I am pretty, I am loved. A review of FX’s Legion.

FX’s show Legion, is, on the surface, a superhero show nominally set in the X-Men universe. From the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Agents of Shield to DC’s various forays with Supergirl, Arrow, and The Flash, it is easy to say that the superhero television genre is now saturated and formulaic. The hero gains powers, overcomes a personal challenge, beats their way through hordes of easily defeated mooks that lead towards a powerful villain, and lastly, after a difficult fight, wins the day and saves the city, the world, the universe.

Occasionally, some of these shows explore deeper conflicts and ideas (Jessica Jones tackling consent, rape, and the idea of victimhood; Luke Cage dealing with with race, civil rights, and corruption). Legion, no less a superhero show than any other, escapes these common tropes by pushing for something deeper — and more meaningful.

Legion wholeheartedly bucks every convention imaginable. It is not a show about punching one’s way to victory — instead, it is about interactions and relationships shaped by love, intimacy, and mental illness . That is what sets it ahead of the pack and makes it worth your time.

1. Why is Legion so special?

Legion is unique in that it is written and filmed in a way that would be ambitious for a show that was specifically an arthouse production. Instead, it is a mainstream show crafted in a unique and provocative manner.

2. Why is Legion historic?

Legion is special because it pushes boundaries usually untouched by a superhero show. While superhero literature tends to at least pay lip service towards being an allegory for a social issue, this is one of the first to make those issues central.

3. How did Legion make you feel?

This may be the hardest of these to answer. I have a person very close to me who had a psychotic break, and they’ve not been able to watch legion because it hits too close to home. So, lots of mixed feelings. On a certain level, though, it’s interesting, because seeing that kind of cognitive and mental disconnect and dissociation lets me understand what happened then more fully. On the other hand, it’s a very entertaining show, well crafted, funny, and I’m hooked.

4. What should I look when I watch it?

The primary thing to look for in Legion is the careful attention to detail that has gone into every scene. Nothing in this show is there arbitrarily, and when it is, even that arbitrariness has a reason.

5. What kind of mood should I be in when I watch it?

One should not watch this when looking for lighthearted stupid comedy. It’s funny, it’s witty, and maybe even lighthearted at times, but it also requires quite a bit of focus and attention. If only to pick up on everything.

[SPOILERS BELOW]

The show opens on David, played by Dan Stevens. He has yet to adopt the series eponymous moniker. We are introduced to a joyful child and taken through his transformation into a traumatized young man, diagnosed with schizophrenia. We conclude with his internment at Clockworks, a mental hospital.

“A passenger on the cruise ship Mental Health”

David spends his days as “a passenger of the cruise ship Mental Health,” kept company by a young woman named Lenny (an excellent and creepy performance by Aubrey Plaza).

The story really gets going when a new patient is introduced to the hospital. Syd (Rachel Keller) is a mysterious young woman seemingly terrified of physical contact. Despite that, David and Syd form a romantic relationship. When Syd is discharged, seemingly “better,” David steals a kiss, and the two switch bodies. Chaos overwhelms the hospital as Syd in David’s body loses control over the incredible powers that David has staunchly repressed, transforming all the doors of the hospital into walls and killing Lenny. David escapes the hospital and takes refuge at his sister’s entirely normal suburban home, where he is confronted by Lenny. He is ultimately picked up by Division Three, a wing of the government bent on the pursuit and death of mutants.

Powers

David is rescued by a group of mutants (including Syd) and is brought to the refuge of Summerland. At Summerland, he learns that he is not sick, but that his manifesting powers are causing him problems and that he needs to learn to control them.

They visit his memories, subject him to a battery of tests, and discover that another entity is hiding in his head. This psychic parasite latched itself onto David’s psyche and powers when he was young. As it feeds on David’s psychic potential, it grows stronger, carefully marshaling its strength for its final play: the annihilation of David’s mind.

The Devil with the Yellow Eyes

The Devil with the Yellow Eyes, perhaps, is the eponymous character just as much as is David. It wears many faces in its hunt and more accurately incarnates the biblical story of the Exorcism of the Gerasenes, which is the origin for the name and title Legion.

On the other side of the sea, they arrived in the region of the Gerasenes. As soon as Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an unclean spirit came from the tombs and met Him. He had been living in the tombs and could no longer be restrained, even with chains. Though he was often bound with chains and shackles, he had broken the chains and shattered the shackles. Now no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day in the tombs and in the mountains, he kept crying out and cutting himself with stones.

When the man saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees before Him. And he shouted in a loud voice, “What do You want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg You before God not to torture me.” For Jesus had already declared, “Come out of this man, you unclean spirit!”

“What is your name?” Jesus asked.

“My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.” And he begged Jesus repeatedly not to send them out of that region.

There on the nearby hillside a large herd of pigs was feeding. So the demons begged Jesus, “Send us to the pigs, so that we may enter them.”

He gave them permission, and the unclean spirits came out and went into the pigs, and the herd of about two thousand rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the water.

Superpowers in Legion, with one exception, reflect different aspects of intimacy. This is most obvious is Syd’s case, where any skin contact causes her to temporarily exchange bodies with the person she has touched. As she tells David, her first (and only) sexual encounter was at the age of sixteen, when she intentionally switched places with her unconscious mother and slept with her mother’s boyfriend. On the opposite end of the spectrum is white and middle-aged Cary, Summerland’s scientist. He shares his body with Kery, a twenty-something Native American woman, who sometimes emerges. Their relationship is symbiotic — even when she is outside his body, he, on some level, feels what she feels and even mirrors her motions. Ptonomy, one of Summerland’s therapists, can visit others’ memories, even those they themselves might not remember. The Eye, a government hunter of mutants, is able to see people, even when hidden, and can take on the shape and voice of those he hunts. He is insidious with this ability, luring unsuspecting prey into traps, preying on them at their most vulnerable.

David’s power, ultimately, is shaped by his past, and manifests itself most violently when he is feeling alone or betrayed, and his therapy is performed by allowing others to traipse through his most personal and private memories. Even the Devil with the Yellow Eyes embodies a twisted intimacy: It hides itself in David’s deepest memories, violates, reshapes, and rewrites itself into them, until David is no longer knows what reality is. Through this, the Devil of the Yellow Eyes, controls David.

That, at its core, is the central conceit of Legion: What is real? And is “real” real? As the Devil with the Yellow Eyes burrows deeper into David’s psyche, it wears many faces; its grotesque “real” face, and that of Lenny, of “The Angriest Boy in the World,” a gruesome storybook character, and even of David’s childhood dog, King (The last face leads to one of the most unnerving lines in the show: “But doctor, we didn’t have a dog.”)

Even other characters participate. In the first episode, the Division Three agents masquerading as police engage in a subtle gaslighting of David, trying to determine what he knows. They make David believe that Syd had never existed, that he had made her up as part of his delusions. “You idiot” He laughs, “I’m crazy! None of this is real, you’re all part of my delusion!”

This sets the tone of the show. From the earliest scenes, we are as no more sure than David of what is real. The careful cinematography, with its bright colors and odd camera angles, out of sequence scenes, and the exact same scenes replayed with key differences (such as a character being replaced by a different character) serve to keep the viewer on edge and questioning. One memorable sequence is shot entirely upside down, and in another, a Bollywood dance sequence appears randomly, never to be referenced again. A harrowing moment is shot entirely as a black and white silent film, complete with intertitles. Even scenes that take place in the supposed “real world” are constructed to keep the audience guessing, with anachronistic pieces forming the setting: people wear hairstyles and outfits reminiscent of the 60s while holding modern cellphones. A lighthouse is rendered cartoonishly, while Summerland, where David feels safe, is all white and light and trees and peace. We cannot know whether this is because David is an unreliable narrator and everything we see is filtered through his perception or because literally everything we have seen in the show so far has been a mental construct, David’s psyche resisting in its own way to the Devil with the Yellow Eyes, or some other, very real illness. We are forced to question everything.

If we take the events of the show at face value, even in the refuge of his mind David is not safe. He engages with the Devil who is wearing Lenny’s face, and ultimately lets it wholly in. It manipulates David into a Faustian bargain after having trapped him in his own consciousness. And it is here that the two facets of the show, intimacy and mental health, come together most poignantly.

David himself changes as the Devil possesses him, shifting from delicately erratic to callously confident. It is a change in personality of someone in the midst of a manic episode. He becomes selfish, rushing recklessly into action, and using and exploiting the people around him.

Syd, unfortunately, bears the brunt of of this. At first, David is caring and mostly respectful of her wishes, especially after understanding the reasoning behind them. (Their first kiss is only performed by their reflections in a window, and he says “our relationship is one of the mind.) However, as the Devil takes over, it, or David, builds a “mind palace” of sorts where Syd and he can be intimate in a way they cannot in the real world. While she is happy there at first, it is still counter to her earlier wishes to not be touched, especially as David grows more and more mercurial, first speaking to the Devil (as Lenny) in the adjacent room to their private place, and, afterwards, simply abandoning her there as he launches a one man assault on the government organization that had been hunting him. Syd’s trust is betrayed as he breaks the promise he had made to her: if they got lost, they would get lost together. And yet, when it’s revealed that David is no longer David, but a grotesque, gleeful monstrosity murdering that murders it’s way through a military complex, a rampage worthy of the “Angriest Boy in the World,” she holds onto hope that David can still be saved. It is her actions, her desperation, that ultimately leads the Summerland mutants to rescue David, and it is a poignant metaphor for loyalty in the face of illness.

While David never crosses the line into being an abusive partner to Syd, the Devil with the Yellow Eyes is, without a doubt, an abusive partner to David. While, for most of his life, it was content to hide and bide its time, eventually, the Devil wants more, and David suffers. As he does so, we see that it has been making David suffer his whole life. Even as it stuffs him into a far corner of his own mind while wearing the face of his friend, unable to move or protect those he loves, it says to him, “I’ve tried making you comfortable. I let you have your friends, your woman, but the fact is it’s too much work. And honestly, all I really need is your body. And your mind? Well, I could give a shit about your mind.” It is heavy handed in its sexual overtones, to be sure, but still powerful.

Legion, at its heart, is a superhero show, just one very different from the common fare. David ultimately defeats the Devil with the Yellow Eyes, though he does not do so alone, and gets the girl. Though the victory is tinged with defeat and loss, it is, ultimately a victory, as David is now free of the one thing that has been a constant in his life.