I just started Legion this week, and had taken note that you'd started recaps of the episodes. So I took time to read the ones you'd done so far, and they are FABULOUS. You are so good at picking up the little nuances that I miss on my first watch through. But I literally just finished ep 4, and I was flailing about all my feelings, and I had to come and say I'm so excited for when I get to read your reactions to this episode. Thanks for the excellent conent!
What a lovely message to receive!! And oooohhh my friend, am I ever looking forward to getting to DRAPE MORE WORDS OVER THIS SHOW. Soon! Later this week probably! Aaahh!
re: Legion - I was curious about your thoughts on the use of aspect ratio in the show and what it signifies! I don't think I'm smart enough to figure it out. (I'm excited that you're recapping the show!)
HI LEGION BUD! :D
Ok so I have seen this show fiddle with the aspect ratio dial twice so far (in the THREE episodes I have had time to watch, ahaha, I cry), so this is gonna be a totally shoddy analysis given that I think you need three of a thing before you can call anything a “pattern”, right? Whatevs, we work with what we got.
My best guess right now is that it actually is just aesthetic — but not like aesthetic for aesthetic’s sake, more like it indicates a deliberate aesthetic shift. The first time those bars narrowed in was when the show briefly transformed into a cool-toned spy thriller, and the second when it went full bore into a trippy cerebral concept piece. There’s as good a chance as any that the creative team just thought widening the shot a neat way to nod to this TV show’s cinematic sensibilities.
But who knows what I have in store for me! More on this story as it develops.
For an intro to this one just imagine a stream of hearts pouring out my own heart while I flail around in a sea of my heart’s hearts splashing and laughing and gently gnawing on one and you should have ABOUT THE STATE OF THINGS.
Season 1, ‘Chapter 3’
The first three minutes of Legion, ‘Chapter 3’ are perhaps the most masterfully bewitching opening of an episode of television I’ve ever watched. Trying to explain what they are and what they did to me just with wordsfeels like one of the more comically hopeless things I’ve attempted in a while, because it’s so rooted in what you can do with television, with image and sound, with that form of storytelling told in installments. This opening couldn’t have come earlier than the third episode, for instance. A big part of its power is in how it draws together elements we’ve already seen to make a new piece of music.
Also: the music. Lovely darkening movie-score strings, overlaid with a spoken-word melody of a man’s voice telling the fable of the poor woodcutter and his wife who found a crane in the woods — a man’s voice playing from a beautiful silver & wire Rube Goldberg machine of a coffee maker. The strangeness, the gorgeous strangeness! A sort of mid-century A.I. doing the scene-setting heavy lifting of paaaages of dialogue.
But more than anything, the magic in this opening is in how it renders the feeling of telepathy. It is of telepathy, of the stuff of it. Not that we’re supposed to parse everything we see as being experienced by David, sitting at the end of a sunlit dock, but we should get the sense that some is, or that it can be. That there are certain threads of connection he’s beginning to feel between sensation and image and thought, a web of humanity, gone mysteriously tangible under his attention.
The fear people have about telepathy, of course, is the idea of someone observing our private lives. And this episode does something brilliant: it gives us telepathy ourselves. It shows us people literally bare. We see a room of people showering, and see it for all that it is: just human bodies bathing. All skin feels the same under soap and water. Telepathy, Legion says, is not inherently voyeuristic — it’s inherently experiential.
It’s just a stunning sequence. I’ve watched it over and over trying to put these words in order, and every time I’ve just been SWEPT BY GOOSEBUMPS TBH.
OH MAN I have to get cracking on the rest of the season, before you overtake me :D
Everyone who is currently behind on Legion gets a sincere and solemn digital fistbump from yours truly, who is every minute aware of the fact that she herself is behind on Legion.
Legion is a show that rewards openness. It’s like a Virginia Woolf novel that way, if you’ll forgive me making a very grand comparison that would probably have Noah Hawley spluttering on his coffee. It’s a show that asks that you hold yourself lightly, be loose, let it take you along its own slipstreams. Trying to hold to a traditional cause/effect narrative here is only going to give you a timeline tension headache.
But we needn’t be lost without those old guideposts. As in Hannibal, the paths here are the emotional through-lines. What we see and hear may not be real, may not be now, but what David feels about them — what we feel about them — that is. It’s free-association television. It’s a dream.
Or in David’s case, maybe a memory.
Which is all to say: I watched the second episode of Legion and drifted into all sorts of places. Join me!
Season 1, ‘Chapter 2’
If you liked that V. Woolves reference you’re probably gonna be happy with this: ‘Chapter 2’ begins with David serving up some VO F. Scott realness over a literal boat beating against the current: “And so we ran on, into Summerland, and the place they said does not exist.” Borne back ceaselessly into the past? Well give them a few minutes but, very yes.
Moments layer together in daymare disruption, sunny tranquility and grim men and dogs in the trees and a pleasant clear voice singing and David panting in wide-eyed pain. Dr. Melanie Bird has brought him to her beautiful facility deep in the woods, called Summerland, not ominously at all, where other young rescued mutants have come to, quote, “do the work that must be done.” Again, not ominously at all.
Summerland seems to have an immediately sapping effect upon David, who can hardly keep himself upright in the midcentury modern elevator,
adorable,
and then just fully collapses into the arms of the first person he meets.
As he shudders on a bed, Dr. Bird tells David that they believe he’s a very powerful telepath, and that all the strong minds here in Summerland are overwhelming him.
I’m gonna start a lot of sentences in these with “what I love about X-Men is.” What I love about X-Men is TELEPATHY. Telepathy is like the most awful, awesome power, and also makes you uniquely, fucked-up-edly fragile.
But Dr. Bird can help. She teaches David how to imagine a knob and dial all the voices out except for hers, speaking his name. His breathing eases. Not bad for the first day! Now get some sleep in your nifty little deco bunk because tomorrow we’re gonna start digging into your surely very nice and not at all upsetting memories!
I'm so happy that you're watching Legion too! It is a bit disorienting on the first watch, but for we who love Lynch and Fuller, it is truly right up our alley. Also, your recap is amazing (as always) - your recaps enhance the whole experience to such a degree, I don't know how you manage to do that, sometimes
That is so nice of you to say!! I don’t really know what I’m doing either… sometimes I kind of feel like I’m just trying to amplify the siren song I’m hearing, because I love drowning and feeling out to seeeaaa
“I think [Fuller]’s done an amazing job with that show. I love how he flipped the table so it was Will Graham in the box and Hannibal going to see him. I thought that was genius.”
WONDERFUL. I can’t believe I was over here going on about how Legion is about creating the experience of being in this world, and meanwhile Noah Hawley is nodding emphatically from the corner like UH-HUH!
Last spring when I was getting mildly sloshed off cheap French rosés and falling in love with the X-Men, I did not know it was because my compass heart had swung unerringly to the superhero franchise that, in its infinite batshit whimsy, would see fit to produce an eight-episode kaleidoscopic mutant concept piece less than one year later, as if the surrealist inventive fuckery inherent in the X-Men universe had just been waiting for me, DTF.
And then Legion had to wait for me a bit more, as historically I’ve only ever managed to watch one TV show at a time. Why? BECAUSE I DO NOTHING BY HALVES, SON. And presently I am still lost in space with my beloved golden-hearts on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
But then I saw a gifset of what looked like Jemaine Clement in a pale suit on some sort of Mylar-draped soundstage, and that was fucking it. I could feel a give in my ribs as I was pulled toward my true north, to Legion, to the show seemingly made out of scraps and spangles fished out of my own head.
So let’s do it. Let’s do two shows at once. Let’s see what my capacity for sustained enthusiasm actually is. Let’s open up all the valves, let’s set fire to tears, LET’S GO.
Legion - Season 1, ‘Chapter 1’
Wooouuuld you like this show to begin with a deeply stylized growing-up montage set to “Happy Jack” by The Who, hyper-slo-mo snapshots all centered in frame, quaint and retro until our boy hits age of onset and begins screaming it into a distorted symmetrical Wes Anderson nightmare? Hohoho, would I.
I WOULD.
Troubled kid grows into troubled man, until his big haunted eyes see no more hope, and he tries to hang himself with an electrical cord, which sparks like synapses (!!! guys) into a sparkling candle on a cupcake — his birthday. Thirty-odd complete revolutions around the sun for David, the last five spent inside this mental institution, which outfits its patients in burnt orange track jackets with yellow stripes, because THE SIXTIES, groovy.
Dan Stevens does a pretty great American accent, it turns out. His most amazing transformation is still when he left his second chin in Downton Abbey and suddenly looked like his own hot evil twin, but this is good too.
