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.
2 comments:
It was a couple of years ago we saw the first trailer forLegion that made it look kind of interesting, but I guess since it never showed up on either of our streaming services we never thought about watching the series. As you describe it the premise does sound thought provoking and I can understand how it could have captured your attention beyond a single episode or two. It's definitely true that the overall X-Men narrative about mutants as persecuted victims turned out to be of great relevance to younger audiences (noted many times in news and editorials about social media). Of course it's also a fact that bells and whistles special effects remain crowd pleasers.
Having watched The Prisoner when it was originally televised we well remember our own disappointment when the ending seemed so flat. "That was it?" Anyway, we've watched a few series since then that have ended poorly so far as we were concerned. One that comes to mind was Twin Peaks. Talk about a huge build-up and then all you get is the Red Room when I was hoping for a big reveal by the Log Lady at least. There are a few reasons for it to happen whether it's an open ended series or one that's planned to be a full story told over a given number of episodes. In the former what often happens is that the original writers or directors leave for other projects or just go away for whatever reason and the people left to continue have a different vision or are left trying to pick up the threads. In the latter case where a limited series has been contracted for ten episodes the creators may find the main arc of the story looks to be completed in eight episodes and they have time to fill. That's when you get gratuitous murders being committed that leave a bad taste in the audience's mind. We've watched a couple of Nordic programs that failed for us in that way. Of course, too, there are the shows that just peter out.
The lead character in Legion does sound like a fascinating case study in your telling, but you're right that trying to keep a large number of people satisfied in a story has become next to impossible.
I've thought for awhile that the mutant persecution theme made more sense in terms of its real world resonance than it does in the context of four color comic books. That is, in superhero comics you have aliens, robots, all sorts of supernatural creatures, etc, so focusing on genetic mutation can seem excessive. But yeah, I can see why teens and others might identify as mutants in that context.
The Prisoner was a weird case. By the end, which you'll remember was only one season, the production team was falling apart, so there was no script supervisor, meaning continuity errors could get through. On the other hand the lack of resolution was a deliberate choice on Patrick McGoohan's part, which I kind of appreciate. Twin Peaks is more straightforward. David Lynch seems to have lost interest at some point. The story is that he didn't want to have the murder of Laura Palmer solved but the network forced his hand. That probably had something to do with it.
Anyway, I wound up liking the first season of Legion, mostly. It's only eight episodes, so not a huge commitment. The male and female leads are fine, but what really made the show for me were two other characters whose mutation caused them to share the same body, sort of. The man lives in the world all the time and ages normally, but his sister only manifests some of the time, so she looks 40-50 years younger. The actors really sell it.
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