There's a kind of TV episode where they just say "screw everything" and confront the viewer with pure weirdness. Often it's produced on cult shows where the creators realize the audience isn't growing and they're near cancellation, although sometimes it's an expression of confidence at the other end of the scale. "Fall Out", the final episode of Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner might be the archetypical example, and would certainly seem to be one of the earliest.
Legion is a show that starts out in this mode, from the very first shot of the first scene of the first episode. From what I've seen so far it never lets up. How well this works is subjective, and I'm still working it out for myself. It is colorful and fun to look at, certainly.
That initial scene, by the way, is a montage following a boy from cheerful infancy through troubled and picked-on adolescence to a suicide attempt as a young adult, all set to the Who's "Happy Jack." (Irony!) Throughout the rest of the first episode he's in or around an asylum called "Clockworks" that looks like Stanley Kubrick dreamed it up.
The root of David Haller's mounting despair is a mind that torments him with awful visions, and voices that incessantly speak to him and him alone. These voices are diagnosed as multiple personalities, although in one episode his sister characterizes him as a schizophrenic, a once-common mistake. Moot point, though. David's visions aren't simply a symptom of mental illness. He's a telepath and reality warper, one of the world's most powerful mutants.
As you may or may not guess, this show derives from the Marvel Universe. In the comic book continuity Haller a.k.a. Legion is the son of X-Men founder Charles Xavier. There are nods to this background in the show, for example circular windows that look like x'es. That said, we're not in MCU blockbuster territory here. The show's closest relatives are Mr. Robot and the violent, claustrophobic fantasia that was Hannibal. Taking spandex material and subjecting it to this arty, "is any of this happening?" approach is something you do when mass audiences have become a thing of the past.
It can be interesting. And I think there is a point. I said earlier that the lead character is a powerful mutant, even if he thinks he's insane. But that might be a distinction without a difference, especially in the way he's treated. The X-Men comics' narrative of mutants as persecuted minority is applied to the impersonal treatment mentally ill people often get. Which can lead to disastrous results.
Legion is a show that starts out in this mode, from the very first shot of the first scene of the first episode. From what I've seen so far it never lets up. How well this works is subjective, and I'm still working it out for myself. It is colorful and fun to look at, certainly.
That initial scene, by the way, is a montage following a boy from cheerful infancy through troubled and picked-on adolescence to a suicide attempt as a young adult, all set to the Who's "Happy Jack." (Irony!) Throughout the rest of the first episode he's in or around an asylum called "Clockworks" that looks like Stanley Kubrick dreamed it up.
The root of David Haller's mounting despair is a mind that torments him with awful visions, and voices that incessantly speak to him and him alone. These voices are diagnosed as multiple personalities, although in one episode his sister characterizes him as a schizophrenic, a once-common mistake. Moot point, though. David's visions aren't simply a symptom of mental illness. He's a telepath and reality warper, one of the world's most powerful mutants.
As you may or may not guess, this show derives from the Marvel Universe. In the comic book continuity Haller a.k.a. Legion is the son of X-Men founder Charles Xavier. There are nods to this background in the show, for example circular windows that look like x'es. That said, we're not in MCU blockbuster territory here. The show's closest relatives are Mr. Robot and the violent, claustrophobic fantasia that was Hannibal. Taking spandex material and subjecting it to this arty, "is any of this happening?" approach is something you do when mass audiences have become a thing of the past.
It can be interesting. And I think there is a point. I said earlier that the lead character is a powerful mutant, even if he thinks he's insane. But that might be a distinction without a difference, especially in the way he's treated. The X-Men comics' narrative of mutants as persecuted minority is applied to the impersonal treatment mentally ill people often get. Which can lead to disastrous results.
