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.