I'm about 2/3 of the way through Legion's final season.
After the flip of season two - in which our protagonist David finds himself the villain, having unleashed his most monstrous qualities in his fight against the Shadow King - season three puts us in an uncomfortable position: David is now at war with the rest of the cast, save Lenny, who now serves as the majordomo (I think she even uses that term) to David's new drug-fueled happy-thoughts cult that seems 1960s utopian but with a dangerous undercurrent of Manson-family menace.
David has, it seems, indulged in his most narcissistic impulses, and now has a fawning group of attractive young people surrounding him, worshipping him, and even calling him "daddy."
Meanwhile, Division III hunts him, and so David has sought out a Time Traveler.
Thus, the early parts of the show are seen through the eyes of Switch, a Chinese woman living in the US who is evidently the daughter of some powerful and emotionally distant "very important man." Switch is a mutant, like David, and her power is the ability to travel through time by opening doors into a somewhat literal time-corridor.
Thus, David recruits Switch so that when Division III comes and kills him, she can simply step back and warn him ahead of time.
But while David protests that all he wants to do is live in peace, there is still that pesky sense that he might end the world. And indeed, in his prosecution of his conflict with Farouk (who is now roaming free amongst Division III - which... is probably not a great thing) David has shown himself to be plenty monstrous in his own way.
David eventually discovers the truth about his parents, traveling back to his infancy and even prior to see what they were like. I actually don't know if we hear Professor X identified by name, but in case you forgot that this was technically an X-Men show (and you could be forgiven for that,) we find that, much as David and Syd had, David's parents met in a mental hospital some time in the late 40s (or possibly early 50s.)
I think it's important to note that showrunner Noah Hawley has placed the time period for the show as "some time in an alternate version of the 1960s and also the future." Granted, that would make David maybe a decade and a half younger than Dan Stevens, but I think the point is not to think too much about it. Anyway, we find that Charles was in the hospital probably on account of his telepathy - though he seems remarkably capable of hiding it, and one wonders why, exactly, he's committed there. David's mother, Gabrielle, however, is a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, and is left catatonic by the trauma. It's Charles' attention and communication with her that helps her get better, and the two escape the hospital together to begin a new life.
But when Charles goes down to North Africa to meet with Amahl Farouk, unaware of the Shadow King's treacherous nature, the Shadow King finds the infant David and infects him, despite David and Switch's time-traveling attempts to stop him. The sight of the sort-of-there David sends Gabrielle back into her catatonia.
The thing that's interesting here is that, while yes, David is a victim of the Shadow King, he's also fixated on making the problem something external - something that can be fixed by simply removing the interloper. And his sense of himself as the victim allows him to justify terrifying deeds.
In the last episode I saw (I have either three or four left, I think) Syd body-swaps with David in an attempt to put him down, but when she does so, she finds that while one personality - the "real David" is in her body, there are a vast number of other Davids inside - the eponymous Legion - and she loses control of the body.
It would be very comforting to think that all the bad things we've done were some foreign object that could be removed. But to truly believe that - that we're completely without fault for anything we've done - is the belief system of a narcissist, and it's that kind of belief that can lead to truly monstrous behavior.
There's another moral question that the show asks. David has justified a great deal of his monstrousness in his faith that, with time travel, he can undo what was done. He kills people in gruesome ways and violates others in similarly horrific ways. His actions toward Syd at the end of season two - effectively drugging and raping her, though it didn't occur to him that was what he was doing at the time - are things that he desperately wants not to have happened. And I think everyone can relate to that, even if we haven't done as heinous things. There are thousands of mistakes I've made or actions I wish I had taken that I no longer can, and the fantasy of a do-over is one of the most attractive ideas one can imagine.
But what does it mean to undo something? Does it absolve you of what you've done? And is the act of changing the past, in fact, a more terrible act of destruction than anything else you could do?
I think we like to imagine that if we changed the past, we'd simply see our memories shift but still fundamentally be us - but is that actually how it would happen?
One thought experiment I've often thought about is a sort of butterfly effect regarding time travel. Let's say that you could reset your life, go back to the moment you were born, but with all the memories you have of your current life. There are definitely things I'd do differently - like warn my mom about the cancer she'd get and encourage her to get surgery to remove the organ in which it developed. But I also have friends who are younger than I am. And is it possible that, in some very subtle way, my different actions could jostle things just so to prevent one of my younger friends from ever being born?
I mean, consider that a human starts as a separate sperm and egg, and that a massive number of sperm cells travel toward the egg, and only one actually fuses with it to become the zygote that will eventually develop into the person's body. And about half of those are male and half are female. Is it possible that some very subtle bump, some very small alteration to the environment could, over time, create enough of a difference to make, say, a Y chromosome sperm win the race instead of a X chromosome one? And while there are, of course, men with two Xs and women with XYs, their experience of gender is going to be very different than that of cisgender people, and thus create a totally different personality (and if they are cisgender, you could easily wind up with a man in one timeline where there had been a woman in the other.)
The point is that a lot of unexpected consequences could occur in trying to change the past - you'd probably change far more than you intend.
But the other moral question is what would happen to the original timeline.
Because it appears there are three scenarios here, and two are rather horrific.
One is that by changing the past, you travel to a new timeline, but the one you left behind still exists. And that means that any damage you did there remains - just that you, the time traveler, cease to exist.
The second, and to my mind most dreadful, is that when you create a new timeline, the old one is erased. Syd expresses this fear in an episode, that in creating a reality in which David was never sick, not only will their relationship and the love they share (because despite what he's done, she still... perhaps... loves him) but it would also mean annihilating that version of her - which is the only version of her she is.
The only good version of this would be if, somehow, the consciousness snapped back to the appropriate person when the change is made, and while I don't know if that's any less likely than the first two possibilities, it's not really a great gamble.
Switch listens to an audio book about how to be a time traveler, and at one point the book says that time travelers are the loneliest people in the universe. And I think there's some logic to that - because in a sense, with all the changes to the timeline one might enact, it would breed a certain sense of solipsism - other people only existing as you perceive them.
David has allowed his narcissism to breed a solipsistic worldview, but can we, the audience, agree with it?
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