Legion was maybe my favorite show, and definitely my favorite new show of last year. A combination of Kubrickian and Lynchian visuals, not to mention a general aesthetic, sound and music design, and mindbending story all really hit my favorite notes.
I think perhaps a bit like Hannibal, which grew more visually ambitious (and potentially alienating,) Legion seems to be going more extreme with oddness.
Theoretically, having the Shadow King extracted from his head should have made things a little more sane for David Haller, but the world he returns to after his journey in the metal sphere at the end of last season (in the middle of the credits, if I recall correctly) is crazier than just about anything we've seen before.
The heightened reality of Legion has always been part of its charm - its ambiguous time period, for example, with people sporting 50s clothing fashion, using technology that looks more like it's from the future. In season two, we find that our Summerland crew has left their utopian forest home and moved in with their former adversaries, Division Three. This makes Clark part of the team (it's odd to think that he was only in the pilot and the finale last season, other than the cliffhanger in the penultimate episode - I guess it goes to show you that a good performance can really leave an impression,) but we also meet the weirdest character outside the Shadow King himself, Admiral Fukuyama, who is in charge of Division Three.
Fukuyama is apparently a cyborg, wearing traditional Japanese robes (as far as I can tell) and a big wicker basket on his head (or it is his head?) and is followed around by a group of women with mustaches who speak for him with computerized voices. There's a scene in which David meets with Fukuyama and each of the Admiral's three... translators? stands behind a plastic disk that magnifies their faces... for some reason.
And indeed, I think that if there's one critique that I'd accept, even if I wouldn't necessarily agree with it, is that there's a lot of weird here that might just be for the sake of weird.
Anyway, we get some plot development: Division Three has found some kind of psychic disease called the Catalyst that causes people to freeze up, only chattering their teeth incessantly but unable to do anything else, and it seems to always follow in Oliver's - and thus the Shadow King's - wake.
David is found in a nightclub by Ptonomy and Clark amongst a group of these chattering victims, though he seems to be free of the curse. However, as he talks to people at Division Three, he discovers that what he remembers as a day of absence in the weird sphere was a year for everyone else. Big changes have happened, not the least of which is the relocation and the new alliance.
The Summerland crew is not sure what to make of David's claims of amnesia. Syd defends him, Cary and Kerry seem most interested in just moving forward. Ptonomy worries that the Shadow King still has some influence over him, and Melanie has fallen into a deep depression over Oliver's bait-and-switch of a return, even apparently developing a taste for that Vapor drug that David and Lenny had used.
Fukuyama summons David to meet with him, and explains that while the Shadow King is dangerous possessing Oliver, he'd be even more dangerous if he were able to recover his own body, and so a race is on to discover Amahl Farouk's corporeal form.
We also get a vision of what seemed to happen in that club - David appears to have been following some strange monk through the club when he encountered both Lenny and Oliver. They then had some kind of psychic dance-off (I'm not sure if it's a visual metaphor for some kind of psychic battle or if they really did enlist the people in the club through psychic domination.)
But at the end, as David sleeps next to Syd in their divided bed (having been far more intimate in their mental-only white room,) he has a dream or vision of Syd, who appears to be communicating to him from the future. Future Syd tells him that he needs to help Farouk, not stop him.
There are a ton of unanswered questions: like the growing sense I'm getting that Lenny isn't and maybe even wasn't actually an avatar of the Shadow King, but perhaps one of his victims. We still don't know what the deal is with the whole Lenny/Benny thing. I'm also wondering if Amahl Farouk is even the same person as the Shadow King - could Farouk have been a possessed victim like David? Is the Shadow King even the big bad of the series?
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