Legion (2017-Present)

I’m really glad I decided to check out this show.  Objectively, I can recognize that it’s not perfect, but I love it so much that I really don’t mind.  It’s offbeat, engrossing, and visually arresting, full of terrific acting and neat themes.  In a media landscape with many, many flavors of superhero/comic book shows, this might be the most original and ambitious that I’ve seen (premise spoilers.)

For most of David’s life, it’s been his understanding that he’s sick, and he’s been in and out of mental health facilities for a number of years.  Things seem to start looking up for him when he meets Syd, an engaging fellow patient, and they enter into a relationship (working around Syd’s intense aversion to being touched.)  However, a freak incident at the hospital turns David’s entire life inside out, and before he knows it, he’s kidnapped by a shadowy government organization and then broken out by a clandestine group of mutants with the most mindbending claim of all:  that David’s apparent mental illness is actually a collection of unrecognized superpowers.  He dives headlong into the idea of being immensely powerful rather than sick, but as he and his new friends delve into his past to sort out the truth of his powers from the trauma of his experiences, they realize that things in David’s psyche might not be as clear-cut as originally anticipated.

The X-Men universe and mutants have always provided fertile ground for exploring issues of social oppression and discrimination in a superhero format, and Legion does some tremendous work in looking at how thoroughly not knowing you have powers could potentially mess someone up.  When your telepathy is called “hearing voices,” when your insistence that you’ve seen objects move by themselves are called hallucinations, and when the destruction caused by those objects actually moving (never when anyone else can see, of course) is called a violent outburst.  Even if matters weren’t more complicated than both David’s doctors and mutant friends might think, that right there is more than enough to do a lasting number on his sense of who he is, and I love watching David and his friends grapple with it.

Like Into the Badlands, the other recent show I’ve picked up, Legion is a visual feast, but in a completely different way.  While the former reminds me somewhat of Kings, the topnotch production design and attention to visual detail here makes me think more of Hannibal – fitting, since both shows deal heavily with mental states and depict that in a primarily visually-inventive way.  What Legion lacks in Hannibal’s sumptuously-grotesque beauty, it makes up for in psychedelic trippiness (the fairly-rudderless timeframe setting helps in that regard.)  I really like how it portrays the freaky goings-on in David’s head.  It’s not afraid to get super weird, flitting between different genre conventions and pulling out numerous subtle cues and tricks as the narrative slips off its linear tracks in disorienting ways.

At the center of the show is Dan Stevens as David.  I think he does a great job with the character, leaning into David’s fragility and confused psyche while still maintaining his dignity and personhood – this is a character who can veer wildly between extremes, but Stevens’s performance helps it all feel cohesive.  Also, his American accent sounds great.  The series also features great work from Jean Smart, Bill Irwin (who became something of a surprise favorite for me,) and an excellently-offbeat Jemaine Clement.  I’m less familiar with Rachel Keller, Amber Midthunder, and Jeremie Harris, but all of them do fine work as well, and Hamish Linklater turns in a cool performance in a more minor role.  When it comes to the acting, though, all praise to Aubrey Plaza.  In the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say anything about her character, but over the course of season 1, she’s an absolute force of nature – so, so great.  Even if the show were lacking on the whole (which it isn’t,) I’d be grateful to it just because her performance exists.

Warnings

Disturbing images, strong thematic elements, violence, sexual content, language, and drinking/smoking/drug use.