur. “Go now,” Shadow!Melanie says to it. “Kill the weak. We’ll be leaving soon.” He places Melanie’s hand on it and the beast’s eyes glow like embers, and with a swelling and creaking it grows into a super buff, freestanding version.

me: “Please don’t let this become a Shape of Water moment.” Jen: [laughter]

So this hole appears to drop you into an underground maze (a maze, in the desert), which eventually connects to the catacombs under the Mi-Go Monastery, where Farouk’s body was kept in its egg-shaped coffin. And now Farouk has it back. He kisses himself back to life, echoes of Syd kissing David laid out in the lab in Chapter 8, ohh.

Note: he is wearing his sunglasses even in death.

On the surface, Kerry has just littered the desert with murder monks, murd-monks everywhere. She faces the last two, asking “You give up yet?” What a hero.

Then each monk goes down with a shot. One of them releases his bolo as he falls, and it whips around Cary’s upper arms, half-pinioning him. Swiftly, a secretly remaining monk leaps on Cary and dives into the hole with him, while Kerry yells in anguish.

The person who did the shooting was naturally Lenny, now strolling up through the heat haze. I guess she never made it to the monastery? I mean this place is a “geological disorder” or whathaveyou, maybe she just got looped around.

I do not believe Kerry and Lenny have ever interacted before. They prove to be another off-the-wall pairing I fucking love, as it turns out they can totally communicate with each other. They have a very comparable base-line affect, and it’s wonderful to watch.

Kerry: “Thanks.” Lenny: “No problem.” [They both look down into the hole] Lenny: “You should probably go get him.” Kerry: “Are you gonna...?” Lenny: “Naw, I’m supposed to wait here.”

Kerry leaps in, pinging expertly from side to side to mitigate her fall, landing strongly on her feet at the base. “Whoo!” Lenny calls down from the surface. Jesus H, my favorite moment. Then she just plops down on the lip of the cavern and hangs out waiting for her signal.

Down the drain with Cary and his captor, we discover that the Buff Minotaur can scrabble along the ceiling like a spider, yipes, and also that the murd-monks and Farouk and this beastie are apparently not ALL on the same side, as the Minotaur violently snatches the monk up like the Shadow Monster in Lost (wow yes I am seeing what I wrote there).

Cary goes running off, upper arms still wrapped to his sides so it is exceedingly comical, especially in the hands of BILL IRWIN.

“Oh dear oh dear oh dear!” he chants softly in terror.

He runs into two Vermillion, apparently down here also, informing them that it’s on the ceiling, and they duly climb the walls as he scuttles off trying to recite the periodic table of elements to himself to keep calm, b l e s s.

Abruptly, Cary stumbles into…the inside of the monastery. Huh! Actually, kinda disappointed that there was not, ultimately, a trick to getting to the monastery. Eventually everyone is just finding it. Maybe you find it when you’re ready. Or when IT’S ready for you. Oooo.

Cary spies Oliver on the floor and rushes over to him, just DISMAYED, because it’s Cary, and also he especially loves Oliver, they built Summerland together!

“He’s not dead,” David remarks, like someone who is. He’s sitting in the chair wreathed in shadows, staring at Oliver’s body, feeling sorry and evil, really down & dark.

David flatly tells Cary he’d tortured Oliver into this state, and Cary, too good for this world, just immediately assumes this’ll be Farouk’s fault somehow (which it is), mutters his name like a low level curse, and assures David that they got his messages and everyone is here with all the stuff, ready to help. Even in this mood David rises to the need to deliver some exposition, and explains that what Clark brought is called The Choke. When rung it dampens mutant powers, makes them just normal mortal humans.

Cary thinks maybe this is not the moment to be expositing, and that they should get out of the range of the Minotaur, but David just keeps talking now, undeterred in his misery, mutedly considering that the Shadow King did this to him, but he’s the one who’s a villain now.

Idk, are you? There seems to be…..an illustrated difference.

“See I’m sitting here,” he says, “thinking about how I’m gonna kill him. My parasite. Aaalll the different ways. And what worries me, is how good it feels.” 

Siiiiiiiggghhh. Will Graham pls. It’s perfectly normal to crave bloody revenge on the person who abused you. And the fact that you are even WORRIED about feeling good about it shows that you AREN’T ~lost to evil~ or whatever. Buuttt they seem to be Doing The Thing, so now we’re probably gonna get reckless half-suicidal “I’m a monster” David Haller figuring he’ll just walk right up to Farouk and self-immolate to destroy them both together. One plus one does not equal two, but zero.

Back in the labyrinth, Kerry discovers the Vermillion, torn apart on the floor. Shoot. She rounds a corner into Syd’s chamber. “Found you,” Kerry says at Syd, then to herself, “That’s one for me.” Holy shit that’s hilarious.

“He’s the monster now,” Syd says distantly, sitting on the floor staring at nothing. “Maybe he always was.” Well there we go, we got to Future Syd.

The Minotaur looms into the room. Kerry’s like hell yeah, already ready to scrap again. But Syd, kind of wonderfully, just goes, “No, I need to hit something,” and pulls up to her feet to wallop it across its boney beak. Remember when Syd and Kerry were battling through Mindworks together? I had missed this duo! Homegirls vs. Monster, round two.

In the desert, night has already fallen as Clark directs his D-3 squadron to place the Choke in position. Bent a little, like an old man, Farouk comes wandering up the hillside. “Hola friend!” Clark greets. “Can we help?” Clark u are wild. In answer, Farouk throws out his arms and knocks them all out. This is not been a great 24 hours for Clark and consciousness.

Farouk considers the Choke, admires David’s thought, then wings it far, far away. Then he fucking makes the sun rise.

wow

And in whisper, we hear David, quoting from his childhood storybook: “‘To bed, to bed,’ the mother said. ‘To bed,’ she said. The Angry Boy, his face turned red. His face turned red. And with a cry, he chopped her head.”

Farouk turns to find David standing behind him, in the new sunlight.

I had this theory after the previous episode, which I forgot to share but at this point it’s clearly not where they’re going so hey. Anyway I was talking with Jen and I got this idea that we would have it Revealed Upon Us that the Future Syd scenes were happening in reverse chronological order. Like a mini Last Five Years: David moving forward in time through those scenes, and Syd moving backward. I thought this might make sense out of it. Explain a lot of her behavior, her shock at seeing him now because it’s after they’d said goodbye, her mood in the Orb, all of it. I still like this theory. There’s a chance that after the finale I may, as an experiment, try re-breaking this season just to see where I get, so, sneak peak of part of that, probably.

***

Wellntruly’s Way Long Legion Recaps Season 2: Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 // Season 1

Other loose Legion meta: astral ‘splaining

[wellntruly]

LEGION Recap: 2x08

Hey that was better!

I mean realistically maybe my perception is skewed because I watched this one over the phone with my bff Jen, but now you get that experience too because I tried to write down all her best bon mots. Of course, you will not get to join us on our SEVERAL in-depth tangents that turned a 47 minute TV show into a 2 hour extravaganza, but for an idea, here is an actual sentence Jen said to me and not something generated by a shitpost bot: “Inside Tip from Drew Magary: Benedict Cumberbatch has never appeared on the cover of GQ because his eyes are too far apart.”

Oh also, the Dramatic FX Guy started doing his cw voiceover and we realized we weren’t clear on how this show is constantly scoring a language rating, so decided to keep a Swear Track, which basically ended up being like a drinking game but with just the shouting.

Alright, mood established, let’s go!!

Season 2, Episode 8: ‘Chapter 16’

Me & Jen: “OOHHHHH”

Me & Jen: “AHAHAHAA”

Me: “What is this, Mad Max: Fury Road!” Jen: “Probably.”

ENIGMATIC EPIGRAPH DELIVERED, we open properly with Syd and David sitting on some of those geometrically-inclined steps outside of Division 3. Syd’s done her hair in style pigtails again with some nice ribbon ties, David’s wearing socks patterned with the pansexual pride flag...

...this is all just-- it is all very good.

They don’t know how they’re gonna find this body though. Syd suggests maybe Future Her would know, and that’s how it comes out that David and Future Syd aren’t talking right now, at which Syd hilariously throws in with the Sydney Barrett Continuum and asks if she should be mad. David’s like aaah no, and tries to explain that he and her just have different viewpoints right now. There’s some more really nice conversational nod-acting from Rachel Keller when David shakes his head that they aren’t helping Farouk anymore, and she worriedly mirrors it.

And we’re not the only ones who get to appreciate that, as we pull back to see that Ptonomy is watching them through Basket-o-Vision. Oh he’s part of the whole surveillance network now! And looking the part. Jen: “I like that his all-black outfit matches the Mainframe.” It’s true, he’s basically got a day-to-night look going, where the day is “art gallery opening” and the night is “running a heist on that art gallery.”

Actually I find the entire Mainframe aesthetic a lot cooler now that we’re getting to explore this space further. It’s like a digital-organic visualization of Admiral Fukyama’s LAN-mind, living electrical thought processes writ in code and sparking along wires. And Ptonomy, a Memory Worker, can interface with it, and loads up Fukyama’s origin story.

Sitting on a bench, 17-year-old Fukyama is approached by a Dr. Brenner type (thanks Jen), who asks him what he’s reading.

Me: [laughing] Jen, PhD: “[sigh] My essay on psycho-sexuality in Legion is getting closer and closer.”

It appears this guy was basically like the Div 3 version of Melanie & Oliver, and many years ago went around gathering up people with special powers to join his fight against…people with special powers. And it appears Fukyama is basically WOLVERINE (Me: “I’m Wolveriiine!”), blessed/cursed with rapid healing and a body that’s never gotten sick. With that kind of ability, D3 Brenner and his team can implant something in his brain, make his mind unreadable by their Enemies, and not have to worry about the kid dying on the table. “You said in your application you’d do anything to serve your country,” he reminds him.

Two things:

1. I forgot how Clark had said last season that Division 3 was a branch of the U.S. government or something, that is so funny. Division 3! Oh lol, lol lol lol: they’re the X-Men Files.

2. How much you wanna bet Fukyama did not make it known amongst people like S1-mindset Clark that he too was a mutant?

After his surgeries, an older nurse sits in a rocking chair at Fukyama’s bedside, reading to him from The Phantom Tollbooth. Ohhh, the woman Syd and Ptonomy saw in the last episode! And right now, Ptonomy sees something else: a crackling electrical cable pulling along the floor of the memory. He runs after it as it winds down the dark, fan-blown halls glowing with binary wallpaper, to…a janitor’s closet.

Literally a janitor’s closet. FROM THE SHOW THAT BROUGHT YOU “THE CLUB”

And inside, hovering up in the rafters house-left, as is his wont, THE MI-GO MONK. “You’re in here too??” Ptonomy asks in echo, and I mean in-world not just us also exclaiming that. But when the monk opens his mouth he just lets out what Jen delightedly informs me FX has captioned as “(digital screeching)”. Ptonomy reaches up into the cables connecting to the hover-monk, and is zapped with weird feed-backing electrics into a vision of the desert, a skeleton, a structure in the distance, monks hanging from balcony—the mad monastery.

With a blink, Ptonomy is back at the room where this scene started. Through a surveilling screen he sees two Vermillion, and wonders….. He sets his hands on the code covering a wall, and out in the hall, a Vermillion pauses, twitching. Hacker voice: He’s in.

The Ptonomillion walks into the aquatic automat, and sits down across from David, taking a solitary luncheon, and not really in the mood for what he thinks is a mean joke where this mustachio’ed android pretends to be Ptonomy. Frustrated with David, what else is new, the Ptonomillion bangs their hands on the table and gets out “I don’t know how long I can-can-can keep control.” Ptonomy’s voice starts coming through a bit at the end there, and now we’re in the midst of another audio triumph by the Legion sound team, god you guys rock.

Unsure how much time he has, Ptonomy wants to get David and the gang a message about what he’s just learned. The way he describes it is that when the monk hacked into the Mainframe, the Mainframe “hacked him back”, and now his memory is stored in here as well. Which is how Ptonomy now knows where Farouk’s body is.

And then at this critical juncture, the Ptonomillion freezes.

Me: “…Are you also leaning toward the screen.” Jen: “...Yes. [laughter]”

Finally he gets out: “Le Désolé. Le Désolé. Le Désolé.” Jen laughs because she speaks French and The Sadness is a hilarious name for a place. Meanwhile I’m having a Yanny vs. Laurel situation and heard “Lindisfarne”, that ancient monastery off the coast of England, and have time-travelled to my Vikings days. It takes us a moment to work this out.

After the break, Oliver resumes his driving around in the desert, now to some sweet Wes Anderson-y choral arrangement. Jen: “It’s not Legion without a good choir.” It’s in French. Jen is living this episode. Then Oliver arrives at a retirement home called CHEZ D’REST and frankly, so am I.

Farouk has steered Oliver here so that he can talk with, oh HEY, that stylish chauffeur woman who drove his body to the monastery!!! She asks how he can be here, how he found her.

We haven’t talked yet about Future Syd’s black-tipped fingers and what a great apocalypse punk/homage to her gloves/gangrenous/dangerous look that is. Also, totes tried on hexagonal shades just like Farouk’s at the Sunglass Hut the other day.

Anyhow, Farouk has come to ask where she drove his body to, of course. And she gives the location up readily, in exchange for her dying wish: an everlasting dream of just driving her car, radio on, windows down, through a balloon forest, forever. Jen: “Honestly, pretty ideal.”

She tells Farouk to look up ahead to see where they’re going, and, satisfied, he and Oliver depart.

Back at Division 3, a tiny and amusing interlude with David just sitting outside in a garden having a ponder, then getting up decisively.

“Alright,” he thinks to himself as he leans back in the Strawberry Cerebrorb. “Le Désolé.” And he finds it! It looks exactly as inconstant as a frickin mirage, but no matter!!

David then has one of his little Gemini heart-to-hearts with himself. He abandons his initial impulse to tell everyone out of fear that Farouk will read their minds — gotta keep it secret, keep it safe. What he’ll do is just give people part of a plan, plant portions of a scheme in their head so that they can help without knowing the whole shape of it. Like how sometimes in big secretive franchise movies they’ll give actors partial scripts with only their own scenes—truly he is of his studio.

In all honesty though I totally understand where David’s at here, this is Classic Telepath™: what they don’t know can’t hurt them. You well-meaning, superior idiots... Love you too well ya disaster zones.

Sitting in his telepathic daiquiri, David flips around to who’s available to be brought in to his plan. Lenny. Kerry & Cary. Clark?

David: “Shiit.” Me & Jen: “SHIT! One.”

Alright, that’s the players—now to plot out how he envisions this going. A sequence which is a VISUAL DELIGHT because LEGION:

Jen: “Oh, love a good STRATEGY BOARD.” Me: [laughter] Jen, continuing: “As you know, one of the main reasons I watch Game of Thrones is my love for strategy boards.” Me: “Oh I do.”

Me & Jen: “AAHHHH! THAT COUNTS. TWO.”

Y’know sometimes I wonder if the reason why I always find Legion so satisfying, is because David can respond to Farouk in all the ways Will never could to Hannibal, because he was on a different kind of show. So whenever something like this happens, I’m like THANK YOU, I have been waiting YEARS. At the end he literally snarf-snarf-snarfs Farouk’s flag all up, wonderful.

Get ‘em baby.

Now, a scene that Jen & I spent most of whimpering to each other, aka the Lenny & David scene. Gird your feelings, anyone else in this boat with us!!

We’re slipped back into Lenny’s emotional framework, still snapping her fingers by ears to hear the echoing scream, feeling like she’s haunting a borrowed body, trapped in an ink blue honeycomb where it’s always dark.

This is how David finds her.

“You awake?” he asks. “I’m not sure,” she tosses back.

He glances down the hall, then unlocks the door and carefully steps in. Lenny chides him for acting like she’s a creature in a zoo, and lets him get into the middle of the room before snarling at him, making him startle and jump, like she knew he would. Then they both laugh. God. God god god god god. I love them.

“How are you?” David asks, sitting down on the bed. “Who cares.” Now David’s the one who chides: “Me. I always cared.”

Me, seriously: “Jen I would- I would kill for them.”

Lenny’s chewing on a lock of her hair, and David, eyes wondering, remarks that Amy used to do that when she was nervous. Aaauugh these two!! They have so much pain between them but yet they’re always managing to just love each other through it, like in what follows.

“Tell me something, and don’t screw with me okay. Am I…” Lenny’s voice goes startling plaintive, “am I really here? Because if I’m not, and I wake up, back there, with them—”

“You’re here. Hey,” David tucks her hair fondly behind her ear, “you’re here. With me. And I’m not gonna let anything bad happen to you.”

Nobody touch me, oh my god.

David kisses Lenny’s forehead, stop this is so soft, places her part of the plan in her mind with a bloom of light, and vanishes.

Well I’m dead thank you.

Leaning back against a wall elsewhere in Div 3, David waits for Cary and Clark to come walking down the corridor. Cary’s like “Hey!”, bless this bean. David pushes off the wall, power strolls up saying “This won’t hurt,” and snaps his fingers in front of their foreheads, light glowing from like, I think some sources on the ground? It’s a fun weird look. Sorry to pull this apart I just get interested in practical effects. Anyhoo, as Lenny did, they get brief flashes of their paths, and when they shake their heads clear, David is gone.

But who’s not getting her own instructions: Syd Barrett. David has decided to leave her safely out of this one. Once again I wish I’ve had time to make Syd light-writing at him UR A DUMB BITCH.

She sits in her apartment, waiting for water to boil in her symbolic tea kettle. But this time, she’s interrupted by an orange hexagon appearing just inside her door. She opens it up to find a note from David, oh Mylanta.

David’s note: “Gone to kill the monster.”

Syd:

Me & Jen: [laughing]

The kettle is whistling, but Syd doesn’t give a shit [language]. She pulls the compass off her neck to track his dumb ass down.

Meanwhile, out in the Plain of Sorrows or whatever, David is also orienting himself. He squints at his outstretched thumb, slowly pivoting until he discovers he’s in Holes a rock formation that looks just like his hand.

Me: “Huh alright” David: [makes the facial equivalent of my exact tone] Jen: [laughing at me] Me: “OH COME ON”

(And incidentally, in Holes, it was called God’s Thumb. Oh come on!)

David starts walking, and after a moment panels begin to slide around the screen. COMIC BOOK, or, as these nerds had it:

Me: “YAASS. PIET MONDRIAN.” Jen, pronounced correctly while laughing: “Piet Mondrian.” Me: “LUH DESOLAY.”

In their panel, Oliver Bird starts reciting Beat poetry again, and Jen & I are pretty much just inconsolable with joy for the remaining minute of this act.

In full disclosure, before rewatching this next scene for this recap, I first paused to refill my glass of wine. Okay, now I’m ready.

It’s time for…. Girl Talk With Sydney & Clark!

Jen: “I would trade all of episode seven for more Girl Talk With Sydney & Clark.”

The vibe is totally that this is not the first time a Syd & Clark dish sesh has happened, in some capacity or other, and that is just….so beautiful 2 me. GOD the possibilities. Where are these missing scenes. And it makes sense, Syd surely just being like, I don’t want to talk to Melanie because I know what she’ll say and I’m not looking for a Bummer Guru right now, and talking to Kerry and Cary is like talking to a cat and a puppy respectively and also they have no context for something like this, and Ptonomy’s gone and so really you’re all I got left.

And Clark just pulls out a pair of whiskey glasses going yeah let’s chat fucked up boyfriends, I’ve got some Stories.

And so we get this. A GIFT. I’m going to cover like every detail of it because it’s all amazing.

Syd talks about how her mom never married, just had a string of boyfriends who fawned after her but never could get that close. She looks at this now, and wonders if maybe she takes after Joan, and pushed David away. “Or maybe the universe just has a sick sense of humor. Ladies and gentlemen, the Untouchable Barretts.”

But Clark’s just like don’t blame yourself for his behavior, what did HE do again? He left. Pointedly, as if he knows any other way to be, Clark sips his drink and asks if David has done this before.

Syd: “Officially?” Clark: “Off the record. Just girl talk.” Syd: [just takes a moody drink] Clark: “All right, if you’re saying something you gotta say it out loud.”

What up I love him I’m sorry.

Syd turns to him, blinking a little.

Syd’s a little drunk.

“I’m going after him,” she announces.

Clark’s been there. “I loved a boy in the Army,” he shares, “who kept jumping out of planes to get away from me.”

Clark did you love Steve Rogers??

Syd: “And then?” Clark: “Well, and then one day his chute didn’t open.”

Holy—shit.

Syd talks about how it was so romantic at the beginning, meeting in the mental hospital. (Omg wonderful.) And then they escaped, went to Summerland, “and it was addictive and intense and sweet. He’s a good person, you know? He tries sooooo hard.”

Clark: “But can we agree that he’s..unwell?” Me & Jen: [intake of breath]

Syd slowly admits that yeah, maybe David doesn’t always know what’s real and not real. Clark tries to push that he’s delusional, but Syd hedges. She doesn’t think it’s quite that, something else.

Syd: “Have you ever seen him lie?” Clark: “No.” Syd: “I know me neither. But I think he lies. Aaalll the time.”

I am…loving this. A) of all I love that of course we’ve all seen David lie, only when he does it is so BLINKINGLY OBVIOUS that they don’t even count it. But B) I loooove that what she’s really saying is what I’ve been saying for ages: that David doesn’t lie to others, he lies to himself, and then tells the truth as he knows it. I love thaaaaat. Now THAT is an interesting unreliable character.

Syd readily admits that she doesn’t trust David, but it doesn’t particularly matter in the way Clark seems to think it does. She forgives him, in this kind of fundamental way, smilingly repeating her old line: “Who teaches us to be normal when we’re one of a kind?” But while she can empathize with his circumstances, and still love him, that doesn’t mean the best thing is for them to keep going on as they have been. “I love what we were,” she explains, “I’m just not sure we’re that any more.” God this whole thing is remarkably grown up and real and I’m so supportive of it as a choice in this show. Real Relationship Shit by Legion.

Clark then does two things that caused me and Jen to be like “UH.” One, he puts his hand on Syd’s wrist, as if that will convey the feeling it would to your average friend, but to Syd is a RED ALERT NO GOOD.

As written across her face.

And two, Clark proposes that David, David Haller, might be one of those guys who react with violence against the whole sorry world if a girl hurts his feelings. Impossible. David??? The David we’ve known for the last 15 episodes gets calmly and compassionately broken up with by Syd, in EVERY UNIVERSE he’s gonna end up with his head on Lenny’s shoulder crying “What did I do wrong?? I love her so muuuch, Syyyd”, while Lenny swipes the carton of ice cream out of his lap and goes “Bitches, right. Listen you’re gonna be fine kid” and he just groans piteously and turns his face into her shoulder.

Anyway, meanwhile, MELANIE has been hiding behind the wall listening to Clark and Syd’s whole conversation!! Melanie Bird where ya been!!!! Actually this is a point of consternation, we’ll get into it later.

Out in the desert, David begins to activate his Friendly Sleeper Agents. First up is Lenny, whose cell door clicks and swings open. She scampers out of Div 3, leaps on a Triumph motorcycle, and races off. Jen, who spent several years working for a brain injury research center, quietly fretted about her not buckling the strap on her helmet—it was adorable.

Out the baking sand, Oliver & Farouk are now riding in an honest-to-god rickshaw, making a beeline for the monastery. Oliver has a martini glass, a silver pick in his olive, and a red plaid umbrella. Unreal. In response to his query, Farouk says David is about a day behind. “Time and space is relative here. The earth changes. Sometimes by the hour. It’s part of the trick, to keep me from myself.” Did Charles charm the land? Baller.

“And David?” Oliver asks.

“Our lost boy will wander this place for the rest off his life. Unless, he figures out the secret.” FUN. That’s not sarcasm I genuinely love stuff like this. Find the magic key!! I hope you have to like, hold various things in your head and then the building unfolds on the horizon or something, yeah, yeahyeahyeah.

In fact, David’s current status on this quest is finding an old water pump and eagerly trying to drink from it, while Jen & I keep up a running chorus of “Oh honey, no. It’s in the middle of nowhere, that’s not gonna… David, hun.” God, Syd talked about how he struggles knowing what’s real and not….do u think…it be like this sometimes?

But then a goddamn jet passes overhead, which is rather a bolt from the blue. WHEN ARE WE. Someone has literally parachuted out of it while David squints up at the sky, it’s hilarious, god this visual. Obviously Jen & I were super hoping for it to be Clark’s ex-boyfriend, somehow falling in from like 20 years ago or whatever, For The Bonkers. But second-best choice is the one that actually happened, which is: this is what Syd meant by “I’m going after him.” INCREDIBLY GOOD.

God Is Coming And She Is Pissed

David, starts backing up, holding up his hands. “To be fair, I left a note this time.” Syd just stalks across that distance and kicks him in the shins.

“I’m! On! Your side!” she shouts, punctuated with smacks. “Asshole!”—Me & Jen: “ASSHOLE. Write it down write it down”—“Whatever some maybe-me in the future says. Got it?!”

Listen I love her, I love this. (Also I do agree with David that there’s gotta be another way besides helping Farouk.) BUT I LOVE THIS.

David agrees. David: “Yes Ma’am.”

They gather themselves.

Honestly, this shot? Poetic cinema.

Syd tucks back a lock of her hair, breathes. Okay now that that’s settled, where are we, what’s going on? God seriously I love her. We’re trying to find the monastery, which David saw once but thinks it’s moving. Syd asks how a building can move, and with hilarious weariness David just goes “I don’t know.”

What follows is a full two TV minutes of Piet-Mondrian-comic-book desert wandering. I love this fucking show [language].

Jen: “The couple that culottes together…does lots together.” Me: [dies]

And now for a segment @memory-for-trifles has described as “Old Man Hawley Yells At Cell Phones.” It’s another Narrator portion, and honestly, a pretty bad choice overall! I mean on the one hand, I kinda enjoy how they somehow turned Plato’s Cave into a lesson about having empathy for people on the other side of a screen, that was a little new but I think it held together. ON THE OTHER, complaining about cell phones is over. It’s done. You can’t do it because everyone just goes “what is this, hack Black Mirror?” and then talks about how Black Mirror is also done. Because it is. It’s too reductive and fear-mongery and uselessly reactionary. It’s tired. Why is this here. In fact that’s actually the biggest problem: why IS this here, in this episode? What did a lecture on cyber bullying have to do with….anything that’s going on in the show?

And frankly, the whole tone of these lessons has gotten too condescending at this point. It worked at the start! At the start it felt, idk, kinda ironic about it, and that fit a certain vibe. I think it felt OMINOUS, actually, ironic and *uneasily* so. That's when it was still Night Vale-y. Anyway the point is: it shoulda ended there. I would have kept the Narrator segments in Chapter 9 alone, while we were already doing catch-up stuff so the didacticism fit.

And that’s my piece on that.

We return to the show. A thunderstorm in the desert, beautiful. Scary, actually, I don’t know how I feel about you two being the only thing above five feet for miles. On cue, they stumble across this little prospector camp looking set-up, and take shelter in the tent.

Come on David, you’re telekinetic, help us out here.

Or Syd lights a lantern. God Haller, you’re hopeless.

Anyway here’s something fun: there’s a chandelier in this place. Also: skeletons of them. Whaaaat. Then the whole thing loops once. I was glad I had Jen to confirm that.

“This place,” Syd ventures, “it’s some kind of geographic disorder.”

“Is that a thing?” David asks.

Syd pulls a face. “A crossroad of possibilities.” Haha what.

David comes and sits by her, and they stare at their skeletons, He assures her that when all this is over, they’ll get a quiet place together in the country. Aw, Melanie’s advice! And then they’ll just grow old together.

“And die,” Syd joins in, lol girl. “Like them. Every story ends the same.”

David shakes his head, eyes bright and a lil manic: “I don’t believe that.” What, in death? I love when David is so optimistic and sunshiny that he sounds completely unhinged. It’s like oh, this too is your madness. I forgot.

Back at Div 3, Clark wakes up in the middle of the night---time to activate the literal sleeper agent. But as he swings down a corridor, Melanie appears out of a dark passage and CLOCKS HIM just as he was about to find “the Clock of the Long Now.” Melanie what!! Oh she’s possessed by Shadow!Oliver. Oh for fuck’s sake.

Like, you have Jean Smart! JEAN SMART. Such a talent!! And what has she done this season? Nothing. Be an occasional cautionary tale. So on the out-skirts that it was credible David wouldn’t have even thought of her when secret-assembling his away team. So, proposal: cut the whole Delusion plot, save all that time and more importantly CGI money, and pay Jean Smart for more episodes. And that’s my piece on THAT.

Out in the night-drawn desert, Oliver announces: “It’s done. She’s ours. Mine. Ours.” Oh Bird.

Farouk assures his body that they’re getting close. He addresses his body as “my love,” which is quite Farouk in how it makes me unaccountably uncomfortable.

Then there’s just, weird noises. And darkness.

Me: “Uh.” Jen: “What are we looking at.”

Me & Jen: “Oh OH, oh my god, that thing, jesus.”

It’s honestly like one of the Stilt-Walkers from Fury Road meets the bear-boar from Annihilation. And it’s Melanie’s, somehow. What the hell, Mel.

Alright, Final Language Count: 1 Shit, 1 Asshole, 1 Flipping Off An Image of Farouk. RATED TV M-L, INTENDED ONLY FOR MATURE AUDIENCES.

Kinda like these recaps.

***

Wellntruly’s Way Long Legion Recaps Season 2: Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14 | Chapter 15 // Season 1

Other loose Legion meta: astral ‘splaining

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[wellntruly]

Legion 2x11

Real question: is anyone gonna actually mind if I don’t write a recap or are we just....done

[wellntruly]

LEGION Recap: 2x06

I cycled through probably half a dozen different openings to this recap, every one feeling like it was setting me off down a different path. It took me way too long to see the joke.

You’d think I might have caught myself in it earlier, maybe the time I just typed “Daaammn, Daniel” and laughed. He’s such an effing kaleidoscope in this. Dan Stevens is just gonna replace his entire reel with this episode.

But then on my next try I got spun off on this whole personal story about a play I worked on in college, and the choice we made to use what we knew would be a very emotionally manipulative music cue, because we felt that we’d done enough work in the hours before to earn the right to open a music box like we were opening our audiences’ hearts. And how good the music in this episode is. And how I think maybe it was something to do with melody memory, that had me suddenly start crying to it while brushing my teeth the next morning?

Chapter 14 got me. It wore a pretty dress and I opened the door, and it stepped inside and made itself at home. It gave me a feeling I haven’t been able to shake. Several days later and I still haven’t been able to fully parse it, to figure out quite what happened to me here!

I have a million things to say.

Season 2, Episode 6: ‘Chapter 14′

There are three timelines. Well, there are six timelines. There are the three main ones that primarily concern us, then the fourth sweeps in to take its rightful hold on our hearts, as it is ours. And the other two are just little bonuses, sprinkles. But like, you know the difference between a dish of ice cream and a dish of ice cream with sprinkles. One is better.

As a recapper, there are few things that bring me greater joy than scene setting sequences with minimal dialogue. It gives me room to stretch out and chat. And we’re in one now, so come oooover, sit down with me.

Conceptually, this episode is basically a thought experiment---but because the thinker is (presumably) David Haller, how much of any of this may be a real, visitable world is up for grabs. Of course, there’s also the possibility that our David isn’t experiencing this in any form at all, and that this is just a moment between the show and its audience. I’m pretty sure that’s the mindset I was in at first, slipping along in the streams of it curious and learning. That daydreaming diversion of the What Ifs, of the AUs. That’s what AUs are for, right? Character sketches illuminated by the light of different worlds? Find your constants in what never seems to change.

And I was drifting along fine in this, until I got caught on one of those constants. A sinister snag that had been lurking underneath all of them (well save one, but ho ho we’ll get to it). “Can’t believe they showed Farouk and now I gotta tease out what that means for the worlds they’ve built here” my notes read. But then soon after: “I take it back I am GLAD I get to tease this out.” Because now it’s not just a Hallers character study, it’s also an examination of Amahl Farouk, from whose position this starts to look, horribly, sorta like a game where his host keeps getting fucked up so he has to start over and try something different this time. And by this light, we even get to see a take where it seems he calculated correctly, which is totally fascinating for how much it illuminates the ghoulish inanity of Farouk’s usual approach---if that is the only thing different in that timeline. But we’ll get to that too. We’ll get to all of it.

Okay let’s!

Onscreen: David, several variants of David Haller. We’ll see him multiplied at multiple points in time, but the reason why I think most of these vignettes fall within three central paths is because early on we get a camera pan across three distinct, late 20s-ish Davids on one city block, as if they’re all running concurrently in overlaid universes. The many-worlds interpretation, as one of the Davids will spell out for us later---the idea that our realities have critical junctures, and when we pass one, the road not taken splits off and creates another universe. And then both will continue to split down the line, creating a many, many branching existence across a myriad of worlds.

1. David Who Didn’t Get Treatment

Very in his voices and very tweaked out on the street drugs he tries to mute them with, getting more and more lost to his family and general cogency until he’s nearly unrecognizable, buried under a mane of grizzled hair and a broken nose, a telekinetic schizophrenic homeless man. A very and distressingly realistic end, wow way to call-out post our society’s mental health care failures, Legion.

2. Heavily Medicated David

On enough antipsychotics for two (a phrase I wrote just as an amplifier before realizing how tragically literal it may be in his case, oh gosh), this David sleepwalks through his life as a drug-fogged menial worker under the care of real estate agent Amy, who never married Ben, and spends the rest of her life taking care of her brother, until they’re both muted with age in a house full of pills. Another easily plausible and haunting end, dang show.

and 3. Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely David

Who brings the first plotline to the timelines, so let’s follow him a moment.

In this world David is a coffee boy at the headquarters of some vague mega-corp, about as squeaky clean as you can be and still look somehow disheveled. Probably because he’s scatterbrained af, only here---a massive divergence this, one (1) of these things is not like the others---he understands the voices he hears to be other people’s thoughts. This is because: they’re clear as fucking day. Gone are the garbled, disorienting, malevolent Lost-y whispers that characterize our timeline and the other two here, replaced instead with the straightforward, easily attributable thoughts of blandly terrible misogyny and greed that you’d expect from the people in this kind of office.

David’s boss, or rather his boss’ boss’ boss, probably, is about to sign a merger with another firm as he distributes their lattes and americanos. Overhearing that it’s a trap, David spontenously tries to intervene and save his CEO, like the earnest goober we know so well. Curiousity piqued, she makes an excuse and follows him out into the hall in which his irrate young supervisor had dragged him, at which point David skittishly reveals that he’s ~psychic~

Twitchy sleepless business psychic is kind of an aesthetic, who’d a figured.

The CEO looks David over, and calculates his value immediately. Did he calculate this? Because it would be a little absurd if this were his first play for easy success in this reality---I guess unless he really is our own David Haller, laugh laugh laugh. I love u David.

Down the street and across the world, Homeless David pushes his shopping cart down the baking sidewalks, barking at shadows. A veerrry Jeff Russo-inflected cover of some song from the 70s plays throughout, somehow destroying me? The rhythmic cinematic strings, maybe?? What completely demolishes me though is the quality it has in another minute, when Russo has seamlessly slid it down in the mix and filtered it until it’s playing diegetically in the warehouse where Medicated David is stacking boxes of milk. All you’d have to do is play an isolated clip of this at me and I’d lose it. This is my Tumblr-style “[blank] playing in another room” in terms of weird emotional upheaval from an audio manipulation.

And ohh, he’s soo foggy.

Continuing the extraordinarily good sound mix in this scene, we’re so muffled up with David that we don’t figure out it’s his phone that’s ringing until about the moment he does, A+. It’s a flip phone btw. When are we. Or did Amy just give him her old Nokia or something. It’s her on the line (probably one of three contacts loaded, you can just imagine it), delivering her daily reminder to David to take his afternoon pill. “Do it now, while I’m on the phone okay?”

Guys, I am so happy to have been wrong!! In fact they had Katie Aselton on a three episode contract for this season*, one of them being this one, an absolute showcase for her and her show bro, and they both showed UP. God they’re so good in this scene. They’re so good together always, just unendingly glad they got this swan song episode. (*According to IMDb she’ll be in the next one too, I’m guessing as the Living Dead Sister; the Abigail Hobbs of the piece.)

And that was act one. What an opener.

After the break, we meet up with David well on his scrounging, drug-addled slide to the old man pushing his cart down the street. Strung out and giggling at a diner, this David ironically serves as our anchor for the schematics of the episode, explaining the concept of branching timelines with the aid of his cold fries spilled on the table. At one point he name-checks the 1991 film Point Break---your guess as for what that means for our timelines is as good as mine.

But the best part by a mile has got to be when David manicly theorizes that in one world he might be a billionaire---shot of that silver-haired, cold-eyed David surveying his domain---or in another, he’s “married in the suburbs with like 2.3 kids.”

At which point they throw Dan Stevens in THIS WIG:

IN CRED

What I love about this sun-dappled interlude is that everything about it, from the music to his performance, is so, so, soooo deeply ironic. Like I refuse to believe they slowed down this footage and Dan Stevens wasn’t just slo-mo Frodo-laughing in bed in real time as his fake kids piled onto it like so many Merry & Pippins.

Again: IN CRED

Anyway this is the timeline I mentioned earlier, the only one where it seems David was completely untroubled by Farouk, or possibly any mutation at all. And it is presented as so utterly false as to be downright fuck-you laughable. It’s a joke. This one was never real.

(Although perhaps I’m wrong about there being no monsters in this timeline, as clearly his children are little demons who wear socks to bed.)

We slide on now, and oh wow hey, it’s our David! Bun! Back when he and Philly lived in that Anthropologie set of an apartment and he only had that one stripey shirt. In fact, it’s specifically that scene when Amy comes by to dish that she thinks Ben is going to propose to her, and asks why David is so sure he can’t have a family too, and he just says “Because I’m sick”, and it hurts so much. I think it’s actually the exact same scene? This show often does that wonderful thing where they use a different take when they revisit something, commenting on the shifting nature of memory and calling our own perception into question and all that good stuff, but I feel like this one was identical. Sure does hurt the same way.

The phone rings, and David turns around, and now he’s in Richard Ayoade’s The Double.

Omfg

This is the other little sprinkles universe, and genuinely who knows what is going on in this one. Least of all David, we gather, here just some pasty basement creature staring in hollow-eyed bewilderment at a mouse performing half an 80s ballad on the corner of his desk, oh magnifique.

This truly is the perfect showcase episode for Dan Stevens, who regularly looks like he has a different face all the time, even when they aren’t enhancing the effect with hair & makeup.

Back on the streets of LA (because oh honest: all these homeless sequences are strikingly Los Angeles, all of them I’m just like “what kind of Mulholland Drive…”) junkie David finds a shopping cart and eagerly commandeers it. In another world, he and Benny race through an alley in a shopping cart of their own. Uugh, layers me about it. And for some reason, that bit affects me more than this David nearly colliding with a car in an intersection and seeing a heavily kohl-eyed Syd Barrett in the backseat, though I couldn’t tell you why. Maybe I like blurring more than coincidence.

Shot forward in time, his cart now full, hoary David finds a little bridge tunnel thing to spend his night---up until he is attacked by a straight UP Clockwork Orange reference. And yes I meant to phrase that as if the movie itself comes to beat him up, that’s how much a reference we are talking here.

Oh so this section is basically Lynch + Kubrick then.

But once they fall on him, David, with a ROAR, turns into a ball of solar flare and vaporizes all of them in a rolling flash. Oh huh. Huh! They leave shadows on the pavement, like when Shadow!Oliver & Shadow!Lenny were turning guards to coal dust in Division 3.

Back in his other kind of drugged reality, bleary David sits at home wearing two bathrobes and listening to jungle sounds on giant headphones. Not actually the same pair the Lenntity used to send Syd to sleep in Chapter 6, but y’know, I think I would have. There’s seems to be a sort of drowsing, hypnotic theme there we coulda got into.

Amy comes home from work and tries to chat with him, but it’s slow going in his haze. She hopes he’ll perk up about dinner, but he just shrugs. Trying for cheerful, she reminds him, “Can’t take your pill on an empty stomach.”

“No more pills,” David pleads, tired, pitiful. “I’m better now, no more pills.” We see teen David from all the way back in the pilot, shaking a bottle by his ear. Aahhhh, god. Underlines the divergent path thing so well, this version where his doctor went really strong on his prescription, and what that meant for him---this life where he can’t think, can’t ever rise about the surface, covered in a heavy drugged down. But gently, painfully, Amy reminds him that he doesn’t want to hurt anyone, does he? It’s implied he may have accidentally hurt her in the past, oh no babes. And David, sweet David, agrees that of course not, of course he doesn’t want to hurt people. It’s a psychiatric catch-22 and it is kiiiilling me!

Alright, *hooks over a swivel chair*, time to get Especially Complicated here on wellntruly’s Legion dot com. Because here’s the thing: the reason why David was medicated was because what he was experiencing matched very very well onto the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia. Now, what has since been proposed by other characters is that all of his mental health troubles were caused by and/or misattributed to a combination of not understanding his own mutant powers, and having the Shadow King curled up in the back of his mind and feeding off him for decades---Farouk’s presence of, let’s be frank, mostly sheer unadulterated terror being his “parasite”, analogous to mental illness but excise-able with the right kind of X-Men magic.

But the problem is, that explanation requires Farouk’s behavior to be…..weird, right? What benefit does he gain from causing David to hear things the way we’ve heard him hear things? To see the kinds of things we’ve seen him see? The Amahl Farouk we’ve met this season, who gets off on power and just wants to be King again, rich and lording and cruel, that Amahl Farouk is reflected perfectly in the timeline we’re turning to now. Which begs the question: what the fuck was he doing every other time? Could he really be that self-defeating of a sadist that he would spend years choosing the immediate kicks of torturing David, despite the ever-increasing odds it will all come to a calamitous end, over the larger, later reward that could come to him if he’d just stopped horribly warping David’s perceptions and instead let him actually understand his power, while continuously nudging him toward this:

An evil grey turtleneck under an evil grey suit, all perfectly tailored. Various genderfluid concubines scattered around the premises. A horse just chillin on his patio. Talking about things like “the China holdings.” He is: The World’s Richest Man In the World, and he’s awful.

This is, naturally, the final form of telepathic coffee boy David from the beginning, that incident being just the first step on his path toward fortune & glory. His CEO now works for him, and he monologues to her about how God blessed him with a gift, he’s the chosen Bezos born to correct the curse of the Tower of Babel with his magical mind and billions of powerful dollars, that he hoards, etc. Honestly he could not sound more like Farouk unless he was speaking with Navid Negahban’s voice, but of course then we would lose the hilarity of David developing this absurd rich person accent once he got money.

Amy arrives, bored and mean. 

“I need a new house,” she announces.

“No, you want a new house,” he corrects.

“Harvey’s screwing his masseuse,” she says, idly adjusting her bracelet.

“So,” David replies, “You’re screwing her too.”

“I hate it when you do that.”

So, 1) omf, 2) this show is so complicated when it comes to queerness, it’s fascinating. Like here, now that the Hallers are evil they’re also bi and that’s no good. But on the other hand, the way they redeemed Clark was through showing us his loving husband and son —it was specifically his gay family that gave him Goodness potential. And this moral muddle is kind of epitomized in Lenny, who was David’s fun lesbian friend first and we loved her, but then when she became the mouthpiece of his monster it was said monster’s queerness that helped code the Evil. Sexual predation toward David was filtered so oddly through her own identity, that was an endless well of bewildering unease. But then when Lenny returned to herself, her own queerness was swiftly reestablished to help signal to us that he had his friend back, gay meant Good again. There’s just a lot in this stew! It’s really unusual and I have no conclusions!

Anyhow, David gives Amy a nosebleed to teach her a lesson about sassing him, I guess. Like, CONVERSELY, this show’s stance on whether money corrupts sure is clear.

Back downtown with Homeless David. “It’s always blue!” he jolts out as a woman passes, startled. That’s what Lenny/Benny used to say about their drug, agh. Good thing this passer-by hurried off though, as an ENTIRE phalanx of Domino Goons from Div 3 have arrived to take him out. Bat-signaled by his power burst the other night, presumably? Though David in this timeline seems to have some measure of careless control over his powers, and flings most of them away from him easily.

But Div 3 is all about that tech, and they send in a drone that mentally scrambles him somewhat, dropping him to his knees. He spreads his arms, waiting, gathering strength, as a woman wearing familiar heeled boots and carrying a sword strides purposefully toward him. David’s eyes begin to look almost yellow, almost Devil, a rising growl--- when he is sliced cleaning down the middle, crown to sternum, bifurcated by Kerry’s sword.

We cut to teen David again, from Chapter 1, screaming and screaming in the rain, clasping his head in his hands. That juxtaposition…

*emotionally* Oh oh oh, and now to the night our David tried to hang himself, oh this episode!

Please, I??

The whispers fill his head, that disjointed cacophony that haunted him into terrified distraction, and in the dark behind him, lurks the Devil With the Yellow Eyes. NO. Please.

He drops.

In the medication timeline, old Amy silently washes his back. The only sound he hears is the water.

But what if they hadn’t even made it that far down this path. What if one night, Amy was a few minutes late picking David up from Mary’s Sunshine Dairy at 8 o’clock. On a night when David seems a bit more alert, a bit more nervy. Maybe she’d had a really busy day, maybe she hadn’t had time to call him that afternoon and remind him to take his pill.

Maybe that’s why he sees him again, that dark terror always there at the bottom of his mind, at the end of the road.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s not even the point, trying to retrofit The Devil With the Yellow Eyes with this season’s Amahl Farouk, when the most consistent thing about David’s monster is how flawlessly he fits into this story as a metaphor for schizophrenia. In last season’s psychiatric what-if sixth episode, the thematic match to this one just as the previous episode was to the first fifth, remember how perfectly Syd and Cary represented Therapy and Medication respectively? How well that analogy hung together? Sometimes I’m really tempted to just throw over and call this whole thing a fable.

Meanwhile, on this dark street, an even darker story. David, on edge, encounters someone who’s going to take it in a new worse direction: a pair of cops. Hey you know what other politics this episode is very upfront about? That our police force is monstrously trigger happy and woefully undertrained on how to serve the mentally ill population. You know I actually have two friends who are therapists, and the one I haven’t mentioned yet in my Legion recaps, her job is to ride along in cop cars precisely to prevent what is about to happen. She’s there to protect the people the police are called to investigate, from the police themselves if need be, which angers some of them, and that alone would be reason why we need so many more of her.

But there’s no Kelly in this car. And the more David tries to hurry away from the cops, the more he catches their attention. One of them brusquely demands to see his ID, and he just goes

Don’t break my heart, David Haller!

And then he sees the Devil with them, in the back seat, which sets him flinching and whimpering anew, apologizing helplessly, trying to explain that he takes medication, but the cops just clamber out to Escalate This Situation.

Amy drives up as they’re trying to handcuff him, and she leaps toward them frantic, explaining that she’s his sister and he’s not a criminal, while David fearfully calls her name, and I can’t take it!!! And if I can’t take it, Amy Haller sure as hell can’t, and smacks the arm of the cop who had just wrenched her brother’s wrist into a cuff, yelling at him to knock it off. Instead, he knocks her hard to the ground.

So now they’ve hurt Amy too, which David can’t handle. But the thing about David is that when he can’t handle something, sometimes his assailant goes flying skyward, far away. Trancelike, shuddering, David forces the gun drawn in the remaining cop’s hand to shoot the car instead, where he saw his monster, and then the man crumples like the Eye in Chapter 7, splattering Amy with blood.

More cops pull up then, like sharks smelling it on the water, and in their frenzy, one of them shoots David through the back. He falls to the ground, arm outstretched toward Amy, crying on the pavement a few yards away, and with a final blast of golden light, he evaporates all the cars and bodies from the street, save their own. Ohh. She stumbles up and rushes over to him, but her brother is gone.

I watched this entire scene with my eyes and mouth utterly round.

They bring us back down through a montage of the Davids, old and young and in-between, a strange sad mosaic of a fragmented, maybe-life. It all pauses for a moment while Amy visits his grave---and if you think his headstone is going to reveal his date of birth, then you don’t know the tricksters running Legion, who just put “Taken Too Soon” and Heelied off into the sunset.

God that Cali lighting though.

And then, what wonders!, the montage resolves into a missing scene from our timeline. You can tell it’s ours by the fact that Amy’s now driving a Volvo from the 1960s with a European-style license plate, and it’s raining---we’re back north, back in CANADA. Well no I mean we’re probably still in LA because this is new footage, but like emotionally.

The rain patters down as David begs her in the passenger seat, a heartbreaking “Pleeeeaase, pleease” please don’t commit him to this mental hospital. He still has the bruises from the cord around his neck. That’s everything Amy needs to know. (God, my babies.)

“It wouldn’t stop, the voices—” he tries to explain, faltering, knowing what he sounds like, the way he always has. What were they though. Those voices that don’t quite fit the going explanation. The ones that spoke even when there was no one else nearby. WHAT DID THE STARS SAY. I mean this timeline is the best not just because it’s ours, but also because it has THAT. Honestly, What Did The Stars Say is my Snowden Of Yesteryear of this show, you have someone say that again and I will transcend this plane and then pass out.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” David says, staring up at the roof of the car.

“I know,” Amy tells him. “But it is.”

She’s arranged things with Dr. Kissinger; he’s gonna get his own room. “It’s a nice place, Clockworks,” Amy says, and they look out at the hospital together, a familiar melody creeping into the score, gaahh I love storytelling. Smiling through her tears, knowing she’ll be lying, Amy tells him it’s just for a few weeks. It’ll be five years.

THIS CAR SCENE WILL BE THE END OF ME

Aannnd we’re in Clockworks, GOD I miss this set, did you all shoot all this last year or did you just keep it??

And then another good and beautiful cover starts, this time an R.E.M. song, and Syd shows up, and now we’re overlapping with the show we know, and goooddddd it’s so affecting!!? It’s something in the music right? The speed of the clips set to the slowness? I love it, this feeling is so much so unusual so sad!

We see how David was accidentally broken out of Clockworks, taken off to Summerland. How they figured out a way to pull a monster from his mind, only to set him loose in Oliver Bird, and how one day the Shadow King would lead his new puppet to Amy’s house, and take her for his plans.

“You decide what is real and what is not. Your will,” Farouk echoes in the golden field, and I still don’t know what the hell he means by this and now they’ve REPEATED it. I mean as David himself put it last episode, he’s a mutant with psychic powers, he’s not a god.

And right now, he’s just a boy sobbing in his friend’s arms, arms torn from his sister.

They drop to credits so quickly it left me breathless.

***

Wellntruly’s Way Long Legion Recaps Season 2: Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 // Season 1

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[wellntruly]

LEGION Recap 2x05

The fifth installment of Legion’s first season was the scariest one, and looks like this one might be tooooo. Tim Mielants (Peaky Blinders, hey) directed both. Midway through I was calling it a “slow-burn episode” to myself, but later the show would give me the right word for it: dread.

TWO big shocking things in this one, one plot one personal; we’ll get to both in due time.

Sorry if this intro seems muted but I am a little stricken??

Season 2, ‘Chapter 13’

For the first time ever, we get a Previously-on! Only it’s Jon Hamm saying “Apparently on Legion...” before rolling the Lenny reel. Stop right now with this you wily lovably motherfuckers!!! APPARENTLY. Fuck you. I love you.

Anyway you ever feel turned upside down.

This episode actually has a very straightforward format, comprised of a series of characters having weird sit-downs with Lenny in this room (“This room is scary” she timidly informs Clark when he arrives first), interspersed with Farouk & Oliver driving around having philosophical conversations in the desert as they plan to enact a Lazarus on peeps. In fact I’d wager that the steady, regular progression of each of these portions contributes to the sense of dread. They both just keep moving, unhurried yet inexorable, toward, we gradually realize, some shared and horrifying end.

But let’s start with Clark.

Clark is a bit of a lamppost in this scene, actually, as he’s playing the familiar role he wore when we first met him: the medium-dickish, eyebrow-arching interrogator armed with the uncanny, squashing the occasional softness behind his eyes with exasperation or self-amused theatricality. “Are you the Shadow King?” he whispers ironically at Lenny at one point.

Lenny, for her part, is behaving much more like the bold, slang-slinging gal we first met in Clockworks than she has been for most of this series, but with this additional sweet, confused veneer over her usual freewheeling ex-junkie conversational diversions. It feels about as real as it does false; about as much as this ceiling is also a glass floor.

Lenny tries to underline her status as a victim in all this by telling Clark about her childhood. She’s named after her alcoholic grandmother, Lenore. “She was… let’s just say she was a real salty broad and leave it at that.” Oh we’re definitely not going to, we’re definitely gonna create a Symbol Scene we can keep coming back to. Little Lenny going over to her gran-gran’s house after school for “Happy Hour” (Aubrey Plaza’s accent work on this is incredible), where they’d watch cartoons and Lenore would feed her vodka in a citrus soda can. Yeaahh, that’s sure not going to set your nine-year-old brain off on strong footing, chemical-wise.

So y’know, shit happens, yada yada yada, and Lenny grew up, hustled to get high, landed in a mental hospital, and that’s when things really got wild: was smashed inside a wall in someone’s telekinetic panic attack, her dying consciousness snatched up by an old malevolent mutant, and was worn around like a puppet tormenting people inside their heads for who honestly knows how long, before finally escaping, woo.

That last part though, that’s the current point of concern. How did she get free. How is she sitting here, able to bleed when Clark pricks her palm. “Who’s body is that?”

Oh my god oh my god how does she look just a little off, something in her face not quite Lenny, someone else, Jesus H this is giving me the creeeeps!

Oh you rascals <3

Oliver drives Farouk down the road, the sun on their faces. Idly, Oliver Bird, dedicated follower of fashion, asks what he can expect, for his suit’s sake, on this grave-digging expedition. But Farouk, comfortable as cat behind his honeycomb sunglasses, is more interested in just hearing himself talk right now.

“When you become my age, you realize it’s not about the thing done, but the beauty of the plan,” he smiles into the sun. “That’s how we judge our gods, not on their math but their poetry.”

Without even acknowledging this Oliver goes: “I’m just unclear on the circumstances of the recovery, are we talking a mausoleum? Is it a pine box six feet under? A golden sarcophagus?” Jemaine Clement I love you. Farouk drops that yes there will be dirt, and bugs. Oliver groans hilariously.

But Farouk is just blissed out in the back seat, already dazzled by the plan that’s unfolding in front of him like this long shimmering road. He assures Oliver that the beauty of this will be unreal.

“Nothing’s felt real to me for a very long time,” he responds lowly. Aw, Bird.

Later that night, under a black sky, Oliver strains to dig up a coffin in the desert to this very fun folk-goth Cat Power song. The Shadow King sits by sipping espresso from his demitasse, until finally deigning to call upon his powers and raise it with a gesture.

Is this American Godz. I want it to be.

Oliver brushes down his cream flannel cashmere suit with GREAT affront that Farouk had him breaking his back out here for so long just for his own amusement, but bends to open the coffin when Farouk bids him. (My understanding of the rules here is that Farouk cannot physically interact with our world himself, can only direct power---tele- or otherwise---through living, bodied people. He can channel his energy through you to lift something, or he can ask you to do it, but he needs you. A machine that bleeds.)

Farouk kneels by the open lid. “There she is,” he coos. What an odd yet somehow Farouk thing to say to his own body, I thought at first. Then as he held a more delicate (decrepit) hand in his own, I realized that this must be Lenny’s body, also buried out here for...some reason.

He asks Oliver for the Device. The Device? Oliver flashes back to his and Lenny’s musical raid on Division 3, where after he told the kids to run, he grabbed this handheld contraption off a shelf of other fantastical gizmos. Farouk plucks a bit of skin off the wrist (eurgh, and also huh, there may go my theory...). Oliver walks off, leaving Farouk to kiss these dead fingers for a beat too long. This...guy.

Second interview with Lenny in the upside down room---Ptonomy. Ptonomy, as is often his wont, is proposing something conceptually dramatic, but this time he actually seems a little worked up about it, which is not his wont. Ptonomy you are usually chill, what is going on with you buddy? He tells Lenny that he’s not really sure the present even exists, given that it takes time for our sense to pick up light and sound and then be processed by our brain. We’re always experiencing the past. [Marcel the Shell voice] But the past of whaat.

And why! does! she! look! different!

Lenny asks if she can try on his glasses Ptonomy is turning anxiously in his hands, and he obliges. She puts them on, then covers her eyes. Okay Memory Boy, what color are her eyes? “Brown,” Ptonomy and I both respond.

Wrong.

ASDLKFJLKJF THAT’S IT

Ptonomy is now even more freaked out. “I’m with you babe, I’m one of the good guys,” Lenny assures him. But, less reassuring, she also points out that Farouk is going to get his body back and come after all of them.

Certain that she has to know more than she’s telling them, Ptonomy stalks around the table and grabs her head to read her memories, warning her that this may hurt. He gets a shaking image of little Lenny and Lenore with their Rondo cans, but it’s all jittery, and cuts into something else---a picture rocking on a wall, sunflowers falling to a linoleum floor and splattering with blood. It’s going wrong for Ptonomy, and we see that black goo seeping out of his ear. Wait the Delusion! Really not a metaphor??? We see it crawl into his ear again several nights ago, yes thank you for the reminder show I remember well bc it was extremely gross!!!!

Ptonomy is dropped into a pitch black space, and in the darkness he sees: Admiral Fukyama, backed by Vermillion, basket AGLOW. His vision pushes INTO IT and inside---a giant version of the Delusion creature? God I am so mystified because this is still such a good metaphor….

The flashes we were seeing throughout this finally resolve themselves into reality, nightmare though it may be: in the waking world, Ptonomy has been unconsciously choking Lenny against the wall. “Shit,” Lenny pants. “Buy a girl a drink first.”

Trust Lenny to manage to diffuse a situation by making a joke about a choking kink.

Panting as well, bewildered, Ptonomy just stumbles out without saying anything at all to her, which is a jerky thing to do, c’mon. Desperately Lenny scrambles for the door, but it closes on her. She sinks to the ground. Oh Lenny! Lenny I feel for you, this sucks.

Wow it has been a whole heck of a WHILE since our last chapter heading! We have transitioned into Chapter Six: Conspiracy. Jon Hamm is now onto evolutionary psychology, which is...well a mixed bag. His lesson though is mostly about how we seek patterns in everything, and that’s pretty valid. (Evo psych, in my opinion, tends to be better at coming up with explanations for how humans tend to interpret our environments than how humans tend to behave in them.) Also I apprech how eventually they’re basically vagueblogging Pizzagate while Jon Hamm damningly intones: “When we encounter Coincidence, we often see...Conspiracy.”

We return to Oliver & Farouk on their journey. They watch miners emerge out of a hole in the middle of the desert, lamps on their helmets, laying shovels and pickaxes on the dirt---and lining up to receive bags of donuts from a food truck shaped like a submarine.

Legion I love you.

Curious, Farouk asks if Oliver is bothered by the morality of the two of them killing little humans. Oliver considers the word ‘morality’ for a second, then rambles on about the molecules of this car coming from a massive star explosion that could have wiped out all sorts of life, and these molecules are still here, so basically it’s all relative. I think. I mean Oliver is definitely that guy in college who always plays devil’s advocate on ethical issues because it entertains him to affect aloof, but none of his “takes” are consistent with each other, it’s just a new play each time.

His statement is also undercut by how this episode has devoted a measurable amount of its precious minutes to reminding us that Oliver has fought back against Farouk and his homo superior mentality, and yes on moral grounds. He told the kids to run so they wouldn’t get turned to black dust. And here, talk about how life and death is irrelevant all he may, this is what he sees:

“Melanie,” he calls in his head.

Oliver turns around in the driver’s seat to smile a bit at Farouk. “I’m going to kill you, you know,” he says mildly. I am \o/ !! That is the best way to deliver a statement of purpose like that.

The donut submarine honks a bawoooga horn, and drives off down the road. The amoral duo start their engine and follow. Honestly if we’ve learned anything this season, it’s that Death drives a sweet retro vehicle.

I’ve spent this whole episode waiting for David to show up. Not because we need David for good Legion (see Chapter 7, see any of them really), but because I want DAVID & LENNY. And now it’s time. He’s the last interview. She raises her head off her arms in the dark room, and it’s a little less scary now, because David’s there. They just laugh quietly at each other, and the low slow-burn smolder in my brain is flaming to life. “Finally,” Lenny breathes---she’d asked after him right at the start. David cocks his head at her, and they both chuckle again, and then just start kinda shootin the breeze. Of course, their breeze is the air in a room you discover you can hear once you’ve gotten a parasitic monster out of your head. Oh babes.

So, the two big things I mentioned at the top are both coming out in this scene. One of them is going to take until the last act to fully come together, so we have a moment there before full-blown reckoning, but the other emerged FULLY FORMED, a 0-to-60 sort of thunderclap of discovery, and that’s the damning revelation of just how much I find I ship these two.

NOW LISTEN. I have to explain, because this is a Classic™ Tarra ship in that really I’m just terribly invested in this relationship, NOT that I want them to bang about it. Because that’s not what this is. It’s flirty, but without the intentionality that traditionally holds. Off-beat flirtiness is just one of the ways they express the weird extra-love they have for each other, this like platonic-intimate bro frission, where maybe if they were both straight then it would be like high-oh, but that’s not the case, and that’s not the case in a way where alluding to that If only seems to heighten their connection and understanding with each other. Like when tragically straight girls will be like if you were a man I’d marry you, and their friend is like god I know babe, and they sling their arms around each other and laugh and in that moment even men they might be in love aren’t as close to them as they are with each other. It’s that. It’s this pairing of two people, this vibe, where even though they both know perfectly well that they’re not gonna become romantic partners, that’s not their thing, what they do have seems romantic because that’s the nearest comparison, and so it’s still threatening when seen by the actual romantic partners they may have. Like I do not want Syd to know the extent of David/Lenny, because it’s just going to hurt and worry her when it needn’t. Lenny’s not David’s secret girlfriend or anything, and never will be, Lenny’s just David’s….Lenny, which is almost worse, because a traditional romantic competitor is someone you can fight, but this...this is something else. Syd has David, he’s her man, that’s not in contention. But he and Lenny have something too, something that doesn’t seem to function on a regular friendship register. And people fear what they don’t understand.

ANYWAY, where were we. Oh, they were laughing about Lenny’s attitude toward sleeping with men (no) and then David glanced around conspiratorially and offered her a Twizzler.

U see? You see what I mean? Flirty Forever Bros. And you can put the emphasis anywhere you want in that it all works.

But when Lenny moves to take the Twizzler David softly points at her with it accusingly, saying “You’re still working for him!”, though he lets her grab it immediately.

“Okay, I’m not not working for him,” Lenny concedes. “But it wasn’t my idea, I swear.” All Lenny knows is that the Shadow King sent her here so that she could tell him that he’s found his body and is a’coming for them. Lenny looks anxious, and David centers himself and does a Telepath Thing, then tells her that he’s shielding her from Farouk; she can talk to him freely. Lenny’s like aw thanks bun, but “doesn’t matter kid, I got no intel.” She has no beans to spill, because she and Oliver were kept “in these little drawers, you know like in a morgue.” He’d take them out to play and then put them back. I’m gonna start calling Farouk the Necrophilic Playboy I can feel it.

David gets a sudden flash at this point, those sunflowers on the linoleum floor that Ptonomy glimpsed, and...wait young Amy on the beach, from the S1 flashbacks? Ice water in my stomach. Oh shit no, no you don’t….

Blinking it off, David asks her why she’s really here, and Lenny takes his face in her hands from across the table, sincere: “Because I missed you.”

“C’mon!” she says, grabbing his hands. “Clockworks, remember! David, and Lenny. The good ol’ times. We were like, white on rice. And I know, he sent me, but, can’t it both?”

These two, Aubrey Plaza and Dan Stevens, they are genuinely one of the best pairs working in TV right now. They’re never more oddball than when they’re playing off each other, but they also clearly trust one another to harmonize to whatever they do, catch them when they swing out on an emotional limb, and so manage to sell a metric fuckton of Real Feelings while they’re at it.

“Lenny,” David implores sweetly, in wonder, gently holding out her hands, “how are you real?”

“You tell me, the guy’s like a god.”

David scrinches his face in skepticism. “He’s a mutant with psychic powers, he’s not a god.” Thank you as always David Haller for pointing out the thing I’m always wanting pointed out. This show is so pleasing to my combination brain, which thrills to weird magic and cares more about emotional reality than logical continuity, but also appreciates a measure of practical details and Rules For This Space.

Anyway, David gets a longer flash then, and okay that’s DEFINITELY little him and his sister on that beach up in British Columbia, in that tiny rectangle they would use, jesus fuckballs no. David jolts out of his chair, scoots a few paces away in agitation. Okay HOW IS LENNY HERE. She doesn’t know. She just woke up, and there she was.

“With blue eyes?” “Yeah. That part’s weird.”

AMY’S EYES ARE BROWN AREN’T THEY, TELL ME THEY ARE.

Farouk and Oliver observe this little property deep in the desert, where the Dead Sea Donuts truck has returned home. A flat modular-sort of house under one of those free-standing roof awnings, with a few wind turbines, and twice that number of armed Div 3 guards standing around, guarding.

“What you said before,” Farouk picks up, “that you’d kill me. You’ve been in the sun for too long. The Shadow King; I’m more powerful than you.” But Oliver calmly observes that he’s found his weakness, and by the time Farouk figures it out it will be too late. Farouk laughs kinda nastily, patronizingly asks for a hint to this oh so amusing mystery of how Oliver is going to attack him. Amazingly, Oliver brings up math, math! The apparent theme of their talks this episode! He asks Farouk what one plus one equals. Two, he provides, naturally.

“Incorrect,” Oliver responds evenly.

Oh, okay so Oliver’s going to kill himself and take Farouk with him, because they aren’t actually two, they’re an entity hosted in another being? That’s my theory, May 5th note it down.

The way they start to bring the two sections of this episode together is through the score first. There’s a sad, worrying violin melody that we hear as Oliver and Farouk walk toward the desert homestead, and it keeps playing as David sits looking at Lenny at the table. The threads are weaving together, scenes intercutting for the first time this episode--- Lenny waking up in a dark hole in the desert, naked and damp with some phantasmic afterbirth.

Clambering out unsteadily into the blazing sun.

And Lenny sitting across from David, repeating all she knows: that Farouk has a plan. And we know: he thinks it beautiful.

A sparkler now, multiple sparklers, and oh, the sparkler on the cupcake Amy brought to David in the hospital, the sparkler that brought us out of the very opening montage in the first chapter. We can hear her voice, singing him ‘Happy birthday’. Oh nooo.

Amy. In this little home in the desert. With sunflowers.

Her husband is the donut delivery man. She tells him she had a weird dream again, and describes, oh what, Admiral Fukyama and the Vermillion. She was one of the Vermillion. Huh. Huh huh huh. Ben sits at the table, quiet. He has a weird feeling, like something bad is going to happen. The shadow and airy slice of the wind turbine right outside sweeps the room, steadily. God that would be a hell of a thing to get used to.

Ben comes up with the word for the feeling he’s thinking of: “Dread.”

The shadows stop suddenly, and wind pours in through the windows.

They can see that the guards are gone. This is exactly how it goes, and now, yes we’re on this inexorable track: Ben goes to the door to see who just rang the bell. He won’t come back. Amy, almost dance-like, because this is choreographed, steps over to the knife block and swings out a butcher knife. She walks slowly to the entry, where the open door bangs in the wind, black ash blowing over the floor. Behind her, the kitchen sink turns on. It’s Oliver, washing his hands and singing ‘Happy birthday’. He keeps them held up like a surgeon. Dread.

Back in Division 3, Lenny, scared, asks David what happened to her body, after they took her out of the wall. David, his fear ricocheting up with hers, nervously recalls that they buried her in the desert. Lenny wonders….maybe Farouk didn’t find his own body, maybe he found her body.

In Amy’s kitchen, Oliver tells her her brother’s back. “Great,” she replies simply. God I love Amy. “I’ll just, I’ll go get my coat.” No. No he’s not going to let her do that. He’s going to lift her up with Farouk’s powers and place her screaming on the dining table. Oliver holds the Device over her middle, and when she asks what he’s doing, replies: “Finding the sculpture in the stone.” Oh...my god.

He transforms her, bone-crunchingly painfully, into Lenny. It is ghastly, terrifying. Amy wails until she can’t anymore, as Oliver stands still over her, his eyes dead. At last Lenny curls up on the table, her bare skin streaked with blood, and Farouk pets her hair, showing her the sun.

Ohhh, wait, god, so the Lenny in the sand, this Lenny now draped across a black horse walking toward the mountains ---

wow

--- is this Farouk? Lenny’ed Amy in the house, and also her body resurrected in the desert to house Farouk?

I mean I guess that would effectively double the amount of Aubrey Plaza in this show, but at what cost.

The timelines have all clicked into place, and David, suddenly seeing it all, scrambles crying for the door, panicked, grief-stricken, sobbing. Lenny doesn’t understand, but runs after him, her David, gathers him into her arms, cradling his head as he hears Farouk’s laughter echoing through it.

Nooo.

This show has clearly grown accustomed to being able to push in on Dan Stevens’ face and trust he can deliver an absurd mission line almost right down the camera with utter unassailable earnestness. I’m thinking of Chapter 7’s “I’m gonna get my body back”, and now this “I’m coming for you.” Like, it is FULLY ridiculous, but it still works if we believe him. And we do. This buttertart means business. You turned his sister into clay, and you will pay for it.

End of Episode Check-In

Well, the thing is that I used to produce television. Cooking television, but television enough that I always know exactly why they make these kinds of decisions, and it starts with B which rhymes with T and that stands for The Budget. This season both Jemaine Clement and Hamish Linklater got upgraded to regular cast members, so that’s a pricier contract each, and they added Navid Negahban to the main cast as well. Legion does okay, ish, but not well enough that they can afford to add those salaries and also keep everyone on from Season 1. You gotta lose a character, and as the answer wasn’t Clark (it coulda easily been Clark, though just him probably wouldn’t have been quite enough $), the solution was regular player Amy Haller. It does make narrative sense---she was kidnapped into this adventure in the last season, and she always had her own life to go back to, unlike the others. Sure it was apparently the Div 3 Witness Protection Program life now, but it wouldn’t have made much sense for Amy to have abandoned her husband to hang around mutant central for the past year waiting for David to come back. She’d lost David before. She knows how this goes.

And so, Amy goes. They could have just never mentioned her again, or given one throwaway line about how she moved away or something, the route maaanny shows take, and a lame one. It doesn’t usually bug me to see the scaffolding of these things, but that one does. Or, you kill her. That’s the bluntest tool, and it’s gonna smash through to the floorboards if your genre can’t support it. But Legion is, sometimes, a right ol’ horror show. Death fits their story. I actually resent it less than the alternative, artistically. Personally I’m upset, but I don’t resent that either, because I watch TV to have feelings. This hurts. This is a fucking loss to my heart. I really liked Amy, and I loved having this adult sibling relationship on TV. I feel this. I’m unhappy. That’s okay. But man :((

(Alternatively, we learn the device works in both directions and those flashes of memory indicate a still-present soul, and eventually Lenny is put back in her proper body and Amy is restored. But, with only a two-episode contract for Katie Aselton! Still saved $$! This is also a possible X-Men solush.)

***

Wellntruly’s Way Long Legion Recaps Season 2: Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 // Season 1

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LEGION Recap 2x04

This episode is extraordinary. It is focused, contained, un- to their usual, and the most philosophical one yet, to the point that I almost thought I’d write a thinkpiece this week instead of a blow-by-blow recap.

But while that idea held some appeal, like hell am I gonna squander the fun to be had in narrating a TIME-LOOP EPISODE.

I mean, hilarious that I thought it my moment to love on Structure in the lede for ‘Chapter 11’, considering.

Season 2, ‘Chapter 12’

The final seconds of the last episode saw David finding Syd standing still on the roof, stricken with that catatonic chattering the monk was spreading, and hurriedly entering her mind.

That’s where we’ll now spend nearly this whole dang chapter. (Yeeeee)

Sydney Barrett sits on a white fur rug inside the igloo David had staggered past in the blowing blue snowstorm. She warms her hands over a stage fire, the kind where cut-out flames of sheer and iridescent red fabric ripple over a glowing light, lord I love, wearing a skimpy fur dress like she’s a sexy cavewoman on Star Trek: The Original Series. It is for all of these reasons that I do feel completely proper in referring to this as Syd’s ice planet, which I will be doing, and LOVING CONTINUOUSLY.

The fire dims, and muffled voices begin to rise in the distance. Syd turns and slowly crawls down the igloo tunnel, which lengthens and stretches, and she is born, tiny new baby Syd, placed in her mother’s arms in the hospital.

It was, surely, best if we didn’t press on how the hell her mom would not have swapped bodies with her infant daughter as soon as she touched her. But as this episode is concerned with Syd’s childhood, we’re going to have to come up with an explanation, and the easiest one is that for her it was much as it was for David, and her power didn’t start fully manifesting until she was a teenager. She was born with a mysterious knowledge of it though, a deep emotional aversion to being touched, particularly on her bare skin.

In her fantastic apartment---god so many patterns---soulful, intelligent Joan Barrett begins to figure this out. She softly places her hand near her baby’s head, then slowly draws it back, noting how her cries lessen. And letting us hear this Bon Iver song come drifting in. I have only heard those four songs everyone has heard, so this was a great “..is that?” moment for me.

Incidentally, have confirmed that yes, Lily Rabe was ALSO in that Shakespeare In the Park production of Cymbeline I saw, co-starring with Hamish Linklater. Buddies helping out buddies I have to bet! Does this mean it’s only a matter of time until Raúl Esparza shows up because [*places hand delicately over my collarbone like I have the vapors*].

Under the tender melodies of Bon Iver, Syd grows up. As a little girl her mom lovingly cradles her with a pillow between them on the bed. She blows kisses at a fish in its glass bowl. She becomes a teenager, discovers her penchant for black & orange, and the comfort of shielding her hands in gloves. She turns the pages of her book with her gloved fingers, smiling at her mom, who’s writing out essays longhand on the floor. I love the Barretts.

Then, oh my god---

THEN THEY GO TO AN EGON SCHIELE EXHIBIT. I am LOSING my mind, Schiele!!! My weird compelling gorgeous upsetting contorted Egon Schiele, a whole gallery, her mom talking passionately about the art, Syd’s wearing a beret, SCHIELE. Huge on all the walls! Bold! Nearly, but rationally not, the same stunning Egon Schiele portrait exhibit I went to when I was living in New York, twice.

There is a young couple who has chosen this as their Makeout Point, v quality, and Syd watches them, while across the room a museum guard watches her.

Later, Joan Barrett’s salon!! Ever since Syd talked about these, talked about her and her mother’s life in NYC, I have cuh-raved this. It’s wonderful. Joan is wearing this long velvet dress and huge round glasses and reading out her essay to the gathered intelligentsia in her living room, this marvel.

One thing I’m just realizing is that it’s hard to judge time period off the looks of rich intellectuals, because they always dress like they’ve walked out of a past era. Is this the 1970s, or does this sculptural history professor just love cream turtlenecks with brown suede?

Anyway, Syd, her room being used as the coat closet (now this feels NYC), dresses up in the guests’ hats and outerwear and vamps around in front of her mirror. I love Young Syd. Young Syd is breaking my heart.

Syd wanders out into the living room, and David is standing in the crowd, watching her mom, watching her. Joan speaks of survivorship. Sometimes, she says, survivors are strongest at the broken places. This is true. The opposite is also true, but I feel that’s the one that gets talked about more, so keep going velvet glasses babe I’m interested. 

I’m love her.

However, someone taps into Syd’s shoulder, and she screams. Too hard. Everyone stares at her, and the view fishbowls slightly---it’s the first time this slide deck of memories has had the warping, heightened visual field of the un-Reality, the not here & now. Incidentally, this episode was directed by Ellen Kuras, the cinematographer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, if u haven’t yet had the opportunity to squeal about how good that is.

Teen Syd runs out of the room. The next time we see her, she’s done her hair up in a punk unicorn mane of knots, smudged half her palette of black eyeshadow on, pulled off her gloves, and gone out to a basement dance club. She jumps around on the dance floor, the others slamming into her, her face blurring and contorting with each bump. Tiny quick swaps? Half swaps? It must wreck her. Later, her mom sits quietly next to a hospital bed as Syd sleeps, her arms strapped down.

And that’s the reel. We return to THE SCHIELE EXHIBIT, Young Syd transforming into Adult Syd. She sits on the bench looking at a painting while her boyfriend walks up dressed as an art cop.

Help me. This art gallery au.

As with Ptonomy in the rose labyrinth, Syd doesn’t seem to recognize David or understand what he’s saying about a Maze and her Core Desire. But Syd “Me the cat?” Barrett is also an inveterate troll, so she may, and just be enjoying remarking “I’ll scream, creep,” when David sits down on the far end of her bench. He’s a little bewildered that she so likes Schiele, and Syd just looks at him levelly.

Like, it’s you, you realize right?

David Haller, Art Critic: “Well, he’s, trapped in all that negative space. No feet no hands. Mouth covered, no way to...communicate or connect. It’s, it’s…” Sydney Barrett, Art Curator: “Honest.” David: “...It’s not the word I was thinking but yeah guess it’s that too.”

David thinks he understands though, what this space means to Syd, the key that will allow him to spring her from the Maze so they can go home. This is her place, “Somewhere you can be a part of the world without needing to touch it.” #MUSEUMS. Holy cats that is the most hilarious definition of museums. You can see the whole world, but Do Not Touch.

But Syd just laughs soft and a little startled, sad but removed: “You don’t know anything.”

She gets up and clips out of the gallery, tossing over shoulder: “Watch it again.”

Whaaaaaaat.

We go back to the beginning, the igloo, the fabric fire. Sydney Barrett’s gravity points are an ICE PLANET and an EGON SCHIELE GALLERY, and honestly I’m suspicious of this show’s read on me sometimes. These are such niche interests. Big love!!!!!

So the story loops again, and like, to be fair to David, it did seem a lot gentler and sadder and wistful when scored to a goddamn BON IVER SONG. I give him a pass on round one. This time Mister Iver is gone, and we see more scenes as well---theoretically, because David’s focus is shifting? That would probably track, that the first round was what he remembered of her remembrances, and now he’s trying to push himself into a different POV, pay closer attention.

This time we see: bullies. Bullies when she’s a little girl, with a mocking sing-song chant about her. Bullies when she’s a teenager, deliberately bumping into her and laughing viciously. Syd draws stitches into her wrist with a ballpoint pen.

And a bully boy, who tries to badger her into kissing him. Gets aggressive when she keeps saying no, shoves her into a fence and calls her a frigid bitch. But then Syd sees her other tormentors, laughing, and gets an idea. A bad idea. She kisses him, and takes his body. He faints in hers, too disoriented to take it, and she turns, picks up his lacrosse stick, and just whales on the girls, beats each one to the ground with a violent slam. They swap back before a teacher walks by, and Syd swiftly says that it was him, and doesn’t bother to turn to see him get hauled away. A private smile flickers on her face as she looks down on her crumpled enemies.

[*low whistle*]

We return to the Schiele exhibit. David has a new idea: it’s the couple she was watching, kissing on the bench. Okay I give him no pass for that one, David what? PAY ATTENTION, NERD. That is nooot what that loop was about! Lather, rinse, repeat.

P.S. I am dying over S T R U C T U R E

Again to the ice planet, again out out out. Her mom mapping her tears, cuddling her with a pillow in bed. Cutting figures out of photos, then her thigh instead. A v angsty song is playing now.

David runs up to her in the museum with a new idea but she just wheels off before he can even get it out.

God I’m loving this. Play it again, Sam.

Syd is a schoolgirl again-- “Poor lost elf / keeps to herself. / Lives with her mom / ‘cause her dad’s in hell.”---until David wades in and tells the mean girls to piss off. “I’m uh….a teacher here,” he begins lamely, and Little Syd just sighs and goes “You’re cheating. You can’t just ask me, the whole point is that you have to figure it out yourself.”

Literally David: “Wh— wait what is happening?”

What is happening, my befuddled telepath boyf, is that this is sure not the Maze as you’ve known it! Syd isn’t trapped here, you are, until you finally comprehend what she’s trying to tell you. God knows how you guys even got into this arrangement, but I bet we’re about to, yup, let’s step out of Syd’s mind for a moment, to check in with the team at Division 3.

In one of the corridors, Kerry suddenly gasps awake. She’s out. “Cary?!” she calls, before hearing him from somewhere behind her sternum. They seem to have figured this out a bit better, and she’s able to only somewhat awkwardly extricate him from her torso, Cary falling with a sprawl to the floor right as Clark comes stomping past.

“Oh excuse me hi---” Cary says all in one breath to his ankles, but Clark doesn’t even slow his swinging stride until a few paces away. FINE, he’ll catch them up: everyone’s awake. The Missing, as he calls them---straight up is that the first time that term’s been used or did I just abandon it early for my own The Chatterers?---all came back early this morning, incidentally at the same time they found the monk dead on the sidewalk outside. Clark has already put together that the monk was likely the culprit, but it can all wait because right now 300 people all need to use the bathroom at the same time, so, peace.

Cary’s like “David!” and Kerry’s like “Syd!” and they rush off, finding them standing locked on the roof in the bright morning sun. It was definitely full nighttime when the monk went over the edge, so, jot that down for your timelines. The couple are hauled down to Cary’s lab, where he bustles around and explains to Melanie and Ptonomy that they’re awake from the contagion, but not awake awake. Basically: idk. Scientifically.

Anyway I would just like to highlight David Haller’s feets situation. Okay carry on whenever you feel like it.

A smooth tune picks up as we return to David, fighting his way through that blizzard on the ice planet. Aaannd, to the gallery, where he careens up to Syd thinking he’s had a breakthrough.

“It took me a while because I’m thick,” he begins, and in this moment I sincerely regret I never had the time to make Future Syd spelling out UR A DUMB BITCH with her light-writer as I had planned to ever since @memory-for-trifles made that joke to me a couple weeks ago. Anyway, continue David, my sweet idiot: “I finally figured it out, figured you out, why you’re doing this. It’s not a maze, it’s not The Maze, I thought it was but this is YOU. You think if you show me who you are, who you really are, all the mistakes all the fouled up things you did, that I won’t love you anymore. It’s a test. But you’re forgetting who I am. David the-the lunatic, the drug addict who stole and cheated and ruined...everything. And yeah you made some bad choices but you were young, and the world is an ugly place for people like us, two people like us, so—I love you, okay? And there is nothing you can show me that is going to scare me away.”

I quote this in full to highlight how David Haller is simultaneously his most precious and most infuriating this episode.

Syd looks at him for a moment, then just makes the sound of a wrong-answer game buzzer. God I love this girl, she’s so WRY. “Try again,” she says intently, nodding a little like you do when you want confirmation from someone.

Rachel Keller is absolutely crushing it this episode. I can hardly describe what she’s doing in these scenes, it’s always like five distinct emotions at once plus another handful of interrelated ones, all extreeemely relatable, somehow.

Once more, with feeling!! “I won’t give up,” David whispers, lying on the bed next to her like her mom. “I’ll never give up.” This hun.

And this loop, something new: we see Joan’s current boyfriend, a dark laughing fellow from the salon. They’re drinking wine and chatting while he strokes her calf. Syd stares at them, then announces that she’s going out. It’s the night she went to the club. Her mom’s boyfriend winks at her, and Syd quickly leaves.

Some time later, a few days or weeks, Sydney can’t sleep. The sirens wail, and she slips out of bed and sits on the floor, hugging her knees under her t-shirt. God, like I said: relatable.

She sees a shadow walk past her door---the boyfriend. Syd has an idea. A very, very bad idea. You know what this one is. She told David what she’d done, last season in the white room, and we were all like !!!!?? Although she’d fudged her age to David---turns out she was actually 15 not 16. Regardless, it’s one of those tragic ironies of being a teenager: you come up with this shit because you’re bored, yet you somehow can’t seem to find the time to think them through to their conclusion. There’s no way out of what you’re about to do Syd, without traumatizing everyone. You haven’t left yourself an exit, this is bad driving! But, you’re 15.

Sydney Barrett swaps bodies with her mom, asleep on the couch, and creeps into the bathroom where her boyfriend is showering. 

Incidentally, is this place rent-controlled.

So tentatively, rapt with wonder, she touches his bare skin, covered in water droplets. It’s this lovely suspended moment, before he lunges forward to kiss her eagerly, and a moment later he’s banging her against the shower wall. Oof.

But I had not fully thought about how VERY terrible the fallout of this would be. Because when the swap wears off, as we learned last season, your body goes to meet where your mind was. So Joan wakes up back on the couch, to hear a shout from the bathroom. She rushes over, to find her boyfriend in the shower with her daughter. Her very young daughter. He looks like a pedophile.

Joan screams. Screams that she’s only fifteen, slaps him repeatedly, furious and terrified and appalled and frantic. Syd just stares, horrified, what can she say. It seems like her mom doesn’t even know she has powers???

He’s hauled away in handcuffs, as Syd sits silently on a chair.

Holy….shit.

David sits back on the couch across from her, STUNNED. Conceptually the learning element of this episode doesn’t make sense unless he’s been getting the same series of events each time and just isn’t doing the right lit crit on them, but in this moment it does kinda feel like he’s seeing this for the first time? Perhaps Syd just went for the deluxe version this time.

We return to the ice planet now, for this one. They sit by the stage fire on the white fur rug, and David thinks that at last he does understand what she’s trying to tell him. I’m going to quote most of this scene, because here’s the thing: I think actually, what their conversation lays out is that they each represent a different, not worse, way of processing trauma. What’s key here, and what will likely be interesting down the line, is that Syd wants to convince David that doing things her way will be better for him, but I’m not so sure that’s right. I think it worked for her, but recovery isn’t a one-size-fits-all sort of thing. Everyone wears survivorship differently. And David being sweet and believing in the Magic of Love despite everything hasn’t actually made him weaker in any distinct way from Syd, who became a self-sufficient badass who believes love is good but might is stronger. (They are Charles and Erik, like totally. And notably, that just went round and round and round with neither of them ever coming out of it as ~better off~ than the other.)

David: “Okay. I think I understand. It’s not about being alone, or about being in love. It’s about the things you survived. As it’s written, ‘the world breaks everyone, and afterward some are strong at the broken places.’”

Syd: “Go on.”

David: “It’s about the damage, how it makes us strong not weak. You survived the bullies and the way they made you feel. And you cut yourself with the dullest blade because it felt the worst---I know that life because I lived it too.”

Syd: “I know.”

David: “And then I met you. And it was True Love, like in a fairy tale.”

Syd: “This isn’t a fairy tale.”

David: “It is for me.”

Syd: “Do you know what love is? It’s a hot bath. What happens to things when you leave them in the bath for too long? Huh? They get soft. Fall apart.”

David had read that story collection Young Syd was carrying around. This was the line that struck him: “Junkies and masochists and hookers and those who have squandered everything are the ring of brightest angels around heaven.”

Her face glows. He gets it.

Syd: “It’s a war. Baby, this life, the things we endure. You said you saw the future? And it’s an apocalypse. Who survives that. The lovers? Or the fighters. They sell us this lie that love’s gonna save us. But all it does is make us stupid and weak.”

David: “Thanks.”

Syd: “Look at me. Love? Isn’t gonna save us. It’s what we have to save. Pain makes us strong enough to do it. All our scars, our anger our despair—it’s armor. Baby, God loves the sinners best because our fire burns bright, bright bright. Burn with me.”

David, naturally, nods. What are you even agreeing to?? I swear if you asked him he would just say “Syd. Because..I love her” and she’d be like “OMG AGAIN.” But no one asks him.

They come back to Division 3. David has tears in the corners of his eyes, which spill when he turns on Cary’s science cot to find her. She’s there. They look at each other, and smile gently. Then a strange alarm starts to call.

The credits happen all the way here at the end, written on the walls.

I’m losing it.

David and Syd run along them, crashing into the rest of the team, who are staring at the person the guards have in their clutches: LENNY’S BACK, IN THE  F L E S H.

The episode ends with a cover of ‘Burning Down the House’

Holy damn.

End of Episode Check-In

I have this theory that telepath characters are omnipotent i.e. without any story possibility, unless one of the following criteria is met:

1. lazy 2. not interested 3. self-policing 4. magically hindered

Charles Xavier, notably, is usually all four at once, if you’re doing your job right. Amahl Farouk, when last we left him, is two: not interested and magically hindered. Meaning both of those had to go in order for him to make Lenny a new body. Presuming of course that this is his doing. But if he is, and they have, then we should be very concerned.

***

Wellntruly’s Way Long Legion Recaps Season 2: Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 // Season 1

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LEGION Recap 2x02

The second episode of the second season of Legion was directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, the Iranian-English filmmaker who made A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. I mention this primarily so that I can link you to this fantastic interview with her where she breaks down just how much she enjoyed making Dan Stevens earnestly talk to a cat for take after take. Amirpour is clearly a true bro & advocate for us all and I hope she returns soon.

Season 2, ‘Chapter 10′

Me, watching the pilot a year ago:

“Listen, being a basic defender of the woozily mind-bending is an integral part of my brand, and I’ll not be stopping any time soon. I LOVE THIS SHIT. I love being bewildered and spun around and dazzled and alarmed, love that it makes us party to the psychological carousel of calamity that is having to live inside David’s poor beautiful patched-together-rocket-lamp head.”

Ana Lily Amirpour, nine episodes later:

Actual Psychological Carousel of Calamity

THX!!!

Rising and falling on his horse of gilt and paint, David is trying to talk it out with Shadow!Oliver and the Lenntity. Or, well wait, would she just be Shadow!Lenny? “Are you you AT ALL?” David suddenly wants to know, thank u doll, always asking the Questions. “The cornflakes girl from the hospital, who couldn’t stand the word nipples?” With a weary sigh, Oliver “I try never to have conversations about time” Bird (is he him?) begs him not to get so hung up on philosophical mind/body/identity questions. He also refers to Lenny as “my associate” and for some reason I loved that even more than his pronunciation of “puma.”

So sure, let’s focus on the practical [*laughing*]. Because he loves and trusts Syd, David is going to draw the team away from Div 3 so that….~these two~ can sneak in and look for clues for finding Farouk’s irl body. David being David, he wants to be clear—“ultra clear”—that they are not to harm anyone. Okay? Okay. Break.

Break my heart upon my knee——

IT’S AN ANDREW WYETH EXCLUSIVE SHIPPED STRAIGHT TO YOUR GIRL!!!!!

You know that giggling that’s just an overflowing of feeling wonderful? Me @ this show.

Spectacularly, this abstract golden field with a fortune teller’s booth that we see Oliver visit is a REAL-ASS PLACE, and where David brings a security detail, Syd, Ptonomy, and three of the Vermillion on his Diversion Excursion. It’s dark but I can still tell David is wearing something absurd, potentially a blue buffalo check jacket? I’d screenshot but I’m saving my allotment for this:

Stuunnnning

There’s no one there now of course, just a music box that Syd crouches down and gazes at, having a quiet, unwelcome flashback to watching it in her room as a little girl. The actress they found for young Rachel Keller is some real good face casting, and I sure hope that indicates they took their time with this because we’re gonna get more of her backstory some day.

Meanwhile, Shadow Oliver & Lenny are breaking into Headquarters to this episode’s musical number, christ, y e s. And that’s musical as in Musical!, Aubrey Plaza singing Bing Crosby’s ’Swinging On a Star’ as they dance through the halls, cascading guards into piles of black glittering sand on the beat. Oh noo. I thought we were ultra clear.

In his lab, Cary talks with Kerry as he examines the Orb, which apparently we have? Apparently we have! It’s a nice little thing how Cary chatting with Kerry manifests like every distracted nerd talking to themselves as they work on something. He’s got a weird feeling that he made this, haha, definitely you did, Grandfather’s Orb Paradox. Meanwhile, Oliver and Lenny dance-creep by in the shadows to a combo of Bing Crosby and a horror string-slide.

Oliver peels off on his own to go on a Weighted Pauses tour, pausing first in Melanie’s doorway to stare at her a moment in the dark, oooh boy, then later pausing in front of the chamber where all the Chatterers stand. Through the glass, he suddenly is—that sunglasses wearing man from the Eiffel Tower room?? Wait hold on, is THAT Farouk??!! Well then who the fuck was the roundy bald guy in the Club!!! Oh my gosh I’m just all turned around!

I wish Cary would turn around, incidentally, but instead he’s walking out into the dark hallway stirring black coffee in a cat mug. He runs right into Shadow!Oliver, whoop, who sinisterly booms at him inside his own head. Kerry tears out with a “Let’s dance, asshole,” a threat rather likely to be literal in this show. But lest we start thinking this show is predictable, Shadow!Lenny reaches an arm up through the concrete floor, wraps a hand around Cary’s calf, and yanks him into the apartment below.

Oh lord that is deliciously terrifying.

Oliver grows and looms giant and grinning over Kerry while Lenny prowls up on Cary, who’s trying to defend himself by valiantly holding up his coffee spoon, bless. Lenny just grins and turns into some sort of un-tuning fork with a dark tap of her finger. God every idea in this X-Men fantasia is just like Yes And.

Thankfully, our devil-may-care devils vanish as soon as David, Syd, and Ptonomy show up. Syd asks if David can still feel them anywhere nearby, and he closes his eyes and raises a vague hand near his temple in the mimic of an amplifying array, a physical focus like miming the scissors you’re looking for. It’s the first time I’ve seen him just naturally fall into a telepath gesture, and my Charles-y heart flipped a beat.

Anyway, no they’re gone. But when the Carries try to recombine, something goes awry (the un-tuning oh no!) and Cary ends up inside Kerry. This is very topsy-turvy! They are distressed, gang!

The next day, Melanie dons a fabulous pair of glasses and a soft cardigan (another choice look for Dr. Bird---your neighbor who teaches at the local college and makes hand thrown pottery), and reports to Admiral Fukiyama that Oliver-Farouk spoke to her last night during his pause-loom. He’s looking for a monk of the Mi-Go Order. MONKS. Roundy dude??

Honestly I’ve kinda missed Headmistress Melanie with her kids, this is great.

Anyway the Vermillion are like “IM•POSS•IB•LE” because the Mi-Go Monks were all wiped out by MISER SUNDAY. I’m sorry whomst? David is #same, and Melanie hilariously just shushes him with a “It was before your time.” But evidently there are rumors that some Mi-Go Monks may have survived, and given that they were the ones who hid Farouk’s body, if there is a monk (roundy dude!), he’d know the scoop.

But Fukiyama doesn’t really want to talk about the potential existence of this monk in front of David, whom they announce is 63% likely to have been lying to them, about Everything. David’s like excuse me, 100% of the time I am only lying…23% of the time. Syd on the other hand just gets indignant. Farouk is the one who lies, Farouk is deceiving them, don’t call David the liar when she currently has some questioning feelings about that herself please!!

Interestingly, Melanie warns Fukiyama not to anger their only hope of defeating this villain. The only person in the room mad right now: Syd Barrett. Hm!

David meanwhile, feels guilty, soo guilty. He kneels in dismay by the piles of damp black sand that were the guards, before jogging off in morose anxiety through the corridors, looking kind of like he’s on the 2001: A Space Odyssey jogging loop when seen through the basket surveillance screen that General Fukiyama appears to have!! Oh shit. They flip through different views, including the guard dirt getting literally vacuumed up, haha oh my GOD, and eventually settle over Kerry, lying painfully on a cot in the lab.

Kerry is stressed, dizzy, stiff. She does not like this one bit. She talks with Cary, who’s scared; they try to calm each other. My darlings! David veers in from his Guiltiness Jog, and with startled concern asks if she’s okay—another thing to feel guilty abooouut. Kerry can tell right away that he wants something (guiltguilt), and David admits that he is hoping to get help modifying the tank because he, uh, has a new plan to find Farouk.

- Liar - he calls himself from somewhere in his head. From another corner - Shut up shut up -

When David tried to hang himself, the voices were telling him to stop. Do you ever think about that. Or that he still hears them. Do you still wonder what the stars said.

- Tell. Her. The truth. - “I wouldn’t ask unless…” - You need to talk to Syd. Future Syd - - Is that…did you just give her a nickname? -

That’s my guy, that’s my relatable boy—in a moral muddle and constantly roasting himself in the second person.

Spinning on, David proposes that the way he’ll be able to find Farouk is by, hold on to your caps: looking into the future. In this world that actually sounds pretty believable as an approach, so Cary gets on board. Tentatively.

Kerry: “Cary said it might be too dangerous, and you could explode.” David:

The glucose solution: [sloshes very gently]

But David’s kind of on roller-skates right now vis-a-vis his decision making, and just careens ahead all “well fortune favors the bold I guess!! Imma hop into this mocktail fax me to the future.”

Cary directs Kerry around his lab plugging cords in and switching lightning bolt levers, and inside the Cerebrorb David gets blasted with a laser-y fuchsia screensaver and warblingly warped through a bunch of SnapChat filters. Finally he flips his eyes open, whole and dry, and HO. LY SHIT. His movements are in strange skippy rushes you can hear like rustling tape, just like the people in that purple space in—

IN TWIN PEAKS THE FUCKING RETURN!!!!

David also finds a round window sunk in the floor with jellyfish cruising by, so he’s also in Mason Verger’s house apparently. God.

Then Future Syd appears in one of the purple frames, still rocking the apocalypse chic updo. She is Very Bewildered! It shouldn’t be possible for her to see David, not again. David just goes haha, “What am I dead in the future?” and Syd gives him a look. “Wait am I dead?” Oh hun, you dear idiot.

Future Syd doesn’t get into details, appears to have developed some of Oliver’s disdain for discussing things that don’t really matter (the nature of reality, how you die, etc), and just explains to David that the reason why she wants him to help Farouk, keep him alive and powerful, is because in her timeline David killed him, and later they could have really used his help against whatever New Threat swept the world. She only describes it as beginning “like any other idea—as an egg.” [*Jon Hamm-inflected shiver*] David protests that the Shadow King has killed people and he’s complicit, but Syd’s just blandly like you studied the Trolley Problem in school yeah? While a few will die because of Farouk, without him everyone dies.

This Syd is different than the Syd David knows, but he loves her, he loves her always. He asks if she would want to see him again. She’s touched, tells him he’s still as he was: sweet. That’s what Amy called him too. I love that.

The purple light grows, and Future Syd steps back into it. David awakes back in his glucose pod. Lol, our sweet boy.

Chapter 4! UMWELT, nice, Germanic. I did not know chapters could cross episodes! Nifty. And is— yeesss, Jon Hamm is back. Btw, in my excitement last episode over discovering that Professor Loudermilk is a Lemony Snickett character doing science with finely wrought mechanical instruments and strawberry extract, I seem to have neglected the other way in which Legion is like A Series of Unfortunate Events: casting the other Patrick Warburton as our loyal narrator. Terrific.

In this segment, Jon Hamm talks to us about how animals perceive reality. Most animals understand the world physically, through their bodies, and that is their reality and it’s fine—no trouble there. Humans on the other hand, perceive the world through our minds. We have to agree with each other, philosophically and practically, on what reality is. Incidentally, he reminds us, humans are the only animals who ever go mad.

Hopping up some big plaza steps at Division 3, David runs into Clark, who asks him to sit with him for a spell in the aquatic automat. David’s like oh, yeah, I was actually on my way to the hot tub that lets me see the future, and Clark, revealing that ol Basket Head is not the only one with surveilling capabilities, asks wasn’t he just there?

“Over my head, the science,” Clark hand waves, “but I gotta ask: did it work?”

“What?” David asks, confused.

“That line you gave.”

Ohhhhh SNAP. Hahaha Claarrrk.

Beyond that though this scene is really just a repeat of Clark and David’s trustworthiness conversation last episode, which only serves to highlight the unfortunate corner they’ve written themselves into here. Because the fact is, there are simply way more reasons for David Haller, a confirmed sweetheart & trusting soul who even tried to cooperate with the people holding him hostage in a pool, to just tell his friends and teammates the truth about what happened to him and ask for help, than there are for him to not. In fact there is only one reason for him not to, and that is top-down plotting (tsk tsk). The longer this forced isolated secrecy goes on the more artificial it’s going to taste, so consider your timer already started, Hawley et al. You gotta get this resolved my guys! It’s untenable in the longterm! Honestly it’s untenable now.

But right now it looks like David’s gonna first try taking matters into his own hands. Or, into his own mind. He walks into an open room (past a black oily Delusion trail on the floor, aahhhhh) and pops up crosslegged on a couch to meditate up a mediation.

Thank u for my LIFE honestly.

The only thing for miles is the fortune teller booth, so David takes a tentative seat, and dings the brass bell.

SUNGLASSES APPEARS. They’re shaped like honeycomb.

“Why so sad, my dear?” is literally the first thing he says to him, oh my god. Okay well this guy is definitely Farouk. The Shadow King has always been so….This Way with David. All of his lines in this scene are just a different vocab filter on the same smiley preying come ons and needling that David would get when Farouk was running through Lenny. Appreciate the consistency! Also, as always: yikes!

David is momentarily confused by all this, because he genuinely did not know what Amahl Farouk looked like, wow that was not a lie at all. Well surprise! This is the true face of your monster, kid. No longer Lenny with her foot in your crotch, but still on that yarn about how the two of you could fight God if you want to, dontcha waaaaanta. Farouk’s white teeth flash as he idly switches from English to French to Farsi and back, which is wildly fun and good, especially as I like to imagine David comprehending him by also seeing subtitles across his chest, like a diegetic chyron.

David in fact looks stricken, to the point that he causes Farouk to breath “Look at you, such a sad face. Why you got such a sad face?” Because he feels used, Farouk reads. And angry. But more at Farouk, or himself? Ugh, shut up abuser.

David stares at the man who has been tormenting him all his life, and suddenly wants nothing more than to fight him. They materialize in…..A WRASSLIN’ RING.

Farouk: *thrilled*

He calls it “Le sport” and “Very physical” and “Homoerotic” and David is just like [screams internally], only that’s where they are, so it’s “Shut uupp!” Reminded that they’re telepaths and the sky’s the limit, and not even then, they escalate their showdown to sword fighting then tanks then dust storms, until finally Farouk literally snaps David out of it.

But David has gotten the point: that he’s arguing for no more violence with….violence. Only You Can Break The Cycle Of Toxic Masculinity™

So David gets more reasonable about it, remembers what he has to bargain with. He vows that he won’t help him find his body at all, unless Farouk promises not to kill anyone else. Annoyed, the Shadow King agrees.

David feels he has regained his footing. Stands up and walks a few paces away about it. “Alright,” he says, marshaling some of his brio, “I’ll find your monk. If he’s even at Division 3. Wait for my signal.” Then he blips out with a little mwwip sound and I laugh every time. Mwwip Drop.

Farouk gets up and strolls away from the fortune teller booth, turning back to put his thumb to the screen and wipe it out.

I am !!!!!! Visuals.

And behind him, sitting up out of the grass, LENNY. Real deal Lenny, we know now!! Farouk must have nabbed her after she died, brought her into astral space to be his conduit to David. But she’s thinking now maybe she could…bounce? “Now that you’re uh, out of the closet, you and the kid, talking again, face to face,” which is a line I just feel we should quote in full.

Also: “And I’m not complaining, I’m not, it’s been a, shit blast, really.” Aubrey Plaza you’re a marvel.

But Farouk does not respond, just continues to smile gently in the opposite direction, backed by the sun, as Lenny grows to realize he has no interest in letting her go. Her hopes rise again when he unzips the Wyeth field into a blank white room and asks what she would do with a new life in a new body, but with each of his low “And then what?”s she realizes she would just die again, and die in a way that is more…permanent. Fade to black. Metaphorically and also right now in the show.

Back in the lab, Kerry is feeling even worse. Lights and sounds flare in her ears. She begs Cary to think of something, some way for him to get out. Since we only hear her side of the conversation, there’s one of those great things where she responds very negatively to an idea, and has to get cajoled into it, and I’m just bouncing gently over here like what’s it gonna be!! And it’s singing together, this little old fashioned tra-lala-la song that they used to watch on TV when they were both little. Cary sings along, until they come into some sort of figurative and literal harmony (re-tuned!!) and Cary can rise back into the open air.

They still don’t know or understand what Farouk might have done to them to keep them from conjoining properly, but Cary’s going to try to fix it.

“I don’t wanna be out here the whole time,” Kerry pleads. “Living life, the boring stuff, that was not our choice.”

“We never had a choice,” Cary reminds her, and oh wow. This whole moment has this very heartfelt Oh Wow quality.

And oh wow, Rogue locks!

Over in Melanie’s rooms, an odd weighty little conversation is unfolding between her and David. Melanie Bird seems to have taken on the role of Cautionary Tale, instating herself in her living room and waylaying the kids as they wend by, sitting them down and telling them a piece of wisdom she’s learning from living her life the wrong way. To David, she talks about how she just followed along with Oliver’s dream, not developing one of her own, and now she’s grown old and it’s too late for her to live her own life. She got caught up in all the mutant drama, it seems, and it kept her from truly living. David stares at himself in the mirror, hearing Farouk telling him he could be bigger than Jesus, but is caught by the next thing Melanie tells him: that her advice to him is to get the hell out of here. “Take Syd, and go find a nice quiet hilltop somewhere.”

Startled, David starts to protest that they can’t just leave everything that’s happening here, but Melanie, amazingly, just assures him that the world will be fine—“It always is.” This would be a profoundly anti superhero story direction, and as we are in a superhero story there is no way we will be taking it, but it’s cool getting to hear it? Melanie has really gone meta-genre to her own show hasn’t she, a lot of COMMENTS coming from her! I don’t hate it.

David scampers off to go find Syd, finally tracking her up to the roof.

Where she is currently crouched on a ventilation shaft over a dead bird.

Pardon?

“Over here,” her voice calls, and David spins around, flocked by all those big green hands pointing in a dozen different directions, that’s fucking hilarious, did you guys put those there just for this visual joke pay-off down the line? My heroes.

David at last spies her cat.

“Neat huh,” Syd preens, and rolling with it, David just agrees with this baffled but supportive “Yeah, sure. Okay!” and starts carefully petting her little cat head.

The Only Good Mutant Boyfriend

Feline Syd asks what’s up, and David, who’s been having a time and a half, just starts SPILLING ALL HIS FEELINGS. I love how clear it is that he has picked up habits from therapy—last season’s reflexive “I am pretty, I am loved” affirmation, and here with his “It’s just, I’m questioning myself?”

And at last, he drops all his shambling pretense and tells her what really happened in the Orb, and how VERY lost in the woods he has been since he landed between his loyalties to two versions of the woman he loves.

“I mean, technically, telling you your own secret, probably is fine, I think—“

hONEY, hahahahah

Now, I definitely do not remember Future Syd making David promise not to tell anyone about her and her message, as he relates here, and suspect they actually didn’t want me to get that at first, in order to keep us suspicious of David too or whatever. But once they were done trying to have their cake and eat it too, this IS in fact a good explanation for why our rambling, transparent David wouldn’t have just blurted this all out to Syd immediately. And like, this whole sequence now is HILARIOUSLY David, and I’ll take it, it’s fine, thank you for solving your prob within half an hour of me telling you to, we’re good now Legion.

Syd, however, is not good. She is perplexed. She ponders. The music box---“I didn’t like that. Seeing it again. He did that to me,” she explains. But David says that it’s not that Future Her said she liked Farouk, she just said to help him.

Syd thinks some more. Thinks, yeah alright. She trusts herself, so.

Well looks like it’s time for our babes to go find themselves a MONK! Pro Tip he’s with the Chatterers.

Alright, Check In. As we stand at the end of the second episode, this threat of the Delusion that is hanging over the season…could it be so simple as: that wasn’t Future Syd? David’s just seeing a trick of Farouk’s?

Wait hold on hold on hold on. Ha hah no, oh I know what it could BE. The false idea that was allowed to grow unchecked by reality, because his reality is reeeaally not going to check this (because it was never mutually exclusive), what if what if the Delusion is: everyone’s collective belief that David Haller isn’t schizophrenic. 

David: “Do you know the most dangerous thing about schizophrenia?” Syd: “You’re not—” David: “The most dangerous thing, is believing…you don’t have it.”

Season 1, ‘Chapter 8′

What if that. 

***

Wellntruly’s Way Long Legion Recaps Season 2: Chapter 9 // Season 1

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[wellntruly]

LEGION Recap 2x03

Of the zillion possible narrative forms Legion could have run through their soft serve swirl machine and presented to me in this episode, the simple, old school genre quest structure of “wake up in a contagion-abandoned complex, meet up with The Only Other Living Boy In New York, and one by one we’ll rescue each member of the team from a new surreal living metaphor of their mind’s own making” sure was an inspired choice by the people just constantly serving up things I ENJOY.

Or, as I nearly cartwheel over here to post every damn time I finish an episode:

“I love Legion on FX”

Season 2, ‘Chapter 11’

Narrator Jon Hamm opens this episode by introducing us to the placebo’s negative twin, the nocebo. I love the word nocebo. It has the same linguistic feel as French having sympathique for nice & agreeable and antipathique for not that. It’s the nope-manteau. They feel so handmade, like, what…human did this? Adorable.

Anyway, speaking of things humans do, less adorably, sometimes we get stressed the fuck out and manifest it as physical symptoms. And we’re so close and pack-oriented that occasionally, it’s catching. Psychologists call it a conversion disorder, and there really was a high school cheerleading troupe swept by a convulsing tic like the girls we see illustrating it here. They were from a town called Le Roy, which sounds like how an American would pronunciation Le Roi, French for The King. I’d chalk that up to chance, but later Lenny is going to call Farouk El Rey, the Spanish rendition, so: Hawley that reference work is absurd.

“Part Contagion: Five”

In the first of several wordless stretches in this, a very me episode, we see the fall of the Shadow King. Literally face-first into a plate of paella maybe, his dark sunglasses reflecting the chalkboard comic book psychic showdown David had drawn in Chapter 7. Farouk’s body is encased in a smooth, white coffin, a tapered oblong like an egg. [*lays finger aside nose, points*] I see ya.

Then this hat-wearing woman drives him off in a retro hearse to a monastery in the California hills, in probably my platonic ideal of the Weird Americana: Religious Gothic vibe.

The monks lower Farouk’s body deep beneath the red floor tiles — an advantageous position from which he can then Tell Tale Heart them unto madness, with an intermittent booming echoing from his unquiet crypt.

Back to Division 3! In the here and now, for now. Poor Ptonomy is just trying to catch a few winks, but there will be no rest for him, or for me ever again, after the Delusion metaphor literally crawls into his ear while he sleeps. Believe me I would really like to keep this metaphor figurative, but when he awakes barefoot in a corridor, disoriented, he rubs dark goo from beneath his ear. What the galloping *GRIMACE*

Elsewhile, Cary tells Kerry It’s Time, yes no he does insist. She flounces off, in as much as an X-chromosome ass-kicker can be said to flounce. Mostly it’s in her curtain of hair.

Oh my god it’s time to introduce Kerry to food. Cary has picked shaomai, his favorite kind of crabmeat dumpling, pls <3. They’ve decided it’s important for Kerry to be biologically autonomous from him, which will need to include eating, and aaalll that goes with it. She hates it. Not this cream soda though, that can stay. “More!” she demands in approval, then high fives Thor in the astral plane.

Later, Syd is doing some feline recon, a cat scan, if you will, trying to find this monk. She chats with David in her head, wanting to know how she compares to her future self, a conversation David is sure can lead to nothing but a variety of bad ends. More pressing things swiftly occur though, in the form of a smeared bloody handprint having appeared on the window into the room of Chatterers. On the inside.

As Clark scopes it out in his Alien cosplay, David experiences a classic™ telepath moment of a sharp, destabilizing pulse of images announced by a wincing feedback whine. God I love telepaths, 2 powerful 2 handle but also so superbly fragile. “Are you okay?” Syd asks him, with that joshing tone she uses to scale down David Haller into one little weirdo who is hers to protect. Love it. Anyway, unclear, as David’s ears are still ringing with, ah, Future Syd’s scream as she sinks into a void, leaving behind a glowing H.

Oh, and Clark finds a disconnected IV bag and an open grate. The Vermillion: SHUT EVERYTHING DOWN.

Syd and David confer as they scamper off through the red-lit halls together. (Theory: that given how often this happens, Fukyama takes every excuse to throw up the crisis lighting he can because he’s just a ho for that #aEsThEtIc.) Syd thinks it’d be best to find the monk and talk with him before handing him to Farouk, which is the kind of good thinking we could always use around here. David agrees that she keep on that beat, while he finds Farouk to talk to him for a moment, because he needs answers or something. Idk David you kinda just spoke with him, but sure take it off. (Theory: that David has developed a bit of a Thing for getting naked in strawberry juice.)

The way this show uses music is inspirational aspirational motivational.

So Lenny, trapped once more in this gorgeous mod SoCal sunglobe where nothing changes no matter how many EXIT signs she chalks on the flagstones like prayers, is straight losing it. Hoping that David, her old buddy old pal, might be able to get her out of here, she tries to get back in his good graces by patting him a lot and complimenting him and all his friends on looking good. It’s amazing.

There’s a particular kind of hell I love, where it’s been designed as idyllic but becomes a horrifying, maddening torment through its nightmarish stasis, its unchanging unendurable unendingness. “I pulled out all my hair, before,” Lenny tells him. “Yesterday. But it all came back.”

Honestly though TEAM UP about it. I say this is a team-up devotée you know this, but also: yes. Please yes. Who’s with me clap your hand and say Yeee.

But no matter how great Aubrey Plaza is in this scene—and she serves up a whole new kind of great here, this half-cracked pathos—a team up is not (yet) forthcoming. Instead, Farouk appears, at the patio bar. These telepaths and their cocktails I just…..what is it.

What follows is an exceedingly interesting conversation, where Farouk presents an array of counterpoints to David’s preconceived notions about evil and enemies, clinking them down like ice cubes in his glass. At one point he says “You’re so young. You think justice is a glass shard. You feel it with your hurt, your hate.” Fucking wow.

Farouk is a refugee, he points out, driven from his land by David’s father—“A white man. This is, you think, important?”—who had swooped in and decided that Farouk should not be ruling his country. At first I found this proposal that Charles Xavier just took it upon himself to carry out a coup in a foreign government to be pretty wild, but then I remembered that there’s really no limit to the extent to which that guy would decide he knows best for other people, so I wouldn’t actually put this past him.

In that case then, Farouk’s wildest assertion is that he can’t possibly be a villain because the word comes from the French for villager, and like, does he look poor?

Naawwww

But ringing most false, contextually, and so strikingly, he’s claiming not to be such a bad guy while we can see that the person he’s keeping captive has hanged herself from the tree over the pretty teal pool. But she can’t die.

Anyway, for those keeping track at home, the question David wanted answered was what Farouk plans on doing once he gets his body back. Just mind my own chill, someone literally called THE SHADOW KING assures him.

Oh, and before David goes, Farouk wants to ask if it’s weird for him at all that he’s working so hard to kill Future Syd? Because if he alters the course of history, her timeline is wiped out, and so is she. This argument is dumb because it’s not like we’re all constantly mourning the loss of the myriad counterparts to our loved ones in the forever fracturing multi-verse, but David is dumb, so it lands right in his sentimental idiot heart.

Oh and also the monk is the one spreading the catatonic contagion. Ok TTYL!

David sloshes back up in the lab. There’s no one there. “Hello??” he starts calling in the red blinking dim.

Ah hell yeah let’s 28 Days Later the shit out of this shit, I LOVE THAT.

Also, thought David was wearing something pretty average for once, but it turns out those are TOS Starfleet capris. Incredible.

Our fashion plate finds a flashlight and sets off making his own little psychedelic light show through the empty honeycombed halls (wordless sequence no. 2, spooky-groovy). Eventually he comes across several dead Div 3 sorts, stools and barrels tossed around them, and one still standing, all a-chatter. What happened here??

Wait, cow.

She has that black sand sprinkled across her back from when Oliver & Lenny were vanishing people, and Russo is playing his spare crystalline melody. These are just two artistic choices I really appreciate, on top of Cow Where There Shouldn’t Be Cow.

David heads off to the automat, which I am just noticing has a big ol ship’s wheel in the middle of it, fabulous. Maybe a waffle boat would steer you in the right direction.

But instead: porcelain jostling. Is someone—oh god it’s Cary, oh thank GOD, perfect apocalypse companion. Cary makes everything 2x better, and that’s SCIENCE. For instance, he has accidentally sprayed David in the face with an emerald glass bottle of household cleaner. David: “Ahh! Shit what is that, it’s so—lemony!” Is it.  I s  i t.  #Doctor Loudermilk is an ASOUE character

Conferring under the DNA-strand filament lights (so nice), Cary recounts that there was scary shouting and lights and Kerry ran off to get on in that, but otherwise he has no idea what happened. David checks to see if he can find anyone with his ~powers~, and this is how they chose to visualize that:

I’m in fucking hysterics.

“Syd? Melanie?” he calls. And with ah-well resignation: “Clark?” Hun I need to breathe.

Anyway there’s no one, David and Cary are now a tiny band of survivors in a mystery dystopia, and frankly I’m living. Cary warns that the monk has bewitched all the child guards with a strange hummed tune—what an unbelievably satisfying textbook Pied Piper situation I am one thousand years here for it. David warns about the cow. Cary: “Cow?”

Our sweet beta-male rescue squad scampers off to Syd’s room, where they find a flat-out chattering Ptonomy and an opportunity to let Syd’s sleepover beds fulfill their calling:

Our soft boys.

Nothing for it they guess: time to drop in and see if they can get Ptonomy out of The Maze. Because he doesn’t require touch for his telepath but it is nice, David takes Cary’s hand, and places his other one over Ptonomy’s forehead.

Oh yes.

Oh YAS.

Ptonomy is wearing a rose patterned suit, cutting roses in a rose labyrinth made of roses. He pleasantly greets David with a “Hullo!” and then goes right back to what he’s doing, in a small closed loop. This isn’t where everyone is lost, Cary figures out, it’s Ptonomy’s maze, a strangely blissful reprieve for the man who remembers everything: a world where he can remember nothing, and can simply smell the roses. He admits it’s kind of beautiful.

“What if it was Kerry?” David asks.

“—You’re right wake him up.”

Winging it, David lights up his fingertip and places it to Ptonomy’s forehead.

YeeEEEEESSSSsss. Inception me, slo mo blow up this rose garden. *FWOOM* *PETALS* God! Good.

Ptonomy gasps awake on Syd’s linoleum floor. When he realizes he can’t remember what happened, he laughs, beautifully. When David and Cary tell him, he asks if he needs his gun. Theerre he is, our stylish muscle. But no, you don’t, the only people armed are the charmed kids and as Cary points out, “They’re…kids. So.”

The three of them rush off, only needing to change direction once due to there being a holstein on the landing. Ptonomy: “Cow.” Cary starts to ask a question but David’s just like WHO HAS THE TIME, and wheels off to find Syd.

In his head, another wincing shriek, and a U. H-U. If she spells out “hun” I’m gonna lose it.

Something that is totally endearing to me about The Boys Show, as this has become, is how there is zero macho posturing among them. There’s an honest openness to how they’re navigating this and their emotional reactions to it, which is so pleasant on a group of dudes. Like here, when they go running past maze-locked Melanie, then troop back in unison going “Oh nooo!” Ptonomy and David intently, falteringly pick her up sideways like a statue, and Cary just directs them into his lab like he’s landing a plane, bless.

Door locked and secured, they all grab ahold of each other and drop into Melanie’s mind. It’s nothing but empty looming darkness.

“Is this—” Ptonomy pauses, “…was mine like this?”

“No you were in a garden,” Cary explains.

David, with sincerity: “In a sharp suit.” Stop. My soft boys.

NONE SO SOFT THOUGH, is Melanie’s maze. Big white letters appear on the wall like an old computer game meets Plato’s allegorical cave. In fact: “You are in a cave,” the letters type out.

David is frustrated because he doesn’t have tiiiime for this, but immediately they get sucked into playing anyway, David typing their collective responses as Ptonomy and Cary advise him from each shoulder. Those choose-your-own-adventure things are addicting, what can you do.

But then things take a House of Leaves turn.

And they find a Minotaur, or it finds them. That beast-headed figure from Melanie’s drug dream, creaking up on its doggie wheelchair—thank u Cary for that definition. Anyway yes speed walk awaayy, quickly quickly.

It seems Melanie’s core desire is to control the story, and yet to stay removed from it all. David tries to just break it all open with his powers, but that's not how this works. Finally, he realizes the way forward is through engaging and supporting. (Perhaps this is her core desire: to teach.) David reaches down to the typewriter, and begins to tell Melanie’s story. He’d listened to her. He processed what she had to say. He knows how she feels she never had a dream, but what if she did all along? “And that dream was…to be…care free.”

Cary assures him that that was the nicest mansplaining moment you could ask for but they might need to— and then Melanie appears. It worked; she’s emosh. David awkwardly asks if he should hug her and she just goes “Please don’t.” He beams them on out of there instead.

*Note: joke hat tip to @memory-for-trifles for referring to David “mansplaining her dreams to her” and killing me dead.

They all return to the lab, hey and the cow is now there too, placidly standing in another light sprinkling of black crystals. Okay there’s STILL NO TIME, David is sure Syd’s in trouble, and Future Her just sent him an R (“hurt” is an option here, that’s no good). Now that there’s four of them, David proposes they split up to cover more ground—he’ll stick with Cary, and Melanie will go with Pol (love it when they call him Pol).

Interestingly, when Ptonomy asks what they should do if they run into the monk, David tells them they should be decently immune now because he apparently added some sort of mental immune booster when he pulled them out of their mazes, but no that’s not the real interesting thing the real interesting thing is that he says they should just ask him what he wants. I like this because it shows he’s genre savvy—your adversary in the comics story will always want something.

Melanie: “What about the cow?” David: “Just leave it here!” Cary: “I don’t think I want a cow in my lab!” David: “Guys I don’t care! I gotta find Syd!”

Do you ever get the feeling that David “constantly at sea” Haller just picks one focus at a time and holds on to it like a fucking lifeline. The very cafeteria has currents.

Of course, Cary and David get all of a few yards down a red hall before David is wracked by another flash—a second R, oh it’s HURRY for sure—and as Cary plunges on ahead, David gets knocked to the wall by a stun gun and dragged off by the helmeted kids. They are small and yet militarily organized and therefore feel like some sort of Star Wars alien creatures.

They take him here:

I did think this 6 was going to slowly resolve itself upright and become CHAPTER 6, but no dice.

Instead, the monk kneels down beside David’s head in the Room of Chatterers, and takes him inside his own mind. Oh yeeaahh, monastery time!! And wordless sequence no. 3, feat. Monk David in the sandals of our guy, seeing what he saw during that fateful time.

The booming is driving them all distracted, demented. It’s ceaseless, the egg-shaped coffin smoothing itself over after each pummeling smash from the inside. The monks can’t sleep, can’t pray, can’t study their holy books. They are all slipping into madness.

Or death. An alternative.

At some point, the rigid teeth-chattering starts. Staring-eyed, the monk wanders through the littered monastery, falling into ruin now. His feet lead him outside, to discover a vast desert stretching out before him. Has the valley they were in transformed into this? Has the monastery moved? I don’t know.

The monk leaves this place.

So…. When Farouk said the monk was spreading the infection, it was the monk in fact spreading something HE started. Farouk what the fuck! He’s telling the truth but he’s lying, is he a Loki type, is that what’s happening.

Back in Division 3, Cary is still wandering the corridors whisper-calling for David, this dear. And as was always going to happen, he finds Kerry, stock still, jaw shuddering. Distraught, Cary tries to combine with her, affording Bill Irwin the chance to do a whole lot of fantastic physical work. At last he just tells her he’s sorry, rests his forehead against hers, and gently fades away. Interesting!

Meanwhile, Melanie and Ptonomy have run to Fukyama’s office. And shit....

...looks weird.

Wait does the basket go red when the lights go red?? Wow an idea! Anyway excellent art-sprawling by the Vermillion.

And to make matters WEIRDER, the monk is hovering near the ceiling with long golden cords plugged into his temples. Oh the fuck.

Apparently he’s hacked into the Vermillion mainframe this way, and can speak through some of them. Meanwhile, Fukyama glitchingly rallies enough to speak through some others. The convo goes as such: The monks were not told they were taking in the body of a monster, and they want it dead. It will not burn or drown, so they need the weapon that they were told Division 3 would have if they needed it. Division 3, however, only planned to build this weapon, and never actually built it. There were just too many other red-light days.

Melanie has an idea though. She’s talked about a weapon before, and when she did she meant David Haller. He can do it, she assures them, he can destroy the Shadow King.

David walks in then like u rang. The monk does not want to take his call though, because he has somehow glommed that David has been negotiating with Farouk. But before he can fully reveal this information, David abruptly whisks them both away to the roof. Smooth.

Anyway the monk turns out to have an absurdly deep Andre the Giant voice oh my GOD what. I can’t like, replicate it here, but I can at least quote this dialogue:

Monk, impressed: “Teleportation!” David: “Just, just quiet, for a second, let me think. And stop making people sick!” Monk: “People don’t matter, only the Body matters.” David: “Well they matter to me! They’re my people!” HUN.

Rather on cue, Future Syd once again whistles into his mind like a mortar shell, with her Y.

WHAT TO DO THO.

“Look,” David announces, grabbing the monk by his persimmon scarf, “I’m having a reeally hard time finding landmarks here.” Haaahahahaahah, truer statements from a character have never etc.

The monk seems to think it’s pretty simple though: the Shadow King is a mass threat so destroy him, who cares about your lonely time-girlfriend Marius. David is just fixated, like “but Future Syd said something bad was going to happen, but I’m not gonna let something bad happen, so—” and the monk is all “U R 2 Late 4 That” and swan dives off the parapet.

Wow and here you thought you still had time to run out of. Maybe timelines are like decimals, and whenever you multiply by them you end up with less.

But hey there’s Syd! Her teeth are chattering, maaaayybe for multiple reasons:

Is Syd’s entrapping fantasy being lost in a polar storm because holy shit my girl. Holy shit. mY GIRL!

When’s next week?

Apparently I’m going to start end-of-episode Check Ins because I have another one: You’re allowed to write it so that Something Happens and all the Chatterers are freed from their mazes in one swoop. But you are also allowed to write it so that there’s a montage of David spending entire days, a week at least probably, with a rucksack and a Cary contraption going through a series of nonsense metaphor mindscapes to get each person out. There would be an extra beat played for Clark’s. Probably Clark going “—Never speak of this to anyone.”

“Okay.”

“Okay David.”

***

Wellntruly’s Way Long Legion Recaps Season 2: Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 // Season 1

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[wellntruly]

LEGION Recap: 2x01

Welcome back. Welcome to the

[continued shaking laughter]

IT’S. It’s. I don t know! Joy? Nonsense? #Looks? That, that they were establishing another Important Moment to keep returning to, a suspended memoragory, as this show does, and this one is set at a nightclub and they just put a little properly capitalized “Club” glowing over the door in finely crafted neon irreverence, and it kills me.

I never took FX’s streaming page for Legion off my bookmarks bar. This whole time, nearly a year. I kept it.

This shit is why.

Season 2, ‘Chapter 9’

Truly setting the bar for all second season cold opens, Legion’s is Aubrey Plaza and Jemaine Clement lounging on sunflower yellow pool floaties in mod swimwear.

*Set as desktop background*

Here’s where we are:

......well that was ambitious even they don’t know where they are.

They are: basking in a pool. Somewhere. A suit jacket’ed arm appears out of the water offering a dripping martini glass to Oliver, end me with this surreal magazine spread, and the Lenntity gradually breaks into slow bronzed laughter at the realization that they’re trapped. You get the idea this is not the first time they’ve remembered. “Ho ho ho,” Oliver chuckles along mutedly, down inside the sunglassed eye of a man sipping from a demitasse in a room overlooking the Eiffel Tower, and back out through his own eye, now in a dark, stylish bar. “Groovy.”

Legion, having lost Oliver Bird for the moment in the wild transatlantic neuralways, thought it would be hilarious and good to fill their storybook narrator role by adding a vaguely midcentury, Jon-Hamm-sounding-like radio voice. And because this is the show that puts “Club” over the door in carmine cursive, they actually got Jon Hamm. They went and got Jon Hamm. Emmy winning Rod Serling comedian Jon Hamm. Oh my jam extremely. My jambon!

Jon Hamm paints us a fable of danger and madness as we gaze into a black screen. He describes a vast maze in the desert, all sand and rock, his deep voice gradually accompanied by the discomfiting clacking of teeth. It is, in short, a solid educational segment from Welcome To Night Vale.

Here’s some more Stuff You Should Know (just pretend I’m Jon Hamm): Sometime in the interim, Summerland and Division 3 have folded into one operation. The reorg means Cary Loudermilk is now bringing his endearingly attentive brand of X-science to the starkly color-lit Brutalist interiors Div 3 seems to favor. Which is where he’s at when he receives David Haller in some pneumatic tube after getting scooped up by Ptonomy and Clark, who found him on an empty dance floor with about two days worth of stubble and a thousand yard stare, guttering out a cryptic line about The Maze before collapsing next to a room containing a whole cadre of tooth-chattering catatonic club-goers, because apparently Jon don’t josh.

Meanwhile, Syd Barrett sits in room vacantly licking her hand and cleaning at her face. Ohh she’s swapped with the pretty siamese in her arms, jesus that took me a moment.

[ PA System: “Reminder: Beware of ideas that are not your own.” ]

Kerry pops in, expresses her weirds with what’s going on here (hilarious Kerry, you literally live in a dude), and duly informs Sydney that they’ve collected her boy. The cat leaps out of her arms. She’s back. He’s back.

I’m gonna flip a nut @ this show’s style choices

Related, Division 3 Headquarters are big on honeycomb, and also big on big green Star Trek hands pointing around all over the place, what the fantastic fuck!

Ringed by yet more honeycomb-shaped things, David is reclined on a chair in a dark lab while Cary cranes over him and repeatedly calls his name. That is nicely familiar. Good to have this to ground us, while Clark is quietly advocating for David’s life to a silent figure wearing a large basket over their head flanked by two feminine-voiced androids with bowl cuts and thick handsome mustaches. Lordt. Kerry faces down the goons who don’t like how reckless Cary is being with his physical safety around a powerful mutant of unknown infection status, and finally David rewards all his friends’ faith by snuffing awake and asking for waffles.

[collapses]

A thought: that the way this show succeeds with its random whimsy is in how it makes it a surreal reality, carried out with detail and dedication by a bunch of artistic goobers. Like you can’t fault them using this glib waffles line to lead in to their title card, when said title card has the aspect ratio so narrowed in that it’s just a blue stripe with ‘LEGION’ blazoned down the middle, and over it runs a perfect miniature wooden motorboat carrying a honeycomb plate of fucking waffles.

Because in Division 3 there’s an aquatic automat diner where waffle boats just run through your table, good god we’re going.

So while David eats his waffles, let’s take a breather and let Ptonomy lay out the Div 3 org chart. These explanatory sequences are still very Wes Anderson in composition and chyron, and I love that. And it’s all pretty much what you’d surmise, the one new & wonderful piece of information being that it was Melanie and Sydney who convinced Division 3 that mutants aren’t an inherent threat, they’re just people trying to live their lives, and that they evidently achieved this through sitting down at a table and relentlessly talking at them until everyone else gave up---the Alexander Hamilton Approach.

But as Ptonomy orients him, it is becoming unavoidably apparent that while for David, still wearing the shirt he was in when he was zapped up by that orb, only about a day has passed since same, considerably more time has passed for Ptonomy and the others.

[ PA System: “Any shift in reality may signal an attack. If you feel something, say something.” ]

Let me just say, if this season is going to address the utterly unreconcilable character timelines in this world that I spent so much of last season happily cataloging, that will have been TIME well spent. PLS.

Ptonomy, catching wise to this most recent and dramatic disparity, asks David what he remembers since the Shadow King ran off in Oliver. Save flashes of panicking in that orb that he kinda squints past, everything David can recall just sounds like the half-remembered story of a night with Jean-Ralphio: “Trees. Being on a roof downtown. Dancing?”

I’m so ready for Ptonomy to be all “David, it’s been F I VE  YE EAARS” or whatever, but he catches sight of Syd through the glass and decides that no matter how long it’s been, it’s high time for these two to reunite. He bids his leave.

[ PA System: “New symptom alert: Unexplained malaise.” ]

Okay real quick before Syd gets here: there’s this great new thing we’re getting this season where we hear David’s scattered conversational chats with himself, woo-yah. Here he frets that Ptonomy knows, and tries to tell himself to calm down. Now for my money, given who David has historically been pretty terrible at lying to—most everyone—and who he excels at lying to—himself—I bet that he genuinely doesn’t know how long he’s been gone for, but does have a pretty good impression that whatever he got up to during that time is going to be a problem of some stripe, maybe several stripes. That really looked like Oliver and the Lenntity in his remembered flash of the Club… But I suspect he doesn’t quite know what went down, is just get these troubling glimpses, and until he’s figured out what actually happened, his instinct is to keep these glimpses from the people he cares about. That secretive fatal flaw of telepaths, who are usually not afforded such a luxury: What They Don’t Know Can’t Hurt Them.

But anyway, right now: Syd! Syd is supremely thrown by having David back. It’s been a year, which is the length I actually suspected, a TV time-skip standard. And a year is a long time. That’s a loonng time in which to have a loott of thoughts, particularly if you’re Sydney Barrett, an exceedingly contemplative character whose interiority is always given a lot of space, which I fucking appreciate. So this moment is weird for her. It’s been a weird time. She tells David about the bargaining games she’d play with herself, pretending that if she could hold her breath until the kettle whistled, that meant he was alive. (It’s really beautiful, they make this stylized sequence like she’s just been holding her breath for a whole year—Metaphorical.)

“Syd,” David breathes, pained.

“What?” she responds simply. It’s her truth. She’s not gonna hide it to make it easier on him.

But when David asks pretty please if he can kiss her, this is her truth too: “You’d better.”

~ T e l e p a t h i c ~ S e x i n ~ S e q u e n c e ~ Y e s ~

After the break, Syd explains that they’ve been looking for Shadow!Oliver, who is looking for something else. And there’s a breadcrumb trail of sorts: wherever he goes, he leaves behind people still as statues, save their chattering teeth. Best they can figure, it’s some sort of psychological infection. They don’t know.

[ PA System: “Announcement 2. Know your symptoms: Confusion. Irritability. Obsessive thoughts. Repetitive sounds. Repetitive sounds. Hopelessness. Despair.” ]

Walking through the halls, Syd passes Melanie’s room, and she beckons her in.

Holy shit. A look.

Anyway we’re gonna quote Melanie Bird’s whole speech here because it’s a stunner.

Melanie: “So. He’s back.” Syd: “This morning. He looks good.” Melanie: “Hm. Oh they always do. Our men. With all their in, out, in out. All their important things to do. ‘World’s not gonna save itself dear’ and off they go. A day, a month. A year. Forever.” Syd: “…Admiral Fukyama asked if you’re ready to get back to work. We need you—” Melanie: “It’s how they control us. Their absence distracts us from our lives. The things that matter.” Syd: “I’m not sure what you’re trying to—” Melanie: “Course it’s never their fault, our men. God forbid we should have a feeling about it. What choice do they have? Destiny calls. What kind of bitches would we be to stand in their way.”

Again, HOLY SHIT.

The tea kettle starts whistling (SYMBOLICAL) and Melanie waits it out until Syd gets up to take it off the heat, and pour her some tea. Just holy shit.

Sydney promises Melanie that David’s going to be able to find Oliver and bring him back. Again. Melanie’s just like believe whatever brings you peace babe. Then after Syd leaves she gets high off a vaporizing elephant puffing out I think that same blue mystery drug David and Benny liked? The room hangs upside down and a man with an animal head slowly arm-stilts across it kneeling on a wheeled contraption, what kind of Mad Max looking…. Shit, Mel.

Chapter 3 begins, ‘Delusions’. The Narrator is back AND it’s an animation now.

Losing it.

Jon Hamm tells us the story of the man who dreamt he was a butterfly, then when he awoke didn’t know if he was in fact a butterfly dreaming of being a man. A classic.

Then Jon Hamm tells us a much more disturbing story about how delusions can develop, complete with limb horror and a very Twin Peaks: The Return ‘Episode 8’ mutated insect-bird hybrid hatching out of a shell and crawling forth, devouring a chick (rational thought) and eventually being brought to the lips of Aubrey Plaza: delusion grown into full-blown psychosis.

We return to David, lost in his layered, fragmented memories, scored by the voices in his life. “Daaaaviiiiid.” “Hey sexy.” “What happened in the nightclub.” “What’s the last thing you remember?” Ah, home sweet disjointed cacophony. David sips his coffee under furrowed brows.

[ PA System: “Reminder: A loss of meaning is not normal.” ]

Clark arrives, and joins him in his booth. God their history is a trip, I’m remembering it now.

Clark tells him he hopes he’s settling in okay, lazily goes on for a bit about how Amahl Farouk probably came to be as we know him sometime in the early 1800s, and then informs David that they find his story of having only been gone for hours to their months questionable, worrisome, and all around no good, so they’re gonna literally “carbon date you, like you would a fossil.”

I laughed at this in exactly the same startled exhaling way Dan Stevens did, at exactly the same time. Love him.

It occurs to David that they think he’s lying (As opposed to just not telling the truth, he probably echoes at himself in his head) (more quietly: Not knowing the truth). Instead of directly responding to this, Clark just starts recounting how he used to stay home from school with his sick mom, and whenever someone in her soap operas had an evil twin or amnesia, they’d eat ice cream. A dish of pointed pistachio arrives for Clark right on cue. I could watch Hamish Linklater be a drawling drama queen all day long.

Clark instructs David to go see Admiral Fukyama and departs. He leaves his prop dessert behind, as well as his delivery of the word “husky,” which I will treasure.

Confronted with Admiral Fukyama, whom it seems we are referring to as ‘they’ now instead of ‘he’, as Ptonomy did, David tries to read their mind but is rebuffed. Verbally. By one of..the Vermillion? (?) They say that when they were a boy they had some sort of horrifically and apparently poetically painful procedure done, and now they are - This.

me: “Oka-ay!” David one second later: “Oka-ay well…”

This is getting out of hand.

So Div 3’s plan is this: use a new device Cary has built to help David recover his memories, find the Shadow King, and destroy Oliver. Wait hold up. David protests that Oliver’s a friend of his, and they’re not gonna kill Farouk’s hostage. Admiral Fukyama just pipes up that they also must destroy Farouk’s actual body, the original b oh d, as if his mind is reunited with it he will be maximally powerful. Ohhhh, that’s what the Lenntity was frantically trying to find in Chapter 6! Farouk’s body! It’s hidden, and now it’s a mad dash to see who can find it first.

David, eyebrows raising, “So you’re saying it’s a race. We’re in a race?”

The Vermillion glance around at each other. There are little flip sound effects for this and I’m dying. “The male Loudermilk is waiting in his lab. Do not fail.”

Lol, Yay, Legion

SPEAKING OF, it’s time to join Cary! I love Cary!! He’s built a combination of Cerebro and Eleven’s sensory deprivation tank, aiming to amplify David’s psychic reach. It’s basically a sunken sphere filled with a liquid 80% glucose, 15% bicarbonate, and 5% strawberry extract. “For conductivity. Also to give it a pleasant aroma and taste, in case you should swallow any, which do not swallow any.”

Legion is Wes Anderson and David Lynch and Bryan Fuller and also: Daniel Handler, because in this moment I suddenly see that Cary is such a Lemony Snickett character. Doctor Loudermilk! Oh my god help.

David strips down (Syd: “Clothes off, handsome.”) and climbs into the pool pod. He looks up at Syd and Cary crouched by the edge. “…… This is a bad idea.”

Cary, vaguely, waving his hand: “Just…open your mind.” I <3

Now I am very interested in what happens next, which is that Syd makes Cary promise to ping her if they discover anything, and then she leaves the lab. She doesn’t wait around! She goes off to do her own thing! Who thinks this is a result of her conversation with Melanie, because I sure bet so.

She gets on an elevator, and finds Ptonomy, who of course just wants to talk about the person she’s trying not to let define her life. Ptonomy’s not sure he believes David. Well---he’s not sure. He saw memories, but just a few images. David at the nightclub, before he and Clark picked him up. With Oliver.

“Doing what?” Syd asks.

“Dancing.”

I’m delighted.

Ptonomy asks Syd if she still trusts David. “He’s my man,” she replies. Mildly. Terrifyingly.

Love it always.

Over in the lab, Cary is plugging cables into a board and calling out inscrutable pairs of colors and numbers. David floats in his chamber and tries to keep his mind clear of “what the hell.” Sometimes, when Cary sets certain frequencies, he returns to that other sphere, screaming. He winces in the here and now, and Cary swiftly tries to ease the levels.

Then Cary hits a particular combo that causes David’s consciousness to slide right out of the Cerebrorb and go streaming loose over the lab. “Caarryy” he calls as he slips past and Cary’s all “—David?” and I am laughing. Now you’ve done it, you’ve set a free-floating telepath looping through the halls, haahh amazing.

Cary urgently tries to dial David back in, but he’s skidding right out of Div 3 now, out of now even, back to the

\o/

David stands on the dance floor, scanning the (madness of) crowds. There is a roundy dude we know immediately is Amahl Farouk by the fact that he is always moving away from us and not dancing. There is also: Oliver and the Lenntity.

Something I do love is that all someone has to do is make this tilt with their head, and you know exactly what's gonna happen. It’s a dance off.

The lights go blue. The music goes Russo.

TELE

PATHIC

DANCE

FIGHT

The psychic spillover even affects Cary and I’m thrilling

Let former vaudeville clown Bill Irwin dance in every episode, oh my god please, he moves so good.

Eventually everything kinda collects and crescendos, steadier white light blowing into the club with the music, and then the whole thing drops to black. End act. End my cool that wAS AWESOME.

When we come back, Sydney crouches down by the door to where the infected people have been housed, listening. It seems the team have just deposited them all here, where they stand in the dark, chattering. It’s eery. And I can’t really think of a temporary housing solution that’s not going to involve rooms of silent people standing around clicking their teeth, but man, it doesn’t feel good.

[ PA System: “New symptom alert: A strong urge to confess.” ]

Syd can’t hear anything. But then she can, from the other direction: David, crouched as well, only he’s hugging his knees to his naked chest, breathing heavily and dripping wet. He seems to have just materialized there, near her. One of my very favorite Jeff Russo melodies plays, that spare crystalline thing I love so much.

“David?” Syd asks.

“I think I need to lie down,” he admits.

Syd takes him to her room. She has two twin beds, close together but not touching. One is scattered with random items. This is…so deftly done. How sweet it is that she’d clearly made this a space where they could live together. And how sad it is that she’d left it there even as the months slipped by, a bed for David should he ever return. But how sad in a different way, how real and awkward, that lately it had stopped being David’s bed at all, became just a space in her apartment, a shelf, where she set things down and didn’t even think of it. Vestigial. She falteringly says she’ll clear it off and David’s just like don’t worry about it. Goddd.

As David gets dressed she asks him how it went, and it’s terrible, we can all hear in her voice that she’s expecting him not to tell her anything, and he doesn’t, just lies that he couldn’t see Farouk, that he didn’t see anything.

“You’re keeping secrets,” she calls out to him around the corner.

“Whaat,” he responds. Terrible.

Incidentally. The retraux 1960s look of last season is deeffinitely giving way to the 1970s this year, which is going to be…challenging, for me. My base reaction to the 70s is, no. Wish me strength.

Anyhoo, this conversation gets even worse before it gets better. David evades Syd’s very accurate points that he’s keeping things from her, and tries to say she’s the one making things weird, because he hasn’t had a year of character growth, so he’s the same. He does catch that he’s being a jerk here, but all he can manage to come up with is a conciliatory “Ah maybe you’re right” and a sincerely baffled “This is a lot to process.”

Syd, truly doing all the honest emotional heavy lifting in this convo, admits that she’s afraid he’s just going to leave again. At this David finally rises to the occasion, presenting her with this pretty hexagonal compass that always points to him. True David! So she can always track his ass down! Ugh, I’m resentfully charmed. So is Syd, who has this aces line read on “It’s beautiful” where she just sounds so affronted that she means it.

“If we get lost, we get lost together,” David promises, reprising her line from last season, aawwww gee.

But he also promises her no secrets, SO. And as they sleep curled together in their white room by the sea, the creeping Delusion wavers an oil slick path under their bed. I don’t liiiike it! And topside, actually far apart on their separate beds, David lies awake, staring into the darkness. He’s remembering something. Before the face of Amahl Farouk, after he was zapped up by the orb, screaming and screaming and screaming in the orb, and then—

She’s wearing the compass and maybe missing part of her arm and also just inherently LOOKS LIKE SHE’S FROM THE FUTURE, oh what the fuck is happening!

David, mystified, tries to ask her, but Syd charade signals that she can’t talk here, in the orb, in the future(??) But she pulls out some wand thing that lets her draw fleeting images on the air.

me, gently startled: “O-oh.” David, same tone: “Whoa-oh.”

I mean at this point I do wonder if the frequency of David Haller reacting to things exactly the way I just did might be a big factor in why I feel I’ve never found a show whose spirit more perfectly matches, like, me.

So Syd starts drawing things out for David like a game of Pictionary. It’s great fun. “I’m good at this,” David congratulates himself at one point. Haha, hun. You’re like, fine.

She manages to get across to him that she is, yes, in the future! She also explains that Farouk wants his body back, which either got blown out of David’s head in whatever shattering event broke the rest of his memories to pieces, or he spent most of this episode pretending he didn’t know this for….some reason. Conceivably, because what happened next threw him for such a loop that he’s hardly known which was up ever since:

W hat.

David is just fucking lost at this, tearfully begging Syd to just talk to him, tell him what the hell this is about, why she seemingly sent this orb from the future?! But Syd can’t say anything, and, tearful too, just draws a big loopy heart between them, then turns and walks away into the darkness.

Back in Syd’s twin bed, David opens his eyes again. Then a moment later he’s in his jim jams in the Club. Oh it’s all very slow, very strange, all these dissolving turns through people dancing at half speed….and Farouk, and Oliver, and the Lenntity.

Which,

Oh no.

Oh no don’t remind me!

AAAHHH, god we sure are back.

***

Wellntruly’s Way Long Legion Recaps // Season 1

Support my writing and get more of it on my Patreon :D

[wellntruly]

Hello! Will you be recapping Legion S2? I really enjoyed your S1 recaps.

Oh HECK YES. I’m recapping Chapter 9 RIGHT NOW.

My recaps will probably be posted here on Saturdays (maybe sometimes Sundays), as I’ll be watching the episodes once FX puts them up to stream on Wednesdays, and then rewatching and editing screencaps and writing a full 4000+ word recap takes me aha haha hah maybe 10 to 12 hours, on a breezy week, so hEy if you like what I produce and would enjoy supporting me for all the work I do, I do have: a new Patreon! [wonky grin]

[wellntruly]

Hi, hey, so, WOW. I just FINALLY read through a bunch of your legion recaps, having gone back to the show SPECIFICALLY so I could enjoy your recaps, and ZERO REGRETS. SO DAMN GOOD. I AM SCREAMING. THE BOLERO THING. CHAPTER 7. SLAY ME. (still need to watch chapter 8, I just actually yelped reading that and wanted you to be made aware how delighted this recap has left me :)

AAHH THANK YOU SO MUUUUUCHH!!!!

Honestly the amount I love Legion + love I poured into those recaps feels kinda inversely proportional to how many people they actually reached, so getting this message made me feel you found my SECRET HORDE of recaps or something and I’m over here thrilled like Congratulations, questing knight!!!

[wellntruly]

Wellntruly’s LEGION RECAPS, Season 1

Complete and unabridged.

1.1. ‘Chapter 1’ 1.2. ‘Chapter 2’ 1.3. ‘Chapter 3’ 1.4. ‘Chapter 4’ 1.5. ‘Chapter 5’ 1.6. ‘Chapter 6’ 1.7. ‘Chapter 7’ 1.8. ‘Chapter 8’

[wellntruly]

LEGION Recap: 1x07

Legion, which has been only escalating the surreal musical interludes that turn me into a pinwheel in a high wind, has in this latest episode rolled out a six (SIX) minute long literal silent film sequence set to a remix of Ravel’s Boléro, and just, respectfully, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Advance notice: this recap is going to contain me getting very intently excited about neurology, as well as multiple links to articles about cocktail ice.

In fact yes, this X-Men program is probably my perfect television show.

And this, one of my favorite TV episodes of all time. 

OF ALL TIME. 

Season 1, ‘Chapter 7’

We’re returned into the middle of it, gliding along one of the empty hospital corridors of David’s mind as it fucking bends like a sinking ship.

Oh my god am I about to yell Inception again over this DREAM BREAKING DOWN?

Well I can tell you something that’s certainly breaking down: Kerry’s composure. Our strange, scrappy Kerry is absolutely terrified out of her wits, trying to escape from The Eye in this flickering warren of remembered hallways left behind in David’s head. Walter follows her, whistling, unbothered, while phantom figures surge up in threatening swarms and then recede again, the halls all going dark, electrics popping in rains of sparks. Which is just exactly the right kind of breakage here — not crumbling, not flooding, but this jolty electrical snapping. Oh flip it’s like misfiring synapses, ah that’s why!! GOOD THEMATIC ALIGNMENT.

Anyway, this scene is UNREAL TERRIFYING. The sound mixing keeping Kerry’s frightened whimpers so clear and present! The agonizing slo-mo! The Lost-y whispering! A maniacal crowd of phosphorous-pale figures suddenly cranes in too fast over the camera and no joke I gripped a blanket in a spasm of terror — so as much as I’m still mystified by how how scared and panicked Kerry has been here compared to how she is on the outside, I think I get it, yes.

One of the big searching eyes suddenly fills a wall, and we tip into it to find ourselves with that yellow eyed nightmare. They’re holding a lantern like The Beast in Over the Garden Wall, words cannot EXPRESS how I love this, and demanding to know, “What did he do with it? What did he do with it??”

Like….a memory? Are they after a memory David has hidden away, some key they need? That’s my Best Guess.

The Monster, scaling into Lenntity form, bops Amy on the nose. “Hey sexy.”

Dang, look at Aubrey Plaza NOW.

The Lenntity asks her about the day David came to live with them. Amy (actual Amy, not whatever was Amy last episode), tries to recall. But she was four, and mostly just remembers peering down through the stair rail, hearing voices, and seeing her parents holding baby David.

This information is apparently not what they were after, and Lenny continues to scan around, frantic and frustrated, demanding to know what he DiD wItH iT.

Quick overlay here OF NOTE:

HAHAHA HI, X-shaped wheelchair wheel

“Uh oh,” Lenny sings out, getting distracted by something on one of the walls. “Looks like one of the animals is out of its pen.” She stretches out a terrible, l e n g t h e n i n g  arm to a spot in this cartography, and — WAIT. IT’S THE COMMAND CENTER OF DAVID’S BRAIN. IT’S A MAP OF HIS NEURAL LANDSCAPES. THAT’S WONDERFUL.

We zoom into the MENTAL ELEVATIONS, and through a crackling sheet of ice, into Oliver’s MODBERG, yeess. Refurbished a bit though, no Mylar --- the walls this time are plainly ice. Which Cary Loudermilk, Scientist, is just *fascinated* by, babbling excitedly over how Oliver has manifested being cryogenically frozen into living in an ice cube.

“When I woke up this morning,” Oliver responds, “I thought to myself: it’s gonna be Daylight Savings soon. Then I realized: I don’t know what that means.”

There’s a special kind of enjoyment that comes from randomness that is done with the correct sort of banality. It is the same kind of enjoyment I get off Oliver Bird, in WAVES. So very happy you’re back.

Cary, bless him, just distractedly explains what Daylight Savings Time is while he scopes this place out. Mixing drinks at his ICE BAR, Oliver is disappointed to learn we’re not literally saving daylight.

By the way, I know with absolutely clarity (lol, jokes you’ll get in a minute) that Oliver has spent an entire year of astral afternoons engaged in nothing but experimenting with cocktail ice. This belief is strengthened by the fact that in retrospect, every article on advancements in avant-garde ice cubes I’ve read sounds like it was written by a journalist Oliver Bird.

Anyway, Cary suddenly swoops in for a perfectly awkwardly received hug. He’s so pleased to see Oliver again! Who doesn’t appear to have aged at all, but, ruh-roh, apparently does not remember Melanie…? Not even with Cary priming him with the knowledge that she’s his wife.

By way of explanation, Oliver tells Cary he’s been in here a long time. Hours. Maybe longer. “My memory’s a bit, uh. It’s a bit uh… Oh what’s the word. Dishes?” My memory is dishes, goddamn that’s good.

“Anyhoo!” Oliver literally says, providing my transition for me, “I supposed we better rescue them, then? Your friends?”

\o/  YES PLEASE, THANKS I LOVE A RESCUE MISSION TO SAVE YOUR FRIENDS

Oliver comments that he’s been watching “this David person and his Monster”, a relationship which he and Cary have independently come to similar conclusions about. Cary jumps on the ends of Oliver’s sentences a bit, out of habit from being around Kerry, and aaahh Cary she needs you right now, do you not feel it??

Instead we turn back to Oliver, WHO HAS A PITCH PIPE OUT OF NOWHERE. “You’re not in any way a tenor perchance, are you?” IN ANY WAY. To Cary’s query Oliver explains that “we’re starting a barbershop quartet, David and myself.” Oh my LOL, the barbershop quartet.

Oh and incidentally, Oliver knows who David’s Monster is. It’s Farouk.

I cannot tell if the show expects us to already know what that name means, but we ARE supposed to know that Cary does, because holy cow he is shriiiiinnking at this suggestion!

Cary what do you knooowww.

“He’s very clever, our Monster,” Oliver goes on, gesturing with his cocktail skewer, “but he puts all his energy into tricking David. Didn’t think to watch his six. And by six I mean— what do I mean?” You mean to watch his back. It’s fighter pilot jargon. Six o’clock: behind you. You’re actually good, Olives.

With a gasp Cary suddenly realizes that OF COURSE it’s Farouk — the dog!! Now it’s Oliver’s turn to feel a little lost in this conversation. Cary explains that David’s Monster used to disguise himself as a very cute little beagle, named King. “Amahl Farouk,” Cary says solemnly: “The Shadow King.”

[tosses head a little] the SHADOW KING? Haha what!

Anyhow, now more imperative than ever that we get concocting a fix right quick. And it’s going to be a challenge, as Oliver points out, with a handy ice-bound visual aid, given that they are just minds, while their bodies, quote, “are in quite a jumble.”

God this show is hilarious.

Farouk is too powerful for Oliver to take on, though possibly David “could break you out of the dream.” [distantly: BRAAMMMM] That is, if Farouk hadn’t tumbled David into an oubliette in his own mind.

And, in another visualization, there’s David, hollering and pounding on the ice wall of Oliver’s hideout, sobbing against encroaching madness, and distressing Cary very much. “David!” he calls softly to the distraught reflection in the wall, omg CARY.

Y’know, while Oliver adds some more vodka to their overly vermouth’d martinis, a question: where ARE we? The vast subconscious, the Astral Plane, yes yes, but it’s like, a shared space? Oliver and David can come here, and they can bring their friends, but can anyone else? Or just telepaths, is this like a telepath timeshare? And so why not Farouk then, why can’t he enter here, presuming Farouk to be a telepath of some stripe? I GOTS QUERIES.

But right now there’s a RESCUE TO PLAN. Cary has recalled his DEVICE, which he describes as a halo, fascinating. If he can get it onto David — physical David in his frozen bedroom — this should block Farouk from influencing his mind. Unfortunately, the assumption is that this will set off a cascading effect wherein David will wake up, releasing all their minds as well, but also the hold he currently has on space & time. And when that happens, those bullets hanging in the air are going to collide with him and Syd. Unless….they can figure out a way to disrupt their current trajectories?

Cary, with the contemplative badassery of a heist movie: “We’re going to need everybody.”

Oliver, gesturing to the diving suit: “May I introduce you to my friend, Jules Verne.”

This show makes me very, very happy.

‘Choir & Crickets’ starts drifting in as we look at the diving suit on the coat rack, aaannnd this is how we got to the end of Ch. 6! Nice!

Goddamnit I just remembered I want to know what the stars said.

Once again Cary holds his finger to his lips in a silent shhh, and in accord, Syd quietly gets out of bed and follows him into a bright light.

Oh what fresh fantasm is THIS NOW!

Syd warily but trustingly follows Cary into this little red booth, where his suit disappears in some sort of reverse Superman situation. Cary assures her the Monster can’t hear them in here (ah, the reason for the shhh-ing earlier!)

“First of all—” Syd starts, but Cary, with patronizing impatience, tells her it’ll be easier if he just talks.

“The hospital wasn’t real,” he begins.

“No shit.” SYD. My girl.

And what promptly happens here is that Cary will start spinning out some overly complicated thing and Syd will just cut in with a nice summation that moves them forward, until eventually she’s just taken the lead on explaining their situation. Yeah, easier if you just talk. My foot. “Wow!” Cary grins, so impressed at how quickly she’s pulled all this together. YOU GOT A GOOD TEAM, dude! And I bet next time you will not be so quick to try to dominate a conversation with your TEAM MEMBERS.

Syd explains up to the most pressing dilemma: the time-starting-up-again problem where she and David wind up shot. And also how they have to be careful in the Clockworks space because the Lenntity rules there, and is keeping a rather awfully VISUAL eye on them.

Cary, excited: “And there’s, there’s a device, I built a—”

“Great,” Syd cuts in, “so I’ll go to the hospital and save the others and deal with Lenny and you Fix It. So I’m not murdered when I wake up.”

God I’m loving this. Everyone on this show is so funny and so GREAT.

But before Syd can head back out, Oliver pulls a pair of eyeglasses out of his jacket and tells her she’s gonna need these. They’ll show her what’s real, filter out the projections. Oliver made them. Cary just kinda waves off explaining what Oliver’s deal is, or who this Farouk is he just mentioned, and instead just keeps pulling more and more glasses out of his fathomless jacket and handing them to her one after the other. This physical comedy, I am giggling so much.

Anyway u see this right. How they’re like the active ingredients in a pill. ~Medicine As Metaphor~

Plan in place and specs in hand, Sydney steps back out of the capsule — fuck which is now THE NURSES’ STATION, where they dispense medication — into the zombie apocalypse movie Mindworks has become. What lights are on are mostly red, the walls are all bare concrete, sirens are wearily sounding, and the place is filled with shambling, raving patients. Syd pulls on her hipster glasses, and the world goes empty — and black-and-white.

Oh good: our ‘60s look has gone FULL FRENCH NEW WAVE. Finally, amiright.

Syd looks around her, and you can just see her gathering her moxie. “I’m comin’ for you, baby,” she quietly declares, and strides off. SYDNEY BARRETT I LOVE YOU SO.

Meanwhile, locked away deep in the dark of his own head, David screams and screams and screams. Christ, did someone let Dan Stevens go ahead and blow out his voice at the end of a filming week or something, because that is some fray. Dang, honey, that hurts to hear.

Aaannnnd Commercial Break! To pass the time: Laura Marling’s ‘Night Terror’ — remembered this absolute Syd song a few weeks ago and have been meaning to bring it to your attention.

We return in the moment the world froze.

Still love THIS STILL. Anything that manages to be simultaneously this pretty and this funny gets an A in my book.

We pivot to the standing pool that tall mirror occasionally becomes, Melanie stepping through its surface.

For a second I thought there was an ornate Catholic-flavored cross here by this candle and was about to go hella whaaa??, but then I lightened it up, and…

it’s a tiny robot. I feel like there’s a joke about the rise of science as a guiding belief system somewhere in this.

So here’s something strange: this scene doesn’t go the same way it did the last time we saw it! Previously, Melanie spoke to the Figure In the Diving Suit, who just kept gesturing at the bullets and Syd & David and then vanished. This time she looks things over a bit on her own, and then turns to the mirror to find the diving suit shimmering there.

God she’s lit like a Hitchcock blonde.

Melanie reaches for him, whispering Oliver’s name, but it’s just Cary again. “Oh, I thought you were—”

“Set them along the perimeter,” Cary calls over her shoulder, and oh fuck there he unceremoniously is, reciting a limerick, sipping a martini, christ, Melanie, I love that this is what you married.

I JUST.

He walks over to her and holds out his hand: “Oliver Bird, dedicated follower of fashion.”

I am choking laughing. WHAT. God every one of his lines sounds like an out-of-context quote on someone’s Tumblr bio. Oliver Bird is out of context to himself.

Melanie, just in an absolute sea of emotions, takes his hand. There is a ~moment~ and Oliver pauses, asking if he’s seen her before, at the poetry slam. Melanie demurs, but Oliver assures her he’s going to remember her name. Aaugh just imagine, your husband not remembering you but also knowing he should, so devastating and so heartwarming at once!!!

It’s all a bit MUCH, so Melanie steps out into the hall to take a breather while Cary and Oliver confer. Unfortunately she walks smack dab into something very unheimlich: drops of blood slowly dripping UP from a pool on the floor to a matching pool on the ceiling. We zoom upstairs, somehow taking Melanie with us, to find poor Flings, stabbed in the chest in a closet, held in a stasis of dying. Omfg, flashes to him in Mindworks, being dressed by nurses --- this is why he’s catatonic here: he’s in suspended death. Oh shit that’s dark.

This is a handy transition back to the, hah, mental hospital, and so we stay here, with Syd running around the floors calling for the others. She finds POOR FLINGS, and slips a pair of Oliver’s magicked glasses onto him, then moves cautiously over to Kerry, still desperately fighting phantoms, oh GIRL.

Syd brings the clarity, beautiful. Also I’m pretty sure Kerry scrambling to her feet to join her means we’re about to get Homegirls vs. Hospital Lenntity, and I’m STOKED.

Mental Hospital, Exterior.

Odd shit on this facility includes: dog statue too high to see, giant-ass chain. 🤔

The Lenntity stands in the office, silent. The silence is broken — and that has hardly been a better phrase before — by arrhythmic slices of David screaming in the darkness. Nice Design.

Do you know what’s interesting and I’m a fan of it? For show called Legion, this is truly an ensemble piece! We’re nearly 19 minutes into this episode and this is the first time we’re checking in with David Haller.

David’s actually kinda engaged in the same process himself right now. “Okay, woohh, you’re okay,” he pants, trying to talk himself together using the second-person form of self-address, ex-actly like I do, god.

Peak Gemini David tries to get a handle on this situation by explaining to himself that he’s not even physically IN this invisible coffin hanging in a mental abyss. “Your body isn’t even— your mind is trapped. Which is….. That’s not better. [starts screaming again]” BABE.

And that’s when this happens:

I WROTE ‘PEAK GEMINI’ TOO SOOOOON. Ahhhahahahaah

So this is David’s Rational Mind, materializing here because sometimes — like when you’re bottled in an inkwell in the root of your own skull — you just gotta try to talk-therapy yourself.

“And you’re…British?” “Like I said I’m your rational mind.”

L O L. Lol. Give me all the meta jokes about production GIVE THEM ME.

Actually…hold on….I can’t believe I’m gonna go confirm this but of course I am……yup, this isn’t even Dan Stevens’ normal speaking voice*. Brit’s doing an English accent. What the fuck Dan!

*yes the first random interview I clicked on YouTube began with him literally talking about developing voices, if you can believe it

So Dan Stevens, Ever A Surprise, plays this on the one half all nervous self-conscious wavering smiles, and on the other completely unselfconsciously posts up on his side and tucks an arm under his head to chat this out. This isn’t quite this, but I just LOVE it when people meet their Doubles.

The solution is fairly simple, as Rational David explains: he’s in his own head, so it follows that he can think his way out of this if he just focuses.

Haha y’know what, it would also have worked to just have his rational mind be SPOCK, c.f. any handful of Star Trek episodes where Spock proposes some similar mind game. Incidentally, I am full on in love with the fact that the rational figure is always the one who ends up advocating for the most bonkers applications of mind-over-matter. In a way, logic is freeing.

With that spirit, David imagines himselves into a sweet classroom.

*high fives location scout for this Globe Theatre-influenced Socratic gem* With the fucking indigo chairs, oh you know they were so pumped when those were just already in this room.

David instructs himself to forget all the tricks and confusion and chart out what he KNOWS. Interestingly, he calls the Memory Work and MRIs lies as well — so lumping Dr. Bird’s brand of therapy in with whatever nonsense you experienced at Clockworks, I see! Honestly, very gratified that what was (suspiciously) set up as The Actual Correct Treatment turns out to be about as flawed and ill-suited as the rest of it, because that is definitely holding the door open for mutation not being a neat clean answer for what David experiences.

Anyway, taking it back to the very beginning: he was adopted. David starts getting swept off-shore a bit here in some waves of emotions, and his logical self has to literally snap him back to focus on the Facts. Incidentally, Professor Haller wants to ask us whether we’re gonna keep calling that thing up there Lenny.

“…No,” David and I agree, no it’s time to interrogate our language here, yes you’re right, you’re right. I’m keeping ‘the Lenntity’ for when they’re in their Lenny-shaped form though, because by this point the Lenntity feels like a realized character to me, of the same cloth but individualized from The Devil With the Yellow Eyes, or like, King. That said Oliver can call this individual Farouk all he wants but I’m gonna real struggle to go full male pronouns here, especially when the connotations of multiplicity with “they” is SO APT in this situation.

Okay so where were we. Oh yes, with Baby David, being adopted. So who were his birth parents?? You got a chalkboard right, might as well DRAW OUT YOUR TALE

ANIMATION INTERLUDE-STYLE

(also check that little X ahaha yes)

David narrates the story we’ve started putting together: That years ago the Monster tangled with Charles his father somehow, and though Dad won, “winning” just freed this entity from their body, and they followed their enemy home to his family.

David, speaking out of the side of his mouth to voice his dad: “Sweetheart it’s over, I won. Give me some sugar.” David: “Is that—is that supposed to be a British accent.”

A special kind of joy. Thank you.

Additionally, a hoot that David has apparently decided his dad was English, just INTUITING this or whatever. But what David has not been able to intuit is why his first parents gave him up for adoption. He starts to spiral a bit again wondering if they just didn’t want him, and his Rational Mind has to snap him back on track again.

David, quietly to himself: “Right, you’re right. I am pretty, I am loved.”

At this point I malfunctioned. Just, it’s UNPROMPTED! And the well-worn feel of it, like this little oft-needed affirmation! DAVID HALLER WHO ARE YOU. Oh you precious, precious weirdo.

Refocused, he scrambles up the stair-ladder to gain a different vantage point on the comic book panels he’s drawn out here on the chalkboards, this show, this fucking show.

“Let’s say, for now, Dad was worried it wasn’t safe, for me. So instead, to keep me safe, I went to live with my other Mom and Dad, adopted in secret. But somehow, the Monster was watching, and found me.”

“And like a haunted house, possessed me.”

FUCK

YEAH

I mean no it’s scary and bad, but THE POETIC IMAGERY. I AM HERE.

Y’know, this episode is kind of the balance to the previous one, as this is the chapter where David speaks — countered to the last one, where the Lenntity does the speaking. We need to bring both together to get the texture of the story. And some interesting stuff is coming out here! David has concluded that the Monster was tormenting him as revenge against his dad, oof. “It poisoned me my whole life. It made me crazy. And…it fed on me.” Oooof.

He envisions the Monster’s fantasized future, grown so powerful supping on David’s strength, wielding him like a weapon against the world. Shit, the pain of that alone would probably kill his father, if the Monster didn’t manage it directly.

But before it quite came to that, “Syd came, and she woke me up.” Aw, my strange sweet little turtledoves! And as David, nudged along by Syd, started to wonder if there wasn’t more to, well, kinda everything? about his lived experience? the Monster started making moves. Pushing back. Eventually dragging them all into where they are now. In the Astral Plane, and in trouble.

“And what are you gonna do about it?”

David, literally turning sideways into a dolly zoom:

[laughing] Go get ‘em u goober.

Meanwhile, on the A-Clock-alypse level, Syd and Kerry slowly wheel Flings down an empty black & white corridor — which fills with the howling projections if they lower their hipster glasses. Best not, then.

“Melanie! David!” Syd whisper-calls, adorably, trying not to draw any unwanted Lenny-shaped attention.

Uugh this shot.

Topside, Cary and Melanie are trying in vain to shove Syd and David out of the path of the bullets. I’m finally realizing that the reason why it’s not working is because they’re not physically there. Oliver, mildly observing this, clears his throat. He waggles the fingers holding his cocktail olive.

Oh my god—

H o w did I not realize that Oliver Bird is ALSO CHARLES XAVIER. The drinking. It was right there in front of me how did I miss it! ARE ALL TELEPATHS JUST LIKE THIS?? SO ENJOYABLE.

Melanie and Cary step aside, and Oliver positions himself abreast of the stream of bullets. He raises his hands, then begins CONDUCTING PHYSICS. Like MUSICALLY. Fucking gorgeous.

About 12 seconds into this the main melody comes in, and I flip an entire fuck. 

HE’S PLAYING BOLÉRO, AKA THE SONG THAT RAVEL COMPOSED WHILE LOSING HIS MIND.

LISTEN, if you’ve never heard the ‘Unraveling Bolero’ episode of Radiolab, or have not been otherwise made aware of this superbly off-the-chain Music History Fact, that ep is 20 minutes long, fascinating and weird, and will explain much better and more fully what I’m going to condense for you right now. Which is that writing Boléro, a song composed of loops of the same exact notes over and over with just the orchestration around them periodically building, was in every likelihood an early symptom of a degenerative brain disease that would strike Maurice Ravel in earnest a few years later. And THIS SONG, this INDICATOR, this PRODUCT OF NEURAL BREAKAGE, that is what is scoring this scene.

DO U SEE WHY I SCREAM.

And then this musical sequence cuts to David, shattering the roof of his mental coffin in a blaze of goldlight, which fucking DROPS THE BASS, REMIXING BOLÉRO AROUND HIM. FUCK ME SIDEWAYS, ARE YOU KIDDING? Russoooooo!!!

Real talk I’m supposed to be rewatching this episode ~For Recap~ right now, which is less watching and more just stops & starts as I figure out how to phrase what’s happening, but hahaha I just full on WATCHED THE WHOLE THING THROUGH AGAIN, COULDN’T STOP, TOO GOOD, DELICIOUS.

Okay, okay let me try to, articulate? Apostrophize? Strew words at the feet of this like iridescent mutant rose petals??

Set to REMIXED BOLÉRO, David’s outstretched power-palms now push him through a door into a memory of the apartment he shared with Philly. ON HIS WAAYY. He strides around a corner to find the door to Dr. Poole’s office, and throws it open— to come through the door into his apartment again. Wheels the corner, and there’s…the door to Dr. Poole’s office. A LOOP? A FUCKING LOOP. A LOOP LIKE YOUR LOOPING BOLERO, THE SONG OF DEMENTED LOOPS?!

CAN I GET A BRILL-IANT

We skip over to Homegirls vs. Hospital Lenntity, all other audio having given way to the Ravel scoring, though we can clearly see Syd calling out David’s name, and— oh my—

THIS WAS ALREADY GOING TO BE ONE OF MY FAVORITE SCENES OF ANYTHING EVER AND THEN YOU DO THIS. YOU DO THIS. A SILENT FILM CARD. WITH “DAVID!”, THE MOST OFT-REPEATED LINE IN THIS GLORIOUS GODDAMN SHOW. SILENT INTERTITLES. MAKING GOOD ON THE BLACK & WHITE IN A WAY I NEVER EXPECTED??

I AM IN TELEVISICAL HEAVEN.

Speaking of LOOPS by the way, this is the third time we’ve seen Syd look into this room with the bloodstain by the doorjamb. [frantic gestures of overwhelmed joy]

A long shot down the corridor now, allowing for the spooky painterly dance-theatre of The Eye suddenly rushing in from stage left and lifting Kerry across the hall, yeeelll. She loses her filter-glasses, and starts spinning and kicking, fighting figures on the air, one of them unfortunately very here.

Topside, Melanie and Cary stare, lovestruck and awestruck, respectively, as Oliver fills the room with tiny letters, swooping and schooling like a murmuration of starlings, all the components to spell out “S H I E L D”

Aaaaaaahhhhh

David finally gets inside Dr. Poole’s office, baring his teeth in a bright grin of frustration, and swing-stomps over to try to move through the closet (following the old Monster path through his memories, I see). Pushes through the door, and he’s spun back to his therapist’s threshold again, again, again. GOD, the glinting genius of this LOOPING, LOOPING, LOOOOOOPING. And the deep-rooted HILARITY of the way they edit together this series of David Trying The Door. Bless this creepy-cute X-Men comedy I swear.

At last he manages to get through, now into those blue hallways of Div-3, to furiously face down this:

Well let’s hope this doesn’t represent some sort of Binary Of Good And Evil choice or something.

Back in the black & white, as Kerry and Sydney grapple with Walter, THE LENNTITY comes sliiIIIDDing in all A-LOOKING LIKE THIS:

ffffffuuuuUUUUUUCCKKKK what sorta depraved Tim Burton character now!!!!!

THE LANTERN AGAIN TOO

And the B O L É R O still throughout and SILENT FILM TITLES and SO FUN and I HAVE RARELY BEEN

SO

HIGHKEYEFFINGDELIGHTED

BY

A

SHOW.

The Lenntity dances up the corridor toward them, all loose jointed, literally unhinged, and frick I can’t figure out who Plaza’s reminding me so much of right now but she’s serving it STRONGLY and I’M SO INTO IT. It’s also definitely the most androgynous she’s gone yet — shifting the subtleties of gender presentation just in physical presence always being one of those things that has me like, [Patrick Stewart nod] Acting.

Anyhow, as with most Trickster Types you gotta keep them amused if you want to stay around, and the Lenntity is NOT entertained when these three don’t stop scuffling to cower in fear, I guess. So the Lenntity thuds the lantern to the floor with a drum in Boléro (fuck) and mime-pulls The Eye over. Kerry and Syd slowly scoot themselves back along the floor side by side, turning their heads in unison, oh my god this is so great, every element of this is singing.

Then, THEN, the Lenntity crumples Walter up in mid-air and it’s so DAMN unnerving that I am somehow obsessed?? GROTÉSQUE.

As is so often the case, thank you Jean Smart for the reaction face.

Oliver, however, is just super feelin his conducting right now, and does not seem to have much care to spare for the horror being thrown back into their plane. Down in the dream, the Lenntity is now crawling toward Syd and Kerry, who have renewed their synchronized scooting back along the floor. “OKAY, KIDS, PREPARE TO DIE!” the Monster’s dialogue card reads, as above, Oliver signals Cary that it’s time to place his halo on David.

SYMBOLISM REPLAY:

David needs a Halo to defend his mind against the Devil.

A Halo the Scientist crafted, no less! The robot perched by the candle like an altar! [happily throws arms around head]

But the Monster sees what is happening on the blue surface, and tells the girls they’ll be right back. Another level down, David is summoning all his strength, evidently deciding the way out of this mad recursive maze is to just tear it apart. The doors are already rattling. Swiftly my unstable sweetheart, swiftly, as the Lenntity has just appeared in your childhood bedroom, throwing Oliver violently to the wall with a tap on his shoulder.

Boléro stops abruptly. The sculpted letters spill to the floor.

Then the musical base steps back in, without the Ravel melody this time, as FLINGS THINGS wakes up!? Flings RALLIES, or something, it’s a little unclear, the takeaway is that he becomes an active agent again here when we most need someone. I’ll take this trope!

So as the Lenntity starts force-choking Syd and Kerry, and David rips the dream apart by the seams, and Cary brings the Halo down over his temples — Flings tackles the Monster, and they go zooming off into an anomaly suddenly narrowing the end of the corridor.

We haven’t highlighted one of these gleaming bullets ever-so-slowly rotating in the dark frozen air yet, and now’s gonna be our last chance, as our team is starting to blurrily shift and settle back into their bodies one by one. The room is coming back to life — and those bullets are still headed for Sydney and David.

David’s eyes spring open wide under the coronet across his brow. Holding Syd in his arms, he spins them around in the still-thick air, setting his back to the bullets instead. And— thudthudthud.

He gasps.

He caught them in his beautiful telekinetic hand. [Magneto swoon]

The music is hauntingly lovely through here, that spare crystalline melody I so adore, as David slowly tips the bullets to the floor. Then he of course makes some supremely dorky little “Psshh” noise/hand gesture, and Syd’s just like staaahp I love you.

A visual of HOW CUTE THEY ARE.

The room finishes settling back into alignment around them, which unfortch includes some GROSS CRUNCHING as Walter finishes crumpling up on the floor. David takes a look around at his rattled cohort, and with a little furrowed quirk of a smile, goes FULL GLOWY SUPERHERO as he teleports them all outta there.

And that’s Act Four.

INSERT CAVALCADE OF ACCOLADES HERE. Like what a brilliant ballyhoo. What a luminous loop-de-loop. Just jeweled in imaginative invention, and so competently constructed, the whole thing like a choreographed dance of editing and sound. Sets and performances beautifully outstanding, as always, but give it up here for POST, my god. This is some TV Dream Team level work, corner to corner. I’M OVER THE MOOOON.

SO, David has taken them all back to Summerland — Syd, Cary & Kerry, Melanie, Amy, Ptonomy, Flings, may he rest in piece. David breathes in fresh air, a little dazed — his Monster is no longer pressing up against the inside of his head. He moves his hands to lift the Halo off and Cary’s like HOLY SHIT NO. That’s what’s keeping them safely cordoned off in his mind.

David: “So, leave it on?”

Cary and me: “Yes, please.” Never take it off. This look is so choice.

While the Haller siblings check in with each other, smiling gently to see if it’s okay, our mother hen starts trying to spread his feathers over his chicklets, wanting to bustle David off to his lab to get him looked over. “Tell him, Melanie,” Cary pleads, but Melanie is gone.

Oliver, too, is gone.

We turn to one of the Summerland buildings, now perched above a light blanket of brown leaves. I mean realistically they probably started shooting during the last sunny days of a Vancouver summer, and then it was just going to be fall and rain, but man it is GREAT thematically.

Melanie rushes down to the lower levels, to confirm her…hopes? Her fears? That Oliver is indeed no longer in the diving suit. It sits empty, a frozen shell. She closes the door, and heads back up to pace an avenue of taxidermied bears. I mean that’s where I always like to do my thinking.

Then she hears Beat poetry.

OLIVER IS HERE and has MADE THEM ALL EGGS. HE MADE THEM SCRAMBLED EGGS AND IS WEARING A CREAMY APRON TO MATCH HIS LEISURE SUIT AND A SUNFLOWER IN HIS LAPEL.

Eggs & Beat Poetry. Beat-en Eggs. The theme of every brunch I will throw from here on out.

Oliver ~importantly~ plinks his sunflower into Melanie’s water glass. She takes the offered seat, tears glimmering in her eyes.

Have I tried to express yet how wonderful I find Melanie Bird? Because I often don’t actually like her very much, but I looooove this character. I love her rich, complicated role in this story, and I super love JEAN SMART, a Talent.

While the others eat breakfast foods, Cary gingerly approaches Kerry, looking out at the trees. Ohhhh, oh no. He knows she finds meals boring, and softly asks if she wants to combine. Kerry turns him down. Grasping at straws, Cary offers soup…?

“You left me,” Kerry responds, still looking out the window. “I needed you, and you left me.” She wheels off, leaving Cary a stricken mess. Oh nooooo! :(

Speaking of relationships that are going to be something new after what’s happened, David makes his way over to poor Amy, who, in keeping with her brand, is struggling with the espresso machine. They both sorta awkwardly emote at each other, oh Hallers. Amy starts trying to apologize and David’s like hey it’s okay, c’mon let’s go talk.

In that circle room with the life-size mountain goat terrarium in the middle, Amy reiterates that she should have told him about the man who brought him to their family, that she should have realized that he wasn’t sick — or that maybe he was sick, but that it was a sickness that came from his powers.

“The powers — David you have powers!”

“I knooww,” he says with this goofy half-grin. “I’m a mutant!”

I love them. More close adult siblings on TV please.

As Amy frets over what she wishes she’d done differently, she suddenly remembers her husband, oh lol. “Oh my god, I have to call Ben,” she says, stunned. David reminds her that she can’t call out when they’re battling a shadowy government agency, so Amy thinks she’ll just email him, which is both hilarious AND yet another timeline bizarrity. David suggests she just get some sleep and they’ll figure it out together tomorrow. In the meantime, he’s finally going to let Cary fuss over him in his lab.

But as David crosses the room to meet him and Syd on the stairs, yikes the World’s Angriest Boy In the World briefly flashes up in a doorway, Lynchian red and pissed. David stumbles back against the landscape ring all OH MY SHIT, and Cary urges him to BE CAREFUL. He’s not sure how stable his device is, and it’s very important David keep it sure and centered around his head.

Okay, you guys, it’s still such a straight up metaphor for medication and therapy though. Like: this was a sickness, there were things in his brain that shouldn’t be, but they have been able to treat him with a combination of science + talking things out, so that he can live his life more healthily. Cary’s Halo is like the Lithium to David’s (imagined) bipolar, and it’s best that he not stop taking his pills. Oh my god and the people overseeing his treatment are still Cary and Syd! The active ingredients in the capsule! Medication and Therapy, respectively!! It just matches so well, oh it’s gonna take a lot to pull this take from me, I’m tellin ya right now.

Anyway, Ptonomy and Kerry fall in to escort them across the compound to Cary’s lab, like the world’s most stylish muscle, but, alarmingly, the aspect ration starts narrowing in as they walk. O what o what is going to happen!

Up on the balcony of the main building, Oliver and Melanie are falling in love all over again. “Did I ever tell you a story about the lady and the crane?” he asks. “Many times,” she smiles. “But tell me again.” Oh my gosh this love story?? I don’t think I was a prepared for this plot line.

Out on the path, David suddenly slows. Cary, darling, worriedly reaches up toward the device to settle it, thinking he’s seeing monsters again. But these threats are real: the Domino Goons from Division 3, rushing in from all directions to encircle them, guns raised.

Oliver SIPS HIS MARTINI WHILE RAISING HIS ARMS, this guy, this fucking guy.

Real-time notes from yours truly:

- wait who on earth is still alive from D3 - GASP!!! it’s Linklater he’s back!!!!!!! - wow I got unreasonably excited about that

LINKLATER limps up, leaning on a cane in his same plum-brown suit. “Daavid!” he sings out in greeting. “You look well. That headband.”

I know.

He says they have a lot to talk about, including, I gather, just how painful his third degree burns were. Uh oh. Linklater calls out that the goons can kill the others, which does seem rather optimistic slash foolish, given that standing in front of him is a telekinetic whirlwind on roller-skates who happens to rather LIKE those others.

As David gives him his best “oh hell no” stare-brows, we zoom down into darkness, through a tunnel of dim gaping carnival-ride mouths, to a blazing-edged coffin hanging in the darkness. Ohhh shit. You’ve just done this to them in turn.

The Monster is trapped in there, and RAGING. Wild, snarling, eyes gone beastly, they claw and claw and shriek and— a crack breaks open. Through the jagged edges, we see the Lenntity grin.

END EPISODE 7

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Wellntruly’s Way Long Legion Recaps Chapter 1 • Chapter 2 • Chapter 3 • Chapter 4 • Chapter 5 • Chapter 6