Celedam wrote:Legion (FX) is some of the best television I've ever seen…
FX Networks wrote:Legion, based on the Marvel Comics by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz, is the story of David Haller (Dan Stevens), a troubled young man who may be more than human. Diagnosed as schizophrenic as a child, David has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years. Now in his early 20's and free once again, David loses himself in the rhythm of the structured regimen of daily life: breakfast, lunch, dinner, therapy, medications, sleep. David spends the rest of his time in companionable silence alongside his chatterbox friend Lenny (Aubrey Plaza), a fellow patient whose life-long drug and alcohol addiction has done nothing to quell her boundless optimism that her luck is about to change. The pleasant numbness of David's routine is completely upended with the arrival of a beautiful and troubled new patient named Syd (Rachel Keller). Inexplicably drawn to one another, David and Syd share a startling encounter, after which David must confront the shocking possibility that the voices he hears and the visions he sees may actually be real.
It's like part Bryan Fuller (
Pushing Daisies) and part David Lynch (
Twin Peaks) — brilliantly weird without tipping over into weird-for-the-sake-of-weird. Everything has a purpose, as long as you remember what that purpose is: to piece together the secret history of a telepath/telekinetic who is so powerful that his own mind became schizophrenic in order to protect itself from… itself.
Unreliable narrator, non-linear narrative, some truly psychedelic visuals, respect for the source material, possible tie-ins to other X-Men adaptations, and Jemaine Clement (
Flight of the Conchords) cast as a beatnik scientist/guru stuck on the astral plane. This is scratching an itch I didn't even know I had.
I want to applaud whomever it is at Fox that is finally taking their X-Men license seriously and greenlighting productions like this,
Deadpool, and
Logan.
So the first season is done. Eight episodes is plenty for a story like this, and since they didn't need to stretch the budget, it didn't end up looking cheap like
Agents of SHIELD.
Anyhow, it was very satisfying, and I genuinely didn't expect quite that ending. There had better be a second season, or we riot.
And like every good Marvel movie, it had a post-credits scene. Heh.
On the technical side, I loved their use of both music
and CG. In particular…
…when Lenny killed Walter in Episode 7. That really freaked me out.
Also…
I look forward to Lenny and Oliver together. The two most interesting characters played by arguably the two most interesting actors. Road trip!
Furthermore…
I like what they did with Clark, a.k.a. the new "Eye". The man is terrified, he stated exactly why, and in most ways that matter he's right. A lesser show would have followed through on making him the new villain — it writes itself, a vengeful bigot commanding jackbooted thugs, always just one step behind our heroes — but this show immediately made it clear how silly that would be. Well done.
For anyone who wants to give it a try, the entire first season is on Hulu…
https://www.hulu.com/legion