Legion Season 3
Review
Legion has been my second favorite show since GOT but because of its mundane and amateurish closing season; I guess you can say it has been my favorite. I want to take this time to look at the Legion’s final season and convey it out of my fanboy perception to the television adaptation. The superhero genre is loaded with both highly successful and futile attempts to find that next score. Legion falls somewhere on the middle of this scale as far from futile but not as successful as we know a Marvel program can be.
The Legion character hails from the Marvel comics and was created by writer Chris Claremont and artist Bill Sienkiewicz. They wanted to explore a superhero with clear mental health issues and what is a better way to get the most out of that by making him telepathic. As the son of Charles Xavier, David Haller has telepathy as the stem of his power that permits him to tap into the astral plane. Legion advances the dangers of his powers because of an illness from his mother’s side of the family. In the show the disorder is schizophrenia but split personality disorder in the comics. The comic version creates a personality for every power he can manifest. We are looking at the show through his schizophrenic outlook and also gives us a warped perception of the world. I found the alterations they made to the character was essential for this to work for television.
In season three David, depicted by Dan Stevens, has all but total control over his abilities. He starts a search for a mutant with the ability to time travel. The radical Division 3 now backed with the Shadow King, David’s nemesis and parasitic Omega level mutant, hurry find David before he can do any major damage. David has garnered a following and lives isolated with them, not causing any trouble. The time traveler David has been reaching out to arrives, and he puts his plan into motion to reset the events that ruined his life. David vows to use the time traveler to warn his family about the Shadow King and kill that past version of him. Both Shadow Kings are played by Navid Negahban. David discovers that his travels have disrupted the nature of time. Despite this he continues risking the fate of the existing world by breaking the laws of time for his own selfish reasons, truly making him the villain of the series. This justifies Division 3 and the information given in earlier season. Albeit, not in the same way because of the future intervention.
I must say that I agree with these choices coming in from a story standpoint about the themes of the show. The hold of perspective and reality are the same and you can always see it vary on this show between the characters’ mindset. Those perspectives of each major character’s reality comes full circle in each of their concluding arcs. It gives the story real closure by the end. You look at the characters as they were in Season 1, and an arrant change occurs for everyone. What is interesting about a show’s characterization is the way they continually evolve what drives the characters. Despite how much these characters have changed up to the beginning of Season 3, the final evolution brings them around to their first season motives. I’ll explain how these changes helped bring a reasonable ending to a show that makes you question the sense of reason or if reason even makes sense.
The most impressive progression I have seen for this series is Amal Farouk, The Shadow King, who serves as the chief antagonist of the series. The complexities of time travel on the story allows for Amal to become an ally to David willingly while not disrupting the status quo. Amal Farouk leeched onto David’s mind since birth but this season the Shadow King admits to how he unintentionally shared experiences and emotions he never felt while living in David’s mind. He confesses to loving David as his own son by the end of the season. The current Shadow King has become an after thought for David by this time; as he is focused on killing the past Farouk before he enters his baby body. Noah Hawley, the man responsible adapting Legion for TV, felt like having a different villain every season was the wrong way to go for this story. In this way he could stick to the show’s ideals in every way. The way he made use of the time travel aspect to allow him to turn the antagonist into a character sympathetic to his enemy was a well executed way to continue to throw people’s position off. Past Farouk becomes the main antagonist of the season.
The view of good and evil is continually challenged throughout the season to those who are familiar with the show. Division 3 is on the hunt for David; who has gone off grid and started his own cult. They come close to succeeding and you see how they truly believe David is evil and will do whatever it takes to end him. When Switch meets him earlier, he seems to do nothing evil of the sort. This makes Division 3 operating with the Shadow King look like the evil ones. These were the support characters from before now actively trying to stop the protagonist. By the middle of the season I started to see David as revealing more villainous aspects. He thinks of himself as a god and the lessons the Shadow King gave him about using his powers still dwell in his mind. When the world is in danger from his time traveling antics he still presses on and destroys whatever is in his way all the while putting time and space in danger for his own personal gain. The traditional structure of the hero isn’t used in Legion but it still sticks to the normal dynamics of protagonist, goal and antagonist.
Legion has a sense of putting the viewer into the mind of every character where their reality can be visually conveyed. This is the way the writers get you to believe that each character thinks what they are doing is right. Probably because most of the abilities deal with the authority of the psyche; revealing all character motivations. For someone not familiar with the series it would seem like the story is still a bit disorienting, but that is necessary to remind us of David’s state of mind. The events of Season 3 are much easier to follow than the earlier seasons if you follow the series. Sydney Barrett, played by Rachel Keller from Fargo, sees her mentality come full circle. The growth for her was beyond her character motivations and literal. At the beginning of this season she is bitter and has utterly given up on David. Yet during the season she learns how to love again beyond the naive and the hopelessness. She realizes love is in hope and this is displayed through her actions. When the time arose, she chose to save David’s baby self when she had come to the past to put an end to Legion. While she is no longer gullible enough to believe that Legion can be saved, Syd doesn’t let the hate for what he has done blind her to the hope David’s baby self poses if they can help Legion’s plan succeed. In a flip to season 2 the supporting characters go from hunting David to aiding him.
David’s logic and needs are revealed in a satisfying form of fulfillment for the viewer. The addition of Charles Xavier, played by Harry Lloyd, made it clear that David would get the answers he wanted to know about his parents. Gabrielle Haller, played by Stephanie Corneliussen, is the first to be visited as it shows the events through her perspective when David takes his first trip through time. They jump between the period when the Shadow King attempts to take David’s mind and to when Charles and Gabrielle met. They found out she was a schizophrenic from the Nazi internment camps and how Charles met her at a psychiatric hospital. This hits a sweet spot for David because it reminds him of how he met Syd in Season 1. After his failure to keep the past Shadow King out of his youth, David undergoes a change that yields a vitriolic line of thinking. Even if he failed, he still saw firsthand where his power and disabilities stem from. He sees his mother and father together with her showering David’s baby self with affection. These are the answers and feelings David has longed for the entire series. This is when we see the side of David we had a glance of through Syd the entire time. David invades Division 3 and exposes the side of him that is Legion when Syd accesses his mind to halt him. Legion begins to do whatever he deems necessary under his screwed sense of logic on the current reality after coming so close to getting the future he wants for himself. Becoming more like the Shadow King he continues his quest despite time itself coming under attack and bringing a world ending plague upon the fabric of reality. He begins to show his lack of empathy to his friends and those who worship him.
Legion’s descent into revenge and trying to redeem himself puts everyone else in a position to pick up the pieces. He gets back to the time traveler after laying waste to most of the Division 3 for capturing her. In this trip back they force their way to Charles’ position in the timeline where he goes to meet Amal Farouk aka the Shadow King for the first time. Here he plans to persuade his father to stop Farouk from taking his baby self by teaming up in killing him as he exists in this time; before he has a chance to have David at all. They are circumvented by the current Farouk but Charles deals with him while Legion assaults the past Shadow King. Legion overwhelms The Shadow King at first but Farouk turns the tables on him in the astral plane. The Shadow King preys on Legion’s final insecurities about the fact that his parents gave him away, and thus must not have loved him. Farouk uses the notion of David’s abandonment to imprison him.
Once Legion commences with reconciling his mother’s love for him in their first trip back in time that he rejects the Shadow King’s notion that he is not loved. He is able to breach the Shadow King’s hold and goes on to finish the kill. Charles ends up interceding, and they make a deal with the Farouks for peace as long as they steer clear of their family. This is the moment that real hope for David peers through his selfish demands. Legion accepts the deal after Charles confesses to how his failure was in leaving him in the first place and that his love for him wants to make it right. David hears what he was willing to destroy the fabric of time for. Giving him a clear resolution to all answers he sought since Season 1. He defeats his nemesis and gains control of his powers. He regains his friends through the limitless possibilities of his baby self which becomes the current him. Then finds out that his mother and father loves him and where he comes from.
Now I can’t go through Season 3 without commenting on Lauren Tsai’s performance as Switch, the time traveler that David enlists for help, and what I thought could have been handled better. I thought Switch fit in with the eldritch tone of the show. At first, I thought that she was the adaptation of Time Sink, the personality the comic Legion made for time traveling capabilities, to pay a little homage to the actual Legion comics. The viewer learns that Switch is some kind of Fourth Dimensional being. The Fourth Dimension being Time. I felt like this was a bit much to take in even for a show like Legion and that this revelation wasn’t matured well enough to give that credibility for the viewer. No explanation for why she is loyal to David to the point where she would sacrifice so much for him or use her power for him and no one else can be assessed. Legion makes it’s pacing and storytelling disorienting on purpose but never before did it have a character motivation issue like this.
Ptonomy Wallace / Mainframe character, played by Jeramie Harris was also lacking in this regard. They basically brought him back solely on comic relief. They didn’t have much for him to do and I could imagine this entire season without him and it would still play out the same way. There isn’t one aspect of the story that he contributed to and his role seem to be: diagnose the problem for the episode, then make you laugh. Mission accomplished if that was what they wanted. For the sake of the story and what happened to his character in Season 2, I was expecting more. The actors and actresses still made what they had work and through them I was always connected to what was going on.
Legion has been a well executed project that I feel will open the minds of others to take more creative approaches to a genre that has become so adaptable and diverse. This is a show of perspective. The story is visually told to use suspension of disbelief that the powers hold on the character and viewer alike. These powers being linked to the psyche makes for clever ways to film these characters’ actions while visually tying the viewer into the reality the show forms. The character of Legion was the perfect way to explore and experiment this way. The psychic premise gives the show the creative liberty to express the feelings and motivations of each character and situation by how those characters comprehend it. If it came on at an earlier time and was easier to digest in one viewing then it wouldn’t have gone under the radar like it did. This show will be classified as a cult classic because of the content and the fact that it isn’t easy to follow. I will vouch that more weight to something if you have to explore for it. This show is for those who want to break away from the ordinary and respect storytelling that puts what you need in front of you visually but won’t reveal it. It might even trick you. I can tell you Legion is worth the binge watch and if you can find your way through the astral plane then you will find that the foundation of this show holds the ideals we can all relate to through one of these well played characters. Love is universal and drives the story of Legion.