Andrew A. Smith
Tribune Content Agency
March 29, 2018 -- Legion Season 2, which premieres April 3 on FX, promises time jumps, psychic possession, strange bedfellows and fabulous dance routines. Oh, and possibly the end of everything.
Legion, as surely everyone must know, is based on a character in Marvel Comics: David Haller, the son of X-Men founder Charles Xavier, who suffers from dissociative personality disorder, with each of his personalities manifesting a different super-power. So he’s, you know, both the most powerful mutant ever, and also the most bonkers. He is called Legion (because of Matthew 8:28-34, look it up) and has the silliest hair in comics – it stands straight up, making him look like a demented paintbrush.
When FX created a show around this peculiar character, they had the wisdom to hire Noah Hawley, who as “Fargo” showrunner, is no stranger to peculiar. He has veered markedly from the comics, with “Legion” less of an X-Men show than an X-Men-adjacent one. And he took the concept of “unreliable narrator” one step further, with a show based on unreliable reality.
Credit: Matthias Clamer/FX
Dan Stevens plays David Haller on FX’s Legion, which sometimes means playing more than one personality.
Here’s what has already happened:
The first season was one of surreal self-discovery for Haller, with the troubled thirtysomething finding out that, after years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, he is not crazy. Instead, the voices he hears and visions he sees are real, and – bonus! – he may be the most powerful mutant in history. He also found true love, in the form of fellow psychiatric patient and mutant Syd Barrett (Rachel Keller), who can’t touch anyone without disastrous consequences. The bad news is that Haller uncovered the Shadow King, an evil psychic parasite of unimaginable power, that has been living in Haller and manipulating him for 30 years.
Haller was recruited by a mutant resistance group Summerland, led by Prof. X stand-in Melanie Bird (Jean Smart), while pursued by government group Division III, led by an implacable interrogator named Clark (Hamish Linklater). In the season finale, the Shadow King was expelled from Haller, but promptly took residence in Melanie’s mutant husband Oliver (Jemaine Clement). Oliver/Shadow King fled, taking with him his former façade, Haller’s street companion Lenny Busker (Aubrey Plaza), who is dead, but still hangs around somehow. Then, abruptly, Haller was sucked into a tiny metal ball and kidnapped before Barrett’s horrified eyes.
That’s probably just another Tuesday for the multi-talented Hawley, but for the rest of us it was mind-blowing television. And now Legion is back – and if the promos are to be believed, more hallucinatory than ever.
So here’s what’s coming up, according to various interviews, press releases, promos and trailers:
Haller will return to Summerland, after having been gone a year – but for him, it’s only been two days. Presumably figuring out what happened to him will be explained in the course of the season, but in the meantime this bizarre experience will exaggerate the gap between Haller’s perspective and those of everyone else.
Credit: Matthias Clamer/FX
Rachel Keller plays Syd Barrett on Legion, a mutant who can’t touch anyone without swapping bodies.
And, as usual, Haller will remain unstable and morally conflicted:
“There’s still a lot of internal conflict in David,” Stevens told Collider.com. “If you know the comic books, there’s still quite a few characters left in there that we’ve gotta deal with, at some point. Shadow King was a big deal, and there are some structural changes. The structure of the components of David have been reshuffled and they’re reconfiguring, at the same time that there’s this external threat and everybody is becoming much more aware of that.”
The comics books? Oh, yes, they remain a resource of great potential. Hawley hasn’t even scratched the surface of the various personalities established there. Dozens are available, including telekinetic cowboy Jack Wayne, telepathic anti-Israeli terrorist Jemail Karami, French “nightclub singer and occasional good-time girl” Tami Haar and my favorite, Johnny Gomorrah, who can turn people into salt.
And while Haller was held captive for a year, Summerland and Division III have formed a grudging partnership against their common foe, the Shadow King.
The Shadow King, too, is from the comics. When created by Chris Claremont and John Byrne in 1979, he was an evil psychic who battled a twentysomething Charles Xavier. In those pre-X-Men days, Prof. X was a sort of 1930s-style soldier of fortune, a globe-trotting do-gooder – Buz Sawyer with mutant powers. He ran across an evil version of himself in Cairo named Amahl Farouk (who resembled Sidney Greenstreet’s signor Ferrari in Casablanca), and defeated him on the psychic plane. Later, however, it was established that Farouk was just another mask for the Shadow King, a vile psychic entity of uncertain origin who has been feeding off mankind’s mental misery since the first nightmare.
It’s hard to say what parts of that origin apply on TV. In the first season, the Shadow King disguised himself as Lenny and “The Devil with the Yellow Eyes” (Quinton Boisclair), and possessed Oliver. In the second season, he’ll make his debut as Amahl Farouk (Navid Negahban of Homeland).
“Lenny and Oliver are being used by this character, Amahl Farouk,” Hawley told Joseph Schmidt of Entertainment Weekly. “He wears their faces from time to time. It’s his way of hiding himself. I had this thought of, ‘What does Freddy Krueger do during the day?’ I thought it was interesting, the idea of the downtime of these characters. They’re not being used and so what is reality like for them?”
Credit: Matthias Clamer/FX
Navid Negahban debuts on Season 2 of Legion as Amahl Farouk. Is he the Shadow King, or just another mask?
We get a hint in the trailers. In one, Lenny and Oliver are floating in a swimming pool, enjoying the sun and an endless supply of martinis – when they realize they are trapped, and have no idea how long they’ve been there. In another, Clement’s chops as a singer, songwriter and hoofer (seen in the cult-classic TV series Flight of the Conchords) are on display in a dance routine that somehow seems really threatening.
As for Lenny, not even the actress can answer the question of who or what she is any more.
“I don’t know,” Plaza told Anthony D'Alessandro of Deadline Hollywood. “It’s really scary to play a character who you don’t know who she is. I was being used as a vessel in the first season. Lenny almost became like David where she doesn’t know what’s real or who she is. For Season 2, it’s as though my power has been taken from me. Now we have to dig deeper. I can’t really answer that right now.”
All of this will be complicated by … well, as one promo puts it, what’s coming is “the end of everything.”
Another features Haller’s face shifting from one cast member to another, with each tossing in a part of what he is or might be – which makes a lot of sense, really. The upshot? “The real me,” Haller begins, before the others continue, “is an imminent threat to our future, our safety … a one-way ticket to our utter destruction.”
Or as beat poet Oliver puts it:
“So I bring you tonight’s play, about a fuzzy little bunny who got too close to the ocean. I’m saying, feed the dragon. Unless, you know, the dragon wins.”
Which is about as linear an explanation as you’re apt to get in Legion.
Find Captain Comics by email (capncomics@aol.com), on his website (captaincomics.ning.com), on Facebook (Captain Comics Round Table) or on Twitter (@CaptainComics).
Replies
Sooooo .... trippy.
And it's been renewed for Season 3! Season 2 finale is this week.