Legion arrives on FX from the pages of Marvel comics, but if you didn’t know that going in, you’d have no idea this is a story of a superhero. The show, brought to the screen by Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley, upends your conception of a tights-clad champion armed with extraordinary powers that defy physics and – sometimes – logic. As the premiere episode opens we meet David Haller, a man who is in no way “super”. In the hands of actor Dan Stevens (now fully removed from his buttoned-up character on Downton Abbey), David is a strung-out patient who hears voices and sees a ghoulish yellow-eyed figure in dark corner. He wears a yellow tracksuit, has darkened circles around his eyes and has lost his grip on reality, diagnosed by his doctors as a schizophrenic. Except that David might not actually be mentally ill. He might just be telepathic.
In the comics, David is the son of Charles Xavier, the mutant leader of the X-Men. Here there’s no mention of that superhero gang, no ties to Fox’s film franchise. These events, which unfold slowly over the first few episodes of the series, take place in a parallel universe where mutants exist, but don’t spend their time dashing around to save the world. For David, the biggest hurdle isn’t the end of the life on Earth, but whether the fragmented existence around him is real or in his head.
The strength of Legion, which grapples with mental health in a way many TV shows might veer away from, is in Hawley’s approach to David’s mind. David is not a reliable narrator, and neither is Hawley. The camera movements are fractured and set at strange angles, and the editing is quick, often jumping between images in an unsettling manner. Sometimes it’s very dark, and sometimes David’s face glows red. It’s all because we’re in David’s head and since he doesn’t always know what he’s seeing, neither do we.
We follow him through the mental hospital, where he’s friends with Aubrey Plaza’s unhinged Lenny Busker, a fellow patient with a similarly slippery grip on reality. When a blonde woman named Syd arrives on the scene, David is lovestruck. He immediately asks Syd, played by Rachel Keller, to be his girlfriend – right in the middle of group therapy – even though she refuses to let anyone touch her. It turns out her aversion to skin-on-skin contact is related to her own superpower, which, of course, causes a destructive event that lands David on the outside of the mental hospital and in the hands of some government thugs who seem to want to experiment on him.
The story unfolds with non-linear precision. We flash to David’s childhood, to his visits with his sister Amy, to previous sessions with a (mostly) unhelpful therapist. One minute he’s being interrogated by the government lackeys, who are both interested and afraid of his powers, and the next he’s engaged in a Bollywood dance in the mental hospital surrounded by his deranged fellow patients. If it sounds bizarre, it is – sort of. It’s a show about the mind and the inability to channel one’s thoughts and memories in a way that feels cohesive. It’s disjointed on purpose, and there’s something deeply satisfying in the edge that gives the viewer. It’s not a comfortable watch, but it doesn’t need to be. Not all shows have to soothe you (take note, Kardashian viewers).
At its core, Legion is about not feeling at home in your own brain, an idea that translates itself beyond David’s character. The show asks the viewer to consider the importance of embracing who you are inherently and moving forward with those particular strengths and weaknesses. At one point, early on, Syd suggests that mental illness isn’t something that makes you abnormal or something that is necessarily problematic. It’s just a part of who you are. It’s probable the rest of the first season will allow David the opportunity to find resolution in that concept. Stevens, who has truly immersed himself in this role, gives David a humanity that transcends the striking comic book-inspired visuals and disjointed storytelling. You care about David, almost instantly, and you care about his love story with Syd (you also wonder how long he can survive without trying to have sex with her, with abstinence as an unfortunate side-effect of her power).
If there’s a fault in Legion, it’s that it can be disorienting, especially if you don’t realize its backstory in the comics. For a viewer with no context, this could be construed simply as a very strange show about a man who has lost his sense of certainty. There are tones of horror, at moments, and the premiere episode leaves a lingering sense of discomfort. How do we, like David, know what is real? What if the entire story is all in his head? (How disappointing that would be.) It’s unclear how David’s powers will manifest and how he’ll use them. For now, he’s able to shatter tables and send men flying across a room, but could he become an actual superhero? It might not matter, in the end, since Legion is far more focused on whether David can save himself.
Legion starts on Fox in the US on 8 February, and on Fox UK and FX in Australia on 9 February.
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