“You know it’s a bad timeline because presumably evil David made Lenny wear a slinky silk gown…..good David respects her andro grunge look!!” THE TRUTH. I heartily agree with like all of this but just wanted to highlight that one particularly, #good
And I totally agree about Hannibal having much better thematic clarity, about all sorts of issues! And that is SO INTERESTING to me, I actually had scrapped a whole tangent I’d gone on in this recap trying to figure out their method for that, compared to what Legion is doing. Hannibal was so fucking ambiguous all the time, and I wonder if that actually helped with the clarity, wildly? (thematic I mean, lol that was often the oooonly clarity it had!) But yeah, while the show always had a whole array of possible interpretations/lenses running simultaneously, even some contradictory ones, (and sure some stronger than others), you could always pick one or a couple to drop into and they would be internally consistent. That show just did everything, all at once all the time, and instead of being frustrating it wound up feeling rich and mythic and amorphous, with a whole number of strong themes.
I suspect that what Legion illustrates is the difference between ambiguity, and ambivalence. Legion OSCILLATES. It’s one thing, and then it’s the other, and then it’s the other one again a bit, and then back, and I’m not saying they should pick a hand, I’m saying THROW YOUR ARMS WIDE. Go boldly out into those ambiguous waters, where some of your strongest stuff has been! Probably I just don’t think shows that are doing some of the things these two are doing should even have This Or That questions. Or they absolutely should, but the answer should always be: Yes.
(Anyway fwiw, if you’re looking for data, I find David just as transparent and soft as I did Will, my sympathy and like, loyalty under narrative duress take a veerry similar shape with the two of them.)
