Review: Legion

I've just finished watching the FX show Legion. Time for a review.

tl;dr: the most ferociously weird TV series I've seen that is actually worth watching. Yes, it's stranger than The Prisoner. (Well, maybe not weirder than the last episode.) IMO it's pretty great, but it is very much a matter of taste.

Legion is based on a comic book from some years ago, by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz; the latter was for many years the high master of weirdness in comics. I can't say whether the TV show is much like the comic (I read it when it was new, but not since, so I just plain don't remember), but weird? Yeah, it has weird in spades.

Our protagonist is David Haller. David is insane, and I don't mean mentally ill in a relatable, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend sort of way, He's moderately schizophrenic, arguably sociopathic, and, frankly, a bit of a dick. (This is not a show of simple good vs evil -- there is heroism and there is evil, but there aren't really simple sides.) He also possesses near-godlike psychic powers.

It's not much of a spoiler to say that the primary antagonist is Amahl Farouk -- aka The Shadow King, the big bad in the origin story of Professor X of the X-Men.

That said, this is not an X-Men TV show. David and Farouk are roughly the same characters as in the comics, and Charles Xavier does eventually make an appearance. But the rest of the characters are more like the X-Men through a clouded glass. Sidney is sort of like Rogue in terms of the emotional impact of her powers, but she's by no means the same character. Melanie is an Emma Frost cognate, but her story is pretty different. And while there are superpowers, they're mostly psychic of one sort or another -- you won't find anybody jumping over buildings or firing lasers out of their eyes.

Moreover, it doesn't feel like a superhero story, thematically or structurally. If anything, it's a bit closer to a horror story in style -- not so much in terms of jump scares or gore (there's some gore, but not a ton), but more in that it is relentlessly unsettling: often creepy, frequently psychedelic, sometimes just plain surreal.

And it warrants content warnings for most forms of psychic horror: at various times, it hits mind control, body horror, possession, erasure of identity. It's by no means all horror, but there are times when it gets downright skin-crawling.

The story and acting are good, if at times a bit overwrought. It takes three short seasons of nine episodes each. Season 1 introduces the story and most of the main characters. In Season 2, the plot wanders a bit (and the morality gets a lot more grey), but the show starts to really find it footing, exploring themes of memes and madness. And things really pull together in Season 3, delving into identity and destiny through a lens of time travel. (Suffice it to say, the story involves a lot of time travel, particularly as it goes along.) While it stays strange, the plot gets more coherent, and the story sticks the landing, with (IMO) a satisfying resolution.

Visually, the show is brilliant. I've mentioned "psychedelic" before, and that particularly comes through in the imagery, especially in Season 3, which gets overtly 70s in its style. It sometimes gets over the top, but this is a show worth watching closely.

Music is also surprisingly central, more as the show goes along. Season 3 borders on rock opera at times, with a number of key scenes rendered as covers of classic songs. They're consistently well executed, enough so that I'm tempted to seek out the soundtrack.

Overall, the show constantly walks the line between Art and unbearable pretentiousness. I could probably argue that's the best thing Marvel has done in movies or television, and I could also probably argue that it's the worst -- it really depends on taste.

So: I give it an A- -- I enjoyed it a lot, and might rewatch it at some point. I fully expect some of my friends will absolutely hate it, but it's worth checking out and deciding for yourself...