Legion Season 2 TV Show Review

Schizophrenic Superheroes

by Casimir Harlow
Movies & TV Shows Review

23

Legion Season 2 TV Show Review

Fox's best X-Men project, Legion enters its second season and it's just as much of a mind-twisting audiovisual delight as the first.

With a plethora of new X-Men-universe features landing on both the big and small screen - after the excellent Days of Future Past we got the abysmal Apocalypse which will hopefully be course-corrected for this year's Dark Phoenix; after the seminal Logan there may well be a sequel/spin-off about X-23; and after the success of the hilarious Deadpool we're not only getting Deadpool 2 this Summer but also a potential X-Force movie; then there's the horror-twinged The New Mutants, and the middling small screen series The Gifted - it's not just superhero saturation that fans may be feeling, but actually X-Men superhero saturation. However one of the most compelling new additions was Legion, a dark and different mutant mystery so heavily psychologically twinged that it spent much of its time questioning whether the supposed heroes of its story were actually just plain crazy.
Legion follows Dan Stevens' (The Guest) schizophrenic protagonist David, who spent years at a mental institution before discovering that he actually had powers - which are not wholly unlike a not totally unrelated other mutant character with telepathy and telekenesis. On the run from a clandestine Government agency called Division III and enlisted by a mysterious group who run a secret facility called Summerland, Dan finds his mind infected by an entity called The Shadow King - who wants to use Dan's immense power to destroy the world. Forced to travel into the Astral Plane, the Summerland group battle both this powerful mutant force and Division III, leaving Dan free of his infected mind, although The Shadow King is soon left in search of a new body to infect, and Dan too soon finds bigger - or rather smaller, since he was minituarised - problems to deal with.
Legion Season 2
Whilst dubbed Chapter 9, the first episode of Season 2 of Legion both does and doesn't actually start off immediately after the events of the Season 1 finale, Chapter 8, with some time having passed after The Shadow King was released and David was minituarised and trapped inside a strange orb, although, for David, it was curiously just yesterday. Scant time is spent recapping the events before, and it's not long before the show has you as mind-melted as it did in the first season, scrambling to figure out what on earth is going on, once again through the lens of David who is - as the unreliable narrator that he always is - also scrambling to figure out what the hell is going on.

Although merely a first taste of what's to come, just one episode is enough to remind you of how great the show was; how interesting the characters are; and how damn frenetically psychedelic the style is. Blending discordant tones with period tracks, turning super-creepy montages into an art form, Legion is tremendous, setting Oliver's Shadow King as a very real threat for both Division III and the Summerland group, who have to work together to find him as he crosses the country infecting people with a mind virus that leaves them as frozen zombies with perpetually chattering teeth.

Sit back and enjoy the majesty of Legion

With stunning, frequently hallucinogenic visuals and dreamy music - including the Best Dance-off Ever - both often crescendoing into nightmarish oblivion, Legion is back with a mental bang, suddenly resuming its place as one of the best shows on television - utterly compelling, mind-blowing, striking and satisfying. If you've never checked the series out, Now TV is re-running the first season as it drop-feeds the next 8 episodes weekly, and comes highly recommended. After that you can sit back and enjoy the majesty of Season 2 of Legion.

Scores

Verdict

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9

9
AVForumsSCORE
OUT OF
10

Where to watch Legion Season 2

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