"Legion," Year Three

I went into the third season of "Legion" very worried.  While I still enjoyed the show, I felt that the second season had become increasingly obtuse and inaccessible.  Certain changes to the characters and their relationships felt too extreme, potentially painting the writers into a corner.  And while I appreciated that the characters were morally greying, it was also becoming difficult to root for any of them.  

The third season doesn't change course, but it makes a difference that it really commits to its own special brand of madness.  David has now set himself up as the guru leader of his own personal cult, with Lenny as chief minion. The Summerland/Division 3 folks, assisted by the Shadow King, are trying to hunt him down and stop him from destroying the world.  As the premiere makes clear, Syd is now very willing and able to kill David dead to ensure he doesn't become the monster tyrant we've glimpsed from the future. There's just one little hitch - David has become friends with a time-traveler, Switch (Lauren Tsai), who is willing to help him muck with the timeline to an alarming degree.  

It's been observed that genre properties tend to introduce time travel whenever they find themselves narratively stuck somewhere they don't want to be.  The MCU and "X-men" movies, for instance, have taken advantage of this. With "Legion," it feels like less of a course correction than something that was planned from the beginning.  The third season is entirely built around the concepts of time travel, cause and effect, and David's obsession with trying to fix things. We meet the younger versions of his parents, Charles (Harry Lloyd) and Gabrielle (Stephanie Corneliussen), and a younger version of the Shadow King too.  

"Legion" continues to be visually inventive and wonderfully innovative with its storytelling.  Traveling through time is visualized as traversing a murky corridor that Switch accesses by drawing neon-lit doors in the air.  There are monsters that inhabit the corridor, the time demons, who look like a nightmarish cross between Cheshire Cats and Blue Meanies.  Their arrival is announced by the sound of a ticking clock, and with each tick their seemingly frozen images keep advancing closer, and closer.  The episode where they're introduced was directed by Daniel Kwan of the DANIELS directing team, who does all kinds of fascinating, experimental things in portraying how time can be warped.  Once sequence is entirely done in still photographs. In another, Lenny watches an entire human lifetime play out in a few seconds.  

This is in addition to the usual "Legion" graphic extravagance.  There are song numbers, a rap battle with Jason Mantzoukas, pastoral fantasy interludes, and much kung-fu fighting.  David has spruced himself up with brightly colored clothing and a color-coded new compound for his hippie-like followers.  Switch's eye-catching wardrobe immediately sets her apart, and she communicates with a distant father (Ben Wang) only through screens and recordings, which she listens to over ever-present headphones.  The show still looks and feels like a comic-book in the best way. The soundtrack is similarly impressive, and deployed with expert precision.          

   

But while all the style is impeccable, the substance left me a little wanting.  I could follow what was going on better than in the previous season, and I'm glad that the creators addressed some longstanding issues with characters like Syd, but parts of the story felt neglected.  There's no resolution for some of my favorites, and others have little more than cameos. I'm okay with how David's story ultimately concludes, but I think it could have been set up better. Navid Negahban distinguishes himself this year, but it felt like major chunks of the Shadow King's story were simply abandoned to play out offscreen.  

"Legion" remains the most daring and unlikely corner of the vast Marvel media universe.  I don't think we're going to see anything like it again in a hurry, especially now that Fox and all its various holdings are part of Disney.  And I don't know that Noah Hawley will ever have so much free reign over a television series in the future. This is a show so niche and so off-the-wall, and yet requires so much patience and indulgence, I'm delighted that it exists, but at the same time I have no idea who I could safely recommend it to.  David Lynch fans? Really dedicated Marvel comics lovers?      

Maybe I could just recommend the pilot and the Daniel Kwan episode.  And then, I'd let people find their way down the rabbit hole themselves.

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