‘Legion’ Recap: A Romance of the Mind
Warning: This post contains spoilers for the “Chapter 2” episode of Legion.
There is just as much bouncing from reality to fantasy and back again in this episode of Legion as there was in the pilot, but it’s definitely easier to follow. David (Dan Stevens) is taken on a trip through his memories — unreliable as they are — while the attempts of his sister, Amy (Katie Aselton), to find him draw the attention of the people tracking her brother.
Related: Catch Up on ‘Legion’ With Our Recaps
The Plot
David is taken to Summerland, where Dr. Bird (Jean Smart) helps David begin to control his telepathic powers. Ptonomy (Jeremie Harris) does “memory work” with Bird and David, and they explore his past — including good times with his parents, drug escapades with Lenny (Aubrey Plaza) before they were institutionalized, and therapy sessions with Dr. Poole (Scott Lawrence). Cary (Bill Irwin) — who may also talk to people who aren’t there — puts him in an MRI machine. A claustrophobic reaction triggers David’s powers, and he teleports the entire MRI machine outside of the building to escape its enclosure at the same time as he sees his sister being taken away by Division 3. David wants to leave Summerland to rescue her, but Syd (Rachel Keller) persuades him to stay and control his powers first. The Eye (Mackenzie Gray) sits down with Amy and begins his interrogation.
A Romance of the Mind
The tender moments between David and Syd are a welcome respite from the tension of the rest of the show. It’s blissfully uncomplicated — just two people with intimacy issues trying to get over their issues to become close. And isn’t that all any of us are doing with our lives on a daily basis? Syd’s touch-based power is really just a magnification of a perfectly ordinary inability to be vulnerable, and David’s inability to block out the thoughts of others is easily recognizable to any particularly empathic person who struggles not to break down crying every time they see a homeless person or a commercial with babies. Superpower as metaphor is why the genre is still vital after all this time.
What Are We Missing Here?
Everything has a sense of impending dread and malice as secrets are uncovered. Sometimes those secrets are unintentional — like David’s deleting the kitchen incident with Philly (Ellie Araiza) from his memory. The video skip effect is often used to disorient (think of the girl crawling out of the TV in The Ring), but here it’s used to illustrate the unreliability of his memory.
Related: ‘Legion’ Star Dan Stevens on Being ‘Confidently Weird,’ as the World’s Most Powerful Mutant
Sometimes the secrets are deliberate, as when Melanie Bird says, “You’re very important to us, David… to me.” That — along with the fact that David can’t see the faces of his parents in his memories — fuels speculation that she may be his mother. Of course, even if we could see their faces, that might not establish who his parents really are. In the first episode, he confuses Dr. Bird for the Interrogator when they come for Syd at Clockworks.
Other times, it’s just associations. The handles in the plastic room are similar to the apparatus in the stress test given by the Scientologists. Have David and Syd escaped from Division 3 only to fall into the hands of a cult with an agenda of its own? In this show, even the simplest things are enough to stoke paranoia.
The Demon With Yellow Eyes
It’s becoming clearer that someone is telling David to hide his powers. More than likely, this is a someone inside his head. In the comics, David had dissociative identity disorder (what used to be known as multiple personality disorder), and various aspects of his fractured psyche would, at various times, be controlling his mind. The Demon often appears near when he uses his powers. Is it urging him to use them or hide them? One of Legion’s personalities in the X-Men: Legacy series is a little yellow goblin who represents his father, Professor X. The Demon may be a distorted vision of Charles Xavier, who perhaps advised him not to let anyone know what he was capable of to protect himself.
Related: Ken Tucker Reviews ‘Legion’: Marvel’s Best TV Show Yet
Blink and You’ll Miss It
Vapor, the drug that David and Lenny are freebasing out of the ceramic frog, appears to be unrelated to anything in the comics. However, in District X — a quickly canceled title from the mid-’00s — there is a drug called Toad Juice that turns out to be the secretions of a mutant named Toad Boy.
What is The World’s Angriest Boy in the World? It’s not an actual book — Amazon doesn’t list any books by Heathcliff Marr — though its Edward Gorey-like illustrations make it seem familiar. It’s clearly a construction of the show, but more important, it may be a construction of David’s. Is the Angriest Boy another personality? Is that who is in Dr. Poole’s closet?
That poster of Saturn’s moon Enceladus on the wall of David’s childhood bedroom is a fantastic piece of set dressing that speaks to his love of astronomy, but it’s an anachronism. Despite its retro look, it was part of a series of posters created in 2016 by the good folks at JPL. This isn’t meant to point out an error — after all, David’s memory has repeatedly been shown to be faulty, so he could have easily slipped a more recent experience into an old one — so much as it’s a recommendation to print out a poster for yourself.
Music Notes
“Chapter 2” contained some great tunes: It has “Don’t Say Goodbye” by Johnny Woodson, Thomas Dolby’s “Hyperactive!” from the end credits, and, sadly, FX hasn’t made that melancholy cover of “Road to Nowhere” by Talking Heads — sung by Rachel Keller — available anywhere. Yet.
Legion airs Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on FX.
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