The Naked Time.
Spoilers follow for this episode and the comics on which Legion is based.
First up, congratulations to the Legion team on the news today that the show has been renewed for a second season. Noah Hawley will continue to serve as creator and executive producer on the show, which will hit in 2018 and no doubt be even crazier than Season 1 has been!
As for tonight’s episode, I’m running out of different ways to say how stylish this show is, so let’s jump to a Star Trek analogy instead. “Chapter 6,” which is set almost entirely within the illusory world where David and his teammates are patients in Clockworks, is essentially Legion’s version of “The Naked Now.” That was the TOS episode of Trek where Kirk, Spock and the gang were infected with a virus which broke down their inhibitions, allowing them to display their innermost feelings, desires, and fears. It was a highly effective cheat sheet to get to the core of the characters, and it works equally well on Legion.
As Lenny -- now the doctor in charge of David and the “patients” -- probes the group, we dig into what drives them deep down inside. For Melanie, she’s frozen in her life as much as her lost husband is, waiting for him to return. Ptonomy is also stuck in a way, “time travelling” back to the moment of his mother’s death over and over again, crouched under the kitchen table but still as helpless as the young boy he was back then. Kerry and Cary, of course, are attached to one another to the point of it almost being crippling (I love how they sit and walk so close to one another here). We even learn something about the Eye/Walter, namely that he was slow to develop as a teen. Could it be that he’s just a bully deep down inside because he’s overcompensating for that time in his life?
And then there’s Syd, who as we already know has long felt isolated and alone in her own body. But she’s the only one of the group who seems to realize that something isn’t quite right here. That door that she keeps seeing, and then not seeing, tips her off -- things just don’t feel real to her. And nor should they, because behind that door is perhaps the biggest character reveal of the group.
There we see Lenny in all her glory, doing a dance/striptease literally in red, gyrating and writhing and celebrating David’s suffering from over the years. This moment really drives home how much Lenny/the Devil with Yellow Eyes enjoys living off of David’s powers, thriving thanks to his misery, while also serving quite nicely as a metaphor for the monster that lurks inside all of us -- the inner demon that brings out our worst impulses.
I was kind of down on Aubrey Plaza when Legion first debuted, perhaps foolishly thinking that she was going to be a one-note character and sidekick. But as the true nature of Lenny has slowly been revealed, Plaza has been able to stretch herself in so many different scary, hilarious directions, culminating in this episode with both the dance scene and then also her final moments with David this week where she explains the life cycle of that nasty, head-bursting ant fungus. That’s what she thinks of when she thinks of love? O.K…
It’s a pretty brilliant scene, with a flow of quotable dialogue -- “What is the point of babies? What is the point of life?” -- that is creepy and funny but also illuminates what Lenny’s plan has been for David essentially since he was a fetus. And it seems that she’s throwing out the script now and taking a new approach, resulting in David’s “boxing” at episode’s end.
Legion asks fewer questions than it answers this week, which is surely a good thing with just two episodes left in the season after tonight. It seems clear this reality is a construction of Lenny’s (or of David’s, but at Lenny’s bidding), and David’s feeling “clearer” and “in control” here is likely just the bonds that Lenny uses to control David, not unlike how we found him in the pilot (it’s worth nothing that this segment duplicates, while slightly changing, several moments and bits of dialogue from that first episode).
And meanwhile, Oliver is emerging from his ice cube to potentially save the day. I’m not sure what Melanie is supposed to do during her The Girl, the Goldwatch, and Everything moment where time is standing still while the machine gun is blasting, but with Cary out and about now in Oliver’s diving suit, things are looking promising for Team Summerland.
Some notes:
- So Amy for some reason is the mean nurse in this illusion. Her character, and Katie Aselton who plays her, have been the least well served by Legion in the cast so far.
- Lenny knew David’s real father. And the reason he placed David with an adopted family was to hide him from Lenny. “Talk about an a$$hole,” she says of the mysterious, probably bald man.
- Bugs or no bugs, that is a big piece of pie that Syd’s eating.
- More circus tricks from Bill Irwin!
- Cary and Kerry had an actual Wonder Twins fist bump moment!
- Syd’s crickets slumber was another transcendent scene that must be mentioned. FX says the music here is “Requiem, Op.48: Libera Me” by Gabriel Faure.
The Verdict
Another strong episode for Legion proves that Noah Hawley’s show is not a one-trick mutant pony, but can find continued substance amid its visual and aural flair while also putting together the pieces of its narrative puzzle in a satisfying way.
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