Legion, FX’s hallucinogenic superhero saga from Fargo mastermind Noah Hawley, finished its first season the other night. A heady mix of comic books, avant garde cinema, and all-around headfuckery, Legion threw a lot of ideas and images at the wall in its detailing troubled young man David Haller’s (Dan Stevens) journey from mentally ill patient in a psych ward to god-level psychic.
Loosely inspired by various X-Men characters (though that tenuous connection strengthened as the show progressed) Legion owed service to no canon beyond its own desire to one-up itself with surreal weirdness each week. It may be the single weirdest thing to ever air on television that didn’t have David Lynch’s name in front of it, and the show left itself a wide open canvas for next season (the show has already been renewed).
A show trying to do as much as Legion did in eight episodes is going to have things that work and things that don’t, so now that the full eight-hours of Legion have been unspooled, let’s take stock of which elements sung, and which fell flat.
WHAT WORKED: AUBREY PLAZA
Look, it’s not like it’s ever been a secret that Aubrey Plaza is great. From the moment she first started stealing every scene that wasn’t nailed down in Parks & Recreation, it’s been clear that she has devastating comic timing and a killer deadpan, qualities that have gone on to great use in post-Parks projects.
But Legion has been a true star-making turn for Plaza, the moment when a talent goes supernova and becomes undeniable. As the endlessly shifting face of the Shadow King, the psychic parasite that tormented our various heroes throughout the season,Plaza was funny, endearing, terrifying, sexy, mesmerizing and most of all fearless. As Legion jumped from style to style, Plaza jumped with it, ably handling whatever new nuttiness the show saw fit to throw at her. Chicago-style dance number? No problem. A black-and-white, silent horror film? Check. A twitchy, slobbering zombie monster? Child’s play.
Honestly, if Legion had failed on every other metric and succeeded only as a deliver system for “Aubrey Plaza Being Amazing” GIFs, the entire endeavor would have been worth it. Which is good, because Legion did fail in places. Such as:
WHAT DIDN’T WORK: THE SUMMERLAND CREW
Introduce as a sort of off-brand X-mansion for the off-brand X-Men that populate Legion, there was perhaps no bigger ball dropped in this first season than the crew of mutants that rescued David in the first episode and worked with him to unravel the secrets of his broken mind. Each character was given maybe one (1) characteristic and little more, and the show never convincingly dramatized any kind of relationship between these people and David, or even these people between each other. When David’s Rational Mind referred to them as his “friends” in Chapter 7, I was a bit taken aback.
Talented folks like Jean Smart and Bill Irwin sure did their best to inject their roles with personality and pathos, but Legion was so singlemindedly focused on David and the nature of his illness/powers, that everything else was back-burnered to the point of nonexistence. The final hour began to make intimations of deeper character relationships and ideologies behind these people, suggesting that Legion plans to open up as it progresses, but so far the first season goes, the Summerland crew could all be junked tomorrow and Legion wouldn’t miss them.
WHAT WORKED: JEMAINE CLEMENT
Jemaine Clement is awesome. I know this, you know this, and if you haven’t seen What We Do in the Shadows, you watch that and you learn it quick. As Dr. Oliver Bird, a swinging 60’s psychic scientist locked into the astral plane for years, Clement was allowed to indulge all of his most fun tics as a performer, and Hawley and his writers clearly adored feeding him bizarre line after bizarre line.
But more importantly, Clement’s Oliver was one of the few characters to actually feel like an articulated character. He may have been mostly speaking wack-a-doo pseudo-science gibberish, but there was a specificity to his mannerisms and utterances that much of the rest of the cast lacked. Oliver seemed to have an actual unique perspective on the events of the story, and didn’t simply exist as a reflector or reflection of whatever David was going through that week.
Chapter 8 concludes with Oliver possessed by the Shadow King, neatly pairing up the two best performances and two best characters on the show for at least a little while into the next season. The only downside to that is that Plaza and Clement may be so much fun, the rest of the show will simply pale in comparison.
WHAT DIDN’T WORK: THE ROMANCE
OK, here’s where this is going to start getting divisive. I imagine that if you are someone for whom the love story between David and touch-averse Syd (Rachel Keller) worked, this section of the show played like gangbusters. It didn’t get there for me, for a few reasons.
Much of the problem comes down to the basic stylistic structure of Legion. The show endeavored to put you in the head of David as he grappled with an endlessly fluctuating reality, and at this it was largely successful. But, big but, that also made it incredibly difficult to invest in any real way with what was happening on screen, since at any moment the show could pull the rug out from you and reveal that what you were seeing was a dream, a memory, a psychic/astral projection, or some combination of all of the above that had been tampered and tweaked by the Shadow King. Legion’s nature was such that the show was constantly doubling back on previously dramatized moments to question the veracity of what we saw, and you can only do that so many times before I as a viewer simply tune out and refuse to engage with anything.
It doesn’t help that Syd was as thinly written as the other non-Davids in the cast (Legion’s relationship to women in general is…weird, and I sorta imagine if the show had been a bigger hit if it would’ve drawn the same sort of intensive inquiries into use of gender that something like, say, Westworld copped when it caught on) for much of the season, her own neuroses and traumas largely shrugged aside to focus on the Ongoing Problem of David. Keller brought a lot to the role, but there’s only so much that she can do, and it’s not like she and Stevens had some kind of astronomical chemistry that could wipe away any narrative deficiencies. As with many of the other problems noted above and below, the season finale suggests that the world of the show will be opening up in future seasons, and hopefully that will include room for Syd to stand as her own character, and the love story between her and David to become as vibrant and important as the show’s scripts keep insisting it is.
WHAT WORKED: DAN STEVENS
Stevens got his start playing a dreamboat on Downton Abbey, but his work beyond that show suggests an interest in both defying his matinee idol good looks and a canny understanding how to subvert them. Stevens can turn on the charm like no one’s business, but he can also redirect that charm into genuine menace. Stevens can be quite unnerving when he wants to be (please go rent The Guest) and Legion made great use of that. In a season that frequently seemed to be sprinting at 100 MPH, Stevens did his level best to jog ahead and offer his full commitment to whatever daffy idea landed on him that day.
Motherfucker learned how to play the banjo!
If Legion frequently didn’t add up to more than the sum of its parts (about which, more in a minute) then Stevens’ intense dedication to his role made it seem like the show did. He and Keller did their damnedest to invest this candy-colored madness with real soul and weight, and if it didn’t always work, then at least that effort was there. I have no idea what sort of plans, Hawley has for what happens to David next, but I’m more than certain that Stevens will play it as well as anybody could. Provided he’s given something good to play. Which brings me to my last point:
WHAT DIDN’T WORK: DAVID HALLER
And this, I think, is the big bet that didn’t pay off. The dice-roll that came up snake eyes. There are plenty of series which feature a main character trying to solve a mystery, but it’s another thing entirely to have a main character who IS a mystery, and to gear the entire show around solving that.
This had a number of implications. First and worstly, it meant that David had to be designed as a blank slate so that each week could reveal new facts or new facets of old facts, with our understanding of the facts changing all the time. But without a strong central figure to hold onto in the storm of bravura technique and fractured narrative, there was very little reason to CARE about any of this. David, frankly, wasn’t a mystery we were given a reason to care about solving, and it left a massive hole at the center of the show.
This only compounded the other major problem, which was that every single other character was defined by their relationship to David and what they thought about David and what they said to each other about David. David became a Poochie-ian figure, the subject of every conversation and the sole point of interest for every character on the show. And with this season ending with David kidnapped by some unknown party, it seems likely that much of next season will be consumed, again, with characters standing around to discuss David and what David is and where David might be and what David’s role in the mutant-human conflict will be and David David David.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
As I’ve mentioned above, the season finale certainly made motions towards addressing some of these qualms, so it’s entirely possible, even likely, that Hawley and his team recognize that subsequent seasons will need to change the game up.
I hope so, because for as frustrating as Legion could often be, the moments when it really started to hum were unlike anything ever seen on television, and as a viewer, they felt tremendously satisfying. The apex of the season was the penultimate episode, Chapter 7, in which all of the show’s narrative, thematic, stylistic, and character interlocked together beautifully, resulting in one of the most rousing and entertaining hours of television that Hawley has yet given us.
Legion’s been picked up for a second season, so here’s hoping that Team Hawley take what works and build on what doesn’t and come back with something bolder, wilder, and even more heartfelt. I’m excited, and until then at least we have a new season of Fargo to obsess over.
Get it at Amazon:
Legion Season 1 – [Blu-ray] | [DVD] | [Instant]