Rethinking the Enemy on Legion's Season One Finale

Legion has finished its first season with a climactic confrontation between the various factions at work - in the outside world, Division Three mounts an assault on Summerland, led by the surprisingly non-dead interrogator, who we know know is named Clark. Meanwhile, attempts are made to separate the Shadow King from David permanently, and Lenny ain't about to let them do that without a fight.

In a sense, the finale does suffer a bit from a premise that makes the build-up far more interesting than any conclusion could be, and visualizing mental battles is never all that easy. But the show does a pretty good job of it. We're left with an ending that doesn't actually take anyone off the board, but the pieces have been moved in ways that we're sure to see big changes in season two.

First off, the episode begins with a surprising perspective. We watch as Clark, who has been covered with burns over 40% of his body, wakes up in a hospital bed watched over by his husband and son. Oh yeah, I guess shady government agents also have lives and loved ones! While I don't think we really get enough of his or Division Three's worldview to feel their methods are justified, we do get a sense of how much of their actions are motivated by fear - not irrational fear, but a logical, rational sense of terror that there's no real upper limit on the power of these potential threats, something David represents perfectly.

Still, not knowing how powerful and in-control David is, their attack on Summerland is kind of pathetic. The faceless goons Clark brings wind up immediately overwhelmed by David's telekinesis. Clark is then a prisoner, and while he's still able to give his superiors (which include the aforementioned husband) a live-feed of what he sees, he plays it cool and winds up keeping the truce while the Summerland crew try to work on the Shadow King.

And ultimately this work is unsuccessful. The parasite is slowly erased from David's mind, but then it starts to fight back, turning David on himself and threatening to kill him. As Lenny taunts Syd in the White Room, it's hard to un-make soup, and she/he/it has been a part of David for practically his whole life. The roots go deep.

This prompts Syd to take a new approach. Syd goes into the room where David is strapped to a chair and kisses him, swapping bodies and allowing the Shadow King into her own. The Shadow King then quickly transfers into Kerry's body (the mechanics are slightly unclear to me here - can whoever is temporarily occupying Syd's body after she has used her power then use Syd's power on someone else? Or, more likely, is this the Shadow King only transferring into Kerry, thus leaving an unoccupied David to fight her?) Anyway, the two have their epic confrontation - waves of psychic energy smashing into each other. And David emerges victorious - only for the essence of the Shadow King to fly right into a wrong-place-wrong-time Oliver.

Amid all the chaos, newly possessed Oliver (who had only just remembered Melanie's name) walks away and gets in a car.

So the Shadow King has been excised from David, but now possesses Oliver. Division Three has been forced to stop their assault (and David suggests to Clark that they've really got to start working together now.) It looks like we'll have a Jemaine Clement/Aubrey Plaza road trip in season two, for which I cannot wait.

And then, in a mid-credits scene (this is the thing all comic book properties have to do now I guess) some weird little flying robot pokéballs David into it, and that's our cliffhanger.

A lot of questions remain about Legion. The visuals that represented David's fractured mind were one of the main draws to the show. How fractured will it remain now that the Shadow King is no longer part of him? Also, how much of an X-men show will this be, and how much will it remain its own thing?

And... All Caught Up on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

Yeah, I've been back home in MA and have had more time on my hands than even I tend to have, so don't judge me.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is, in a lot of ways, a deconstruction of the romantic comedy. But in another way, it is a dark and devastating romance. But here's the thing: the will-they-won't-they is not about any of the men in Rebecca Bunch's life - it's about herself. Can this poor, broken woman learn to love herself? Can she live happily ever after, but with herself?

And holy crap do I ship those two.

The title of the show, as we've discussed before and as was mentioned in season one's opening title song, is a sexist term that the show is all about exploring and deconstructing. Rachel Bloom creates a character that is so well-conceived and well-performed that we can't help but sympathize with her. She's the sort of character who might be peripheral on other shows. Sure, we do tend to empathize with the main characters on a show, but unlike Seinfeld or It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the mission of this show is for us to see the likable, good person buried under all this toxic behavior and psychology.

The last few episodes of season two see Rebecca get back with Josh, get engaged, and plan an absurdly quick marriage. And the proposal comes literally right as Rebecca is about to finally start delving into her problems with Dr. Akopian. Her man problems - problems that even saw her committing arson and being institutionalized in the finale's big reveal (well, one of the big reveals) - are all just symptomatic of her self-esteem issues.

By so many standards, Rebecca is a success. She's a brilliant lawyer with two Ivy League colleges on her resume (though the reason there are two and not one is actually significant to her problems as it turns out.) And while the central motivation for her move to West Covina was unhealthy, it's a good thing she realized her life in New York was not what she wanted it to be.

She diagnosed the problem: she was unhappy, but chose a terrible prescription.

And there were two major factors at work: one being the relationships with her parents, particularly her father (not that my parents are perfect, but judging from how many characters on TV have issues with their dads, I've got to count myself lucky. Actually, I appreciate that Greg had a good relationship with his.) The other being the narratives that we love. And look, I think the shows I post about make it clear I have a pretty standard guy-nerd set of tastes, and you do not see me rushing off to every rom-com that makes it to the theaters.

But the toxic idealized narratives of the romantic comedy that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is all about tearing down can affect anyone, regardless of your gender or orientation. There's something so appealing about the idea that another person could fix you - that a mix of sex and affection and having someone to be with you all the time will allow your underlying problems to melt away. I've sure as hell daydreamed about women I've had crushes on coming in and breaking me out of whatever rut I'm in (the manic pixie dream girl trope is all about this,) but that sort of thinking gets you stuck in place.

So, it might be kind of out of left field, and maybe it's because I've been watching one show while bingeing the other (and I'm about to hit that serious show-withdrawal) but in a very odd way, there's a parallel with Legion here.

Stick with me.

In this week's episode of Legion (and spoiler alert for those of you in the CEGF/Legion Venn diagram,) David finally starts to learn to take some control of his power once he looks inward and personifies his rational mind as another version of himself. They talk things out, and doing so allows David to become grounded enough that he can break out of his, in this case literal, mental prison and actualize his powers.

What Rebecca Bunch needs is to step outside of herself, take a look, and learn to be happy with who she is in a relative vacuum - not by the standards of who she's currently attached to. And it should probably be a duet.

Of course, we can't go there yet (just as David can't have total control of his powers yet) because then the series would end. On the other hand, CEGF is also about subverting the idea that there are happy endings - having everything wrapped up neatly is another one of those toxic fantasies. And we have seen Rebecca make real progress, only for her to backslide.

But even with backslides, progress can be made. Rebecca needs to learn that the idea that all of her problems will disappear is something that just won't ever happen. But she can reduce them, and she can get herself into a place where she can deal with them as they come. And that's as good as it'll get, but it's not bad.

The Expanse - The Weeping Somnambulist

One of the great features of the Expanse is the way that they tell small stories of individuals who aren't part of the main cast of characters in order to flesh out the world. And this week, we got the crew of the Weeping Somnambulist, a freighter bringing emergency supplies to the survivors on Ganymede.

As the episode begins, they're boarded by a pair of Martian marines who seem, like many of these patrols, to be nothing but abusive to the Belters they stop. They threaten to impound the ship despite there being no problems with its cargo or registration, at which point one of the married-couple crew tears off a marine's mask and we realize: oh hey, that's Holden. And the other is Amos.

Yes, as it turns out, the Roci crew are looking for a less conspicuous ride to get to Ganymede, where they'll take Prax to find his daughter and her conspiracy-linked pediatrician.

The fact that the Somnambulist becomes a shooting gallery at the end of the episode, with the husband dead in the crossfire, is not strictly speaking the fault of the Roci folks - they are boarded by the thugs who would have been there anyway, and it's likely that both of these innocent belters would have been murdered had Holden and Amos not stepped in, but it also shows how going after the big picture the way Holden and Co do, they're not going to be able to save everyone, and they shouldn't expect everyone to love them for it.

While the Roci gets to Ganymede, Bobbie Draper arrives on Earth.

The Martians have a culture of strength - compulsory military service and an ethic that detests those who are not working. Earth, as we and Bobbie learn from Avasarala, has a majority of unemployed citizens who live on government assistance. They aren't simply lazy - one does not get the impression that the average Earther can afford the home and clothes that Avasarala has - but Earth just doesn't have the opportunities that are found on a planet united in its goal to terraform.

But physically, Martians are weaker. It's just a simple fact: their physiology is not used to the high gravity and bright light on Earth (Mars is twice the distance from the sun as Earth, and thus would, I think, get a quarter the sunlight.) So as Bobbie arrives on planet that birthed her species, a fellow Martian collapses and vomits and she is nearly blinded by the glare of the sun (she declines to wear sunglasses as they've all been advised.)

She is there to testify at the peace summit where Erinwright and Avasarala are meeting with the guy I assume is the Martian ambassador in a lavish building somewhere on Central Park West.

Bobbie gives her testimony, but the Martian narrative singles out the Earth-born member of her crew as the cause of the incident, attempting to place the blame all on one marine who has to prove himself  loyal to Mars by taking out a bunch of Earthers.

But when Avasarala calls her back in for questioning, Bobbie lets slip the detail about the soldier who wasn't wearing a suit. She returns to the official story soon enough, but you can bet your ass that Avasarala caught that detail.

Meanwhile, Avasarala's scientist friend has traveled to Venus to take a look at the impact crater Eros left on the planet's surface. After having some minor arguments with the Naval officer running the research ship, they arrive at the crater to find it full of biological activity.

So yeah, I don't think we're done with the Eros protomolecule. Bad for humanity, but if it means we could see Miller again in some form, I'd be pretty happy about that!

Legion Chapter Seven

Legion's style is so strong that we've gotten pretty far into the season without any real exposition.

I've often posited that Fantasy and Science Fiction are genres for people who love exposition. Largely thanks to Anthony Stewart Head, some of the best times on Buffy the Vampire Slayer were when Giles was cracking open some obscure book and explaining to the Scooby gang (weird now thinking that Sarah Michelle Gellar was in that live-action Scooby Doo movie) what the rules were with the demonic monster of the week.

Legion is set in the X-Men universe (and of course the comics are in the larger Marvel universe, but Fox and Disney have a legal wall between them, which is why we've seen two Quicksilvers in recent years) but for most of its run, the show has felt independent of them. Things have existed in a hazy, hallucinogenic vacuum that allows for Jemaine Clement's beatnik Oliver and a struggle against Division Three by a vaguely-defined group at Summerland that does not feel at all like X-Men, even if it's a group of good-guy mutants.

In chapter seven, we actually do get some solid connections. Cary and Oliver discuss what Lenny actually is, and we get confirmation that the parasite is in fact Ahmal Farouk, the Shadow King (though I'm given to understand that technically Farouk is just the previous victim of the parasitic Shadow King.)

David, while trapped in the mind-coffin Lenny sent him to last episode, manifests his rational thoughts as another version of himself (allowing Dan Stevens to use his actual English accent - at least I think that's his natural accent.) We learn that Lenny (I prefer to refer to the parasite by that name and by the female pronoun out of deference to Aubrey Plaza's amazing performance) is trying to get Amy to reveal something about the night David arrived in their home, and in that flashback we get a pretty clear confirmation that David's biological father is truly Charles Xavier.

Discussing things with his rational mind, David susses out (or at least speculates in a way that we can probably expect to be accurate) that Lenny is this parasite, and that his father (whom David gives a hilariously on-point Patrick Stewart accent) must have fought. Through David, the Shadow King would be able to feed on the world, but Lenny needs his power, and David is beginning to realize that power.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Summerland crew manage to break through their imprisonment and hatch a plan to rescue David and Syd from the bullets gradually heading toward them. Syd and Kerry are nearly killed by the Eye, and then they're confronted by Lenny in one of the weirdest and most awesome moments in the show - when everything becomes a silent movie for... well, some reason.

Lenny, apparently bored of the Eye, crumples him up in a horrifically disturbing way, and then turns her attention to Syd and Kerry, but not before Rudy - who has been bleeding out upstairs all this time after being stabbed and impersonated by the Eye - tackles her and rescues the two women.

But ultimately, it is Cary's device and David's nascent control over his power that allows him to imprison Lenny and take control of the situation. As everyone is restored to their bodies and time begins to move forward again, David catches the bullets heading toward them in his hand as if they were traveling at a leisurely pace.

Lenny appears trapped, and the crew is ready to go home, taking Rudy on a stretcher.

Things are mostly working out, and even Oliver has escaped the astral plane (though he is still missing his memories) but as David and Cary head to the lab to see if they can find a more permanent solution than the high-tech wreath that's isolating the Shadow King in his head, Division Three shows up, along with the interviewer who was only partially flash-fried, and who is now pretty happy to see everyone but David dead.

And in the anger over this threat, Lenny is starting to crack her way out of her own mind-coffin.

We have one more episode this season, but I have some suspicions about what might go down.

Apparently in the comics, the way David works is that he has multiple personalities, each with their own powers. Might David absorb his own parasite, turning Lenny into a useful (though dangerous) aspect of his own psyche? If it means keeping Aubrey Plaza in the cast, I'm all for it. We've seen that when Lenny's in control, David can annihilate the likes of Division Three with ease (an almost cartoonish ease) - something that the current situation would probably call for. But even if the Shadow King itself is killed by David absorbing him, it means that David would carry this vindictive, evil aspect with him forever.

Which would suck for him, but set up great stories for the future.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

I'm late to the party here, but I'm glad I came.

As someone who is not where he wishes he was professionally, I do have a certain jealousy toward people who have passed through similar orbits as mine and gone on to do respected, famous work. Renaissance man Donald Glover, for instance, was in the same department as me at Tisch (though I think three years ahead, so if I met him, it was only in passing during my freshman year.) Anyway, add Rachel Bloom to the list of super-talented people who went to school with me (though I think she was in the acting program) of whom I am super-jealous but also vaguely proud (not that I ever knew her personally.) And the fact that she's a year younger... oh hell, it's not a healthy way to think about those things.

So speaking of unhealthy ways of thinking about things (all that was totally just a segue and totally not a confession of a real problem I have...):

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is a show co-created, executive produced, and starring Rachel Bloom. It is about a successful New York lawyer named Rebecca Bunch who abandons her life there to move to West Covina, California (an LA suburb) after discovering that her summer camp boyfriend from her teenage years Josh Chan lives there.

Rebecca is a conundrum, full of contradictions. She is well-meaning, but she has deep-rooted problems that drive her to utterly absurd and sometimes criminal lengths. In fact, her pursuit of Josh Chan is, well, stalking.

But this show is deeply empathetic. In fact, the show's premise is all about subverting its title, which the opening theme (more on music in a moment) calls out as a sexist term. Actually, I think a lot of the early marketing sort of leaned in to the sexist portrayal of Rebecca that the show is ultimately about subverting.

So not only do we see where Rebecca's coming from, and ultimately want what's best for her (which I'm thinking at the end of season one is for her to take some time not trying to be in a relationship at all and working on standing on her own two feet) but we also see how every character is messed up in their own ways.

Greg, Josh's best friend who is presented through much of the season as a far more viable romantic interest for Rebecca, is himself a big pile of problems, such as his affected apathy which is actually a way to cover up for his fear of failure (as long as he doesn't try, he can convince himself that if he was trying he'd succeed in every endeavor, something that does ring a few familiar bells for this blogger.) Paula, Rebecca's new best friend and Josh-stalking enabler, is so obsessed with living through Rebecca's delusions vicariously that she winds up being kind of terrifying, all because her own life is so mundane and dull.

And even Josh, who is so idealized in Rebecca's mind, is messed up in his own ways. He's in denial about the fact that he's an adult, so focused on retaining the comforts of his teenage years - sticking with his high school girlfriend (who domineers him) and insisting on keeping his other relationships in a blissful stasis.

In the first season we do already see some positive movements - Rebecca's new boss, for instance, realizes he's bisexual (and man, how often do you see a male bisexual character on a network TV show?) and seems to mostly come out of the season in a better place than where he started. For all of Rebecca's hurricane-like effect on her social circle in West Covina, the net effect might actually wind up being a positive.

And in the midst of all this character drama, we have an incredibly funny show that is also a musical.

Rachel Bloom made a name for herself doing viral music videos on YouTube, and is a huge musical theater nerd, and the show's cast is filled with Broadway veterans. So what we get are some inspired music numbers - about one or two an episode - that are often the funniest part of a very funny show (also sometimes the most devastating, like a number called "You Stupid Bitch.) This show is all about subversion, so for example, in the first episode there's a number called "The Sexy Getting Ready Song" in which the rapper who comes in at the bridge realizes how absurdly complicated and painful the process is for women to conform to our society's standards of beauty that he has a serious moment of reflection and then spends the end-of-episode tag calling up women he's dated and apologizing for perpetuating the patriarchal double-standards.

The music is kinda-sorta explained as Rebecca's imagination (we hear her singing "for real" occasionally and let's just say Rebecca is not Rachel Bloom) except that if that's the case, the other characters must do the same thing.

I've got to confess: while I was absolutely a theater kid in high school, I wasn't much of a musical theater fanatic. I was never one to listen to musical theater scores as my primary listening music (I think I had the soundtrack to Urinetown, but it wasn't a go-to CD like Californication.) But I tend to love people who love musical theater, and this show is so clever with its musical numbers that I can't help but enjoy them.

Obviously there's a lot more left to the show that I haven't seen (there's a whole season two on Netflix that I haven't watched yet,) but the characters are so well-drawn, the writing so clever, and the performances so fantastic that I'm eager to see more.

The Expanse Season Two

Season Two of the Expanse has been fantastic - the world-building and forward momentum of season one has payed off with the characters growing and the plot thickening.

One odd thing about the season, however, is the way that the first part felt like the real conclusion to season two. There are going to be open spoilers in this post, so if you aren't caught up on the show, scroll away.

Season one ended with the reveal of what was really happening on Eros, but not a resolution to that plot. There was definitely a big cliffhanger - a horror show of just how evil the people experimenting on the Protomolecule were - but the end of the season was more about the shock of that evil and the strong hints that the thing was alive than actually about how to deal with this reality.

In season two, we see Holden become, I think, more formally "the captain," even if his crew is only three other people (with Miller joining temporarily as a fifth Roci member.) Miller was probably the best character on the show (even though her plot is still isolated a bit from the rest of the cast, Chrisjen is also such a badass that you can't help but like her too - though I do feel a bit uncomfortable that part of that badassness came in the form of her being willing to torture a guy in the pilot.)

One of the things I've liked about the show is that it really tries very hard to create a lived-in universe. These are people who have all lived in a human-colonized solar system their whole lives, and a lot of the things that we take for granted in space-based sci-fi are called into question: biggest being I think the disregard that Martians and Belters have for Earth - the planet, not just the people on it.

The parallels with the Cold War are hard to miss - during the Cold War the First World and Third World terminology was created to talk about geopolitics (the Second World was the Communist one, though I feel like you never see that term used as much.) In The Expanse, these terms are pretty much literal. Earth is of course the first world, Mars is the second, and the Belters are trying to build their own identity.

The OPA (Outer Planets Alliance) is their stab at legitimacy - their golden vision of the future is one in which the OPA is right up there with the UN and the MCR as an equal partner. But there are big problems there. One is that Earth and Mars benefit from the Belt remaining subservient. It has even been a kind of buffer on their own relations, as both planets need the resources of the belt and cooperate to get them.

The other big problem is that there isn't any one particular capital for the OPA. The Belters are scattered across the Asteroid Belt and the outer planets and there are a hundred different factions that each have a different vision of how things should go. And of course, some have more realistic plans than others. Those who are looking for legitimacy, to be able to sit down at the table and see their interests represented, are constantly undermined by gangs and thugs that think that negotiating is weakness.

I think one of the really clever things the show does is make all of these factions a mix of races. So much of national identity is tied to race (sadly something that is seeing a resurgence these days,) with the "First World" in real life often being conflated with whiteness, and with the Third World being conflated with color.

But it does sort of make sense that with the massive space-based diaspora of all of humanity, these old signifiers (mostly based on how much sun your ancestors got at their latitude) are no longer relevant. In fact, new physical differences are emerging, like the Belters' elongated limbs and Miller's poorly-fused spine.

One might feel inclined to "root" for Earth on the Expanse, but of course there's no actual guarantee that your descendants in this hypothetical future would still be on Earth. Earthers, Martians and Belters are all us in the future.

And that's interestingly disorienting. Our sympathies may jump around and make us realize that everyone's flawed but no one is evil for evil's sake (though the guy who spaced all the "Inners" on the refugee ship was pretty close to that.) Even the people doing that stuff on Eros are theoretically trying to defend humanity (though seriously, you couldn't come up with a less awful way to study this thing?)

That makes things tough for a guy like James Holden. He always wants to do the right thing, but in a universe where villains don't just twirl their mustaches and hatch intentionally evil plots, it becomes a lot harder to know what is the right thing to do. For his crew? For one faction or another? For humanity?

Legion Chapter Six

I'm loving this show enough that I might just have to make a weekly post about it. It airs at the same time as The Expanse, so Wednesday nights might be a bit crowded on this blog, as these are the two shows I'm watching at the moment (though I also have one episode left in the first season of Fargo and I'm sure I'll want to post about that soon too - that's less time sensitive, though.)

In most genre shows, there seems to be a standard "you're just crazy and none of this is real" episode. I almost always hate them. The one that really frustrated me was in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where the Trio in Season Six summons a demon that injects her with something to convince her that she's just nuts. The episode actually leaves the question unanswered.

And I get it, you know, someone thought that was a cool ambiguous ending that would leave people guessing. But the problem with it is that when we go into a genre show - fantasy, science fiction, superhero (which tends to be some mix of the former and the latter) - we're already getting invested in this world that is heightened from our own reality. The thing that's exciting about these genres is the ability to escape mundane reality.

So by leaving a story in a place where you're not sure if all the monsters and superpowers and what-have-you are real, it kind of feels like a big middle finger to the audience. It's like you're saying "oh, you like this show about a girl with mystically-empowered strength who fights demons? Well you're getting invested in nothing, because none of that is real!" We know these things aren't real. But we like the genre because it presents to us a world in which that stuff is real, and we get to empathize with characters who then exist in such a world. Putting this into question - even if any reasonable person would make the "no, it is real" conclusion - undercuts the very appeal of the story you're telling.

But with Legion, I don't mind.

For one thing, this is a cliffhanger with a resolution, and the hints pile up pretty quickly that the Summerland Crew's return to (or appearance in) Clockworks is illusory - or at the very least the result of extreme reality warping.

And once an oozing wound appears Cronenberging out of a wall, it's pretty damn clear that the show isn't really inviting us to question the reality of the show. After all, at the end of the pilot, David asks Syd if what is happening is real, and (in what I really have to say was a phenomenally layered line reading by Rachel Keller) Syd reassures him that yes, it's all real, with all the positive and negative consequences that reality implies.

To begin with, Syd is the one sane woman in this faux-Clockworks. She's not totally convinced it isn't real - after all, believing a mental institution you're stuck in isn't real is kind of a crazy person cliche - but from our presumably objective perspective, it's clearly not real. We see Carey and Kerry playing ping pong with no ball, but with an audible sound each time the absent ball should bounce.

She discovers a door that appears and disappears, which we later discover is a means for Lenny to access other parts of David's mind. In a mad dance number, Lenny strides through his memories, dancing and messing up the place and having just a total ball.

Lenny/Devil with Yellow Eyes/Whatever It Actually Is uses her position as the illusory psychiatrist to tamp down on any resistance that the various people who are trapped would be able to mount, but it seems like she doesn't have total control.

She does manage to neutralize Syd - sort of hypnotizing her with some cricket-based music - and ships her off to another part of David's mind. But there are others resisting now. Thankfully, while the people in the house from last week are all stuck here, Oliver (I'm assuming Oliver is the diver, and maybe this makes it easier for them not to have to bring Jemaine Clement in all the time?) reaches out to Carey (Carey with a C is the guy, right?) and takes him through the Astral Plane to give him some freedom. Notably, the bruises he suffered from Kerry's beating return, which I take to mean he's restored to his ordinary (not that it's ordinary in the traditional sense) mind. Carey then reaches out to Melanie, showing her the not-quite-frozen moment that they're all stuck in (while time seems to have slowed to an utter crawl, those bullets are still heading right for Syd's back, and the wound in the wall and the red paint on David's shirt really don't bode well.)

Lenny's eyes appear on the wall in the slow-time tableau room, so Melanie and Carey's attempts at disruption are not unnoticed, but it remains to be seen exactly how much control she/it has.

We do find out a bit more about Lenny's nature. She compares herself to that fungus that infects ants and controls their brains to use them to spread its spores. She says that she originally just wanted to poison David's mind and spread herself farther, but when she saw how much power he had, she figured that she'd try to develop some less destructive symbiosis. But with David potentially threatening her control, she decides instead to lock his mind away.

We're not out of Faux-Clockworks yet.

Remaining Questions:

Given how abstract this show goes, I figure for my episode posts I'll leave some remaining questions here.

We get a mirror of a shot from the pilot that I still don't know if I understand. In the pilot, David is in bed and the door to his room at Clockworks opens. We see under the bed and the door opens and closes with no feet appearing before it closes, but when the camera tilts up, we see Syd waiting there. This adds a very troubling idea that Syd, or at least Syd's affection for David, could all be in his head. But that upsets so much of what happens later that I kind of wrote it off as the show being weird to be weird. We get the inverse of that this time, with Syd in bed and David showing up with a pillow to be a border. And once again, the door seems to open and close with no one coming through until the camera tilts up. What does it mean?

How do Lenny's and David's powers compare? Like a much less benevolent Carey/Kerry, they've shared a body for David's whole life. Lenny can clearly control the actions and perceptions of her host, but I'm assuming all the telepathy, telekinesis, and reality-shaping is David (my understanding is that in the comics, he has multiple personalities and each has its own power, which does kind of explain the name a little better.)

Did David create this fake Clockworks to protect Syd (and himself) from the very real bullets that are currently making their very gradual way toward them? Or did Lenny do it (not necessarily out of spite or cruelty, but because she wants to hold onto her host.)

Less a question and more nerdy pet peeves. When Melanie sees the slowed-down room, she walks around and tries to move Syd and David out of the way, but they're stuck, and she tries to touch the bullet, but it's way too hot for her to touch. First off - how is she pushing through all the air in that room if it's all slowed down too? And second - if time is slowed down, wouldn't the temperature of the bullet be far lower? Actually, wouldn't the whole room be utterly frozen? These are useless complaints, but nerd's gotta nerd.

Also less of a question and more of a... ok, I don't want to rip off the AV Club here, but more of a Stray Observation: The Eye got sucked into this fake world too. He's really all that's left of the Division 3 threat, but he still seems to be a threat. Being a scary asshole (who we hear talk I think for the first time) seems to make Lenny like him, and now he's chasing Kerry for some reason. I hope they know what they're doing with this character.

Ok, and Now an Actual Legion Post

Having now seen the first four episodes of Legion, I think I'm ready to go in-depth.

First off, I think it's very easy to forget Legion is based on a comic series. This is actually a little unfair, even if it's true, because as someone who has read far more Sandman books than any Superman title, I know that comics as a medium are hugely diverse in tone and subject matter. A History of Violence, for example, was based on a comic.

But Legion is not only based on a comic; it's based on a comic series that is directly tied to the X-Men. This is all in the same universe as Wolverine and Professor X (though unless Fox and Disney pull off some absurdly tricky deal, not the Avengers.) But aside, at this point, from the use of the term mutant (which actually shouldn't be something exclusive to the X-men series) you could very easily see this as a stand-alone, truly out-there and original show.

The show focuses primarily on David, a man who begins the show in a mental institution. Well, sort of.

The pilot at least plays a lot with time, and so while it's partially set in that hospital, it's also set in an interrogation room with an extraordinarily shady government or para-goverment conspiracy.

David has, for years, believed that he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. He hears voices and sees things that aren't there. However, as he escapes from his captors, the leader of his new allies, Melanie, tells him that he's not mentally ill at all, and that instead he is the most powerful telepath/telekinetic in the world.

David's mental powers seem as if they might not have any upper limit. But because there is so much power flowing through his brain, the mundane physical world is shrouded by layers of mental environments.

There is this outer plot about the sinister Division Three trying to track everyone down and either recruit or kill them, but this all seems pretty minor compared to the vast conspiracy going on within David's own brain.

One of the allies at Melanie's Summerland sanctuary, named Ptonomy (you bet your ass I had to look up the spelling for that one,) has the ability to walk through a person's memory with them (and others he brings along.) Attempting to get David some control over his powers, they do a lot of delving into his memories, but there are serious problems.

For one, David has, maybe subconsciously, been editing his own memories, leaving gaps. And along with that, there is a figure (or maybe it's two figures?) that manifest as kind of monsters within his mind that threaten to do him terrible harm, or perhaps make him do terrible things.

And that's especially worrying as he has a girlfriend now, a fellow patient named Syd who has the unfortunate power of temporarily swapping bodies with anyone she physically touches. Like David, it's probable that her diagnosis was a misreading of her power (and quite rational aversion to touching people.)

The strange and barely-explained wild card in all of this is Lenny, David's friend apparently from both before and during the hospital. Played by Aubrey Plaza, who seems to be having a whole lot of fun with the part, Lenny is some kind of enabler whose true nature is mysterious.

The show is a total mindfuck in the best way (the kind that I've been a fan of since watching Fight Club in High School) and is also one of those shows that really does not let its nature as a TV show limit its ambition.

On top of editing and cinematography, the production design is also amazing, with costume design that suggests either the past or the future but definitely not the present (maybe taking queues from Spike Jonze's Her) and sets that have a bit of that 1960s space age feel.

This is definitely a show to follow, and I've got to say it hits just about all of my buttons, so you can bet I'll be talking about it in the future.

Just a Sort of General Pop Culture Check In

I would have made this post specifically about the pilot of Legion, FX's new show that is technically set in the X-Men-verse but looks to be trying to stand on its own. Unfortunately, the website gives you about an hour free to preview before you need to sign on with your cable provider (and as someone born in the 80s, I don't have one of those.) The pilot is longer than an hour, though, so I was able to see the first... maybe 6/7ths of the episode.

And holy crap is it right up my alley - hallucinatory imagery that asks you to question what you're seeing, a plot filled with conspiracy, and Aubrey Plaza having what looks like a really really fun time.

To do a little mini-article (without a conclusion I don't really know that I can talk too broadly about themes,) the story concerns David, a man who tried to hang himself despite the voices in his head telling him not to, and who wound up in a mental hospital, only for a telekinetic event involving his in-hopsital girlfriend swapping into his body and accidentally setting off his powers and killing presumably a lot of people to occur there. At some later point, David winds up in the hands of some shady organization that identifies him as potentially the most powerful mutant in the world, and they seem to either want to control or kill him.

The production design, editing, and cinematography are all outstanding, calling to mind a bit the third season of Hannibal, but with more forward momentum.

I'm curious to see whether they really judiciously avoid invoking the larger cinematic world or if they roll it in. In the comics at least, David is the son of Charles Xavier, but at least so far there hasn't been any mention of MacAvoy/Stewart.

Moving on to the main Marvel universe, I've been stuck on Fleetwood Mac's The Chain ever since I saw the latest Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 trailer. I got Rumors on iTunes and have been listening to it a whole lot (really, I should have gotten it a long time ago. That's a hell of a classic album.)

I rewatched Captain America: Winter Soldier and Civil War recently as well. I guess I need to see a symbol of patriotism that is in a firm anti-Nazi camp these days.

I'm also eager to pick up Doctor Strange. While I do think that the "he's basically Tony Stark but with Magic" criticisms are not entirely unfair, I really love the explicitly magical stuff in this story, especially as they've been careful to make all of Thor's stuff seem really more like "Sufficiently Advanced Science." (This in a series that had literal Dark Elves as the bad guys in one of the movies.)

And visually, Doctor Strange was really truly something I had never seen before. I'm a little bummed it didn't win for visual effects at the Oscars.

I find myself willing to forgive the whole whitewashing thing with Tilda Swinton, though I also recognize that as a white guy I'm not exactly in a great position to do so. Really, I wish that Hollywood would just cast some freaking Asian actors in these big movies so I don't have to feel guilty about liking them. I mean, as someone who is not even a big anime fan, I watched through all of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex and I'm hyped as hell to see that movie. And I like Scarlett Johannson a whole lot. But... you know, it wouldn't be so bad to have a white person play a character from an Asian story if, you know, this wasn't like a constant problem in the industry.

I rewatched the Expanse's season one and have come away feeling confident in my liking of the show. SyFy (I still think it was idiotic to change it from SciFi) occasionally flirts with respectability, and the Expanse seems like its first opportunity to do so since Battlestar Galactica. Here's hoping they can hold on to that. (I haven't kept up with The Magicians. I read the books and they left a kind of bitter taste in my mouth.)

I watched the Oscars but I must confess that I hadn't seen any of the best picture nominees. I had heard that La La Land probably would win but Moonlight deserved to, and then... that kind of happened? Honestly the one that I'm most eager to see is Arrival (shocker, the one Sci Fi movie.)

I've heard about the plans for a new Dune adaptation. I tried to watch the David Lynch one, but after the first ten minutes of narration over kind of crappy still paintings explaining the world, I gave up. Dune is such a masterful book (if you haven't read it, imagine Game of Thrones where every character is as cunning as Varys or Littlefinger) that I think it really deserves a good adaptation.

I do wonder if it will work as a film, though. I think Game of Thrones and now other shows are demonstrating that television is actually a great format to adapt complex novels. I would love to see a Foundation series that does each time period as a separate season.

And of course I'm eagerly awaiting the American Gods series, which, at least in terms of production design and cinematography, looks precisely how I think an adaptation of that novel should.