At the end of season 2, I said I wouldn’t continue watching Legion when the third season came out, but of course that was an empty promise
Some stray comments on the first two episodes of season 3:
– As in various earlier stretches of the show, I’m unimpressed with the writing per se when I try to mentally isolate it from everything else, but I can only perform that isolation retrospectively and with deliberate effort, since the visuals, acting, etc. do so much on their own and have an infectious energy that elevates whatever they depict.
It’s the fun of seeing people “put on a show" to wow an expectant audience, as distinct from the fun of experiencing a story. Like going to see the circus, or maybe like going to the theater in the days before film existed.
– Like, if this were a novel, I don’t think I’d feel any impetus to continue reading? But it’s hard to even think coherently about that hypothetical, because there’s so much you’re forced to specify in text that you’re free to leave ambiguous onscreen (and vice versa).
David’s by-the-numbers hippie cult is impossible for me to take seriously as a brute fact; it’s transparently the result of a creator starting with certain psychological story beats and then choosing the broadest, loudest trope out there that conveys those beats, and then amplifying and distilling the trope even more than usual. Considered by the self-contained standards of writing qua writing, this is simply bad, and yet onscreen it sort of works – because every aspect of the production is doing the same thing the writing is doing, painting in strokes too broad to look real while still very clearly sketching a recognizable thing.
I guess the real question is whether that “recognizable thing” is any good or not.
– We already had precognition and time travel in Season 2, and I guess I’m glad to see the story focus on these more. IMO, any story with time travel elements (let’s say ”time shit,’ following Homestuck) needs to either restrict them heavily (it only happens once, or it’s constrained in some way that prevents it from being useful), or needs to become largely about time travel. A world with time shit simply isn’t like our world, and the very nature of time shit makes it hard to contain these differences.
– On the other hand, the moral valence of time shit in the story feels incoherent. In Seasons 2, the main plot function of the precognition was to set up an Oedipus-like situation where the precognition users help bring something about by trying to avert it. Yet in Season 3, the same people keep trying this exact thing (after it spectacularly failed once) without it being coded as evil or even dumb, at least so far. Meanwhile, David’s interest in changing the past is clearly coded as reflective of his petulant inability to accept tough facts. But just what moral distinction is being drawn here? At least David knows what did happen and how, and can use that to plan his revisions and perhaps to avoid stable time loops, unlike Syd et. al., who I fully expect to Vriska their way into the catastrophe they’re trying to avoid.
