Legion, Season 1 (2017)

 

Despite sharing the same name, this is nothing to do with the movie I recently reviewed. Instead, this series is adapted from the Marvel comic of the same name.

Our main character is David Haller,who was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a young age and has been a patient in various psychiatric hospitals since the diagnosis. After he has an encounter with fellow patient Syd Barrett, David is confronted with the possibility that there may be more to his condition than simple mental illness.

Haller's awakening awareness brings him to the attention of both the sinister government agency Division 3, and the private organisation Summerland.  The latter help him escape the former, and reveal the truth: David is a mutant with potent but uncontrolled psychic abilities.  Summerland wants to help him control his powers.  Division 3 fears what he might do with them, and wants to control him.

But there may be more forces at work than either Summerland or Division 3 realise ...

A lot of people really liked Legion, but - while I agree it has many very good elements - I have to admit I am not one of them.

The strengths of the show include its cast, all of whom give good performances.  I think special recognition is due to Aubrey Plaza, though, who is great every time she shows up, and who shows considerable breadth of ability in depicting what is a more layered character than the "manic pixie dream-girl" she might initially appear to be.

The program also has great visual design and a fine soundtrack.  In the former category, although the limitations of a broadcast TV budget are sometimes apparent, I was impressed by the sinister appearance of the villain, and the delighted by the macabre charm of "The World's Angriest Boy in the World", a fake kid's book created for the show.  In the latter sphere, there's a lot of good use of particular pieces of music such as Ravel's "Bolero" and Pink Floyd's "Breathe".

For me, where things struggled was the script.  The show features a deliberately convoluted, sometimes almost "trippy" narrative.  There are lots of time jumps, deliberate false impressions, and later revelations. The show also deliberately mixes 60s and 70s fashion and technology with modern day elements, creating a general sense of "unreality" even in the "real" world of the program.

Honestly, all these fancy shenanigans just didn't work that well, for me.  I found the show a little hard to get into at first.  It did start to come together better later on, but for my tastes, it never quite got the momentum it needed to fully work. There was too much obfuscation and overly clever symbolism and not enough just telling the story.  Even at only eight episodes, it felt a little drawn out to me, like it would have been better done in six, with a bit less "woooooh, look how weird we can be!" along the way.