Full and
complete spoilage ahead: here we go.
I was
amused by Lenny, David’s sarcastic best friend in the hospital, during the
pilot and was disappointed when she was killed (and in such a horrific way,
too.) I was intrigued when she showed up
again in David’s psyche, even more so when it became apparent that she was
acting as something of a devil on his shoulder, both berating him personally
and encouraging him to distrust his new friends. Then doubts are placed on David’s memories,
with people from his past indicating that he was never friends with a woman
named Lenny at all, but rather a man named Benny. Clearly, something was up.
And how.
The deeper into the season we go, the more we realize that David’s psychological
damage is more than just trauma from his misunderstood experiences with his
powers. No – a malevolent force has
curled up inside his head and been feeding on his power, editing David’s
memories to suit its purposes. It takes
numerous forms. The yellowed-eyed demon
is the most blatantly up-to-no-good-looking, with the World’s Angriest Little
Boy in the World a close second. There’s
also King, the childhood dog David doesn’t realize he never had; King isn’t
inherently creepy until you realize he’s a demonstration of just how long this
thing has been getting under David’s skin.
But Lenny
– Lenny is its voice. As the folks at
Summerland dig deeper and David retreats further and further into his head, it
takes on greater agency, convincing David to let it (temporarily? ha!) get in the driver’s seat of his
body/powers to help him rescue his sister from Division 3. It plays the tempter as it shows David some
of the potential of his powers; the astral-plane “white room” is huge for David
and Syd, who can’t touch in the physical world, but it’s also a dangerous door
to open, as David wouldn’t be the first telepath to get lost in an astral world
of his own creation.
I used
“Lenny” to avoid spoilers in the title of the post, but it’s high time we used
its real name: Shadow King. The Shadow King is creepy as all hell, both
in the way it dementedly lays waste to anyone who opposes it and in the
seductively-inviting way it gets David to poison his own thoughts against
himself. It builds prisons, it creates
worlds, it rips bodies in half, and it takes a perverse joy in all of it. The Shadow King is half fugitive, hiding out
inside David until it’s strong enough to tear the world apart, and half junkie,
living off the rush David’s power gives it.
So insanely freaky and so, so
watchable.
Aubrey
Plaza is just stunning in the role – can’t take my eyes off her. She’s deadpan, sinister, sultry, vulgar,
dangerous, manic, collected, swaggering, and darkly comic as fits the bill, and
she’s just perfect every time. One of
the best portrayals I’ve seen of a non-human character that doesn’t involve
prosthetics or makeup; everything about her says, “Something’s not right
here.” I really appreciate showrunner
Noah Hawley for seeing her and realizing what she could bring to the role. Evidently, “Lenny” was originally written to be played by a man, and when Plaza was
cast, all that changed was the pertinent pronouns, with the rest of her
dialogue staying as-is. The result is a
character who feels really uniqe, and Plaza just tears it up from start to
finish.
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