I blogged a fair amount about Legion the TV show when it was running but have hardly thought about it since it ended.  Since its existence randomly popped into my head this morning, I want to write down the following opinion, while I’ve had for a while but never blogged about:

That final scene of Season 2, which I wrote a long rant about when I first saw it?  That scene is really good.  I’ve re-watched it a number of times and it’s … one of the most raw, powerful things I’ve seen on a TV or film screen.  (I don’t watch many TV shows or movies, so maybe that isn’t saying much.)

It’s not like I’ve changed my mind about the qualities that my rant was about.  The scene does in fact reveal a bizarre, apparently very ignorant view of mental illness that I’m shocked could make it onto network TV in 2018.  Nothing in the final season undoes that, and in fact the writers drag their heels in further there.

But the scene is so powerful in part because the writers don’t seem in control of what they’re doing.  It’s like they’ve summoned a demon by accident, and are standing around, gawking awkwardly at the pentagram they drew and mumbling “we didn’t think it would work … ”  As a twist at the end of the story’s middle act, the scene is meant to be exciting in a standard-issue, screenwriting-textbook way, but it ends up being a very different kind of exciting.  The car has gone off the road; no one is driving it anymore; nightmare energies have been called up that no one had expected and no one can predict.

Legion is worst at portraying the perspectives that are supposed to be its moral center.  Its implicit moral worldview is naive, childlike, a “good cluster morality” in which you can read someone’s quality as a person off of incidental properties of their appearance, diction, and deportment.  Syd, the purported hero in the end, is a terribly written character with little to do but stand around delivering carefully worded didactic speeches with impeccable poise.  But the “bad” people are allowed to be flawed, impulsive, rough-edged (or just rough), traumatized, messed-up, irreverent, cynical.

The show seems to think we’ll just read all these things as proxies for “bad,” which is terrible.  Emotionally, it makes me want to “side with” these characters against the writers who created them.  I want to grab their stuffy lapels and yell “Lenny deserved better, dammit!” … for example.  And, almost paradoxically, this resistant reading of the show is interesting and emotionally involving enough to make the show worth watching.  Like Andrew Hussie, the writers are a villainous presence, but they lack Hussie’s self-awareness and metafictional bent – which makes them better villains.  You really do want to grab their labels and yell various things, because it seems plausible that they might not actually know.

Anyway, that one scene is the apex of all this, which nothing in the pretty-good-but-underwhelming final season can match, and whose power that final season cements by confirming the writers indeed had no idea what to do with the demon they had summoned.  Through their ineptitude, they become better villains in their own story than any of the textual ones.  By seeming not to recognize to the very real-looking pain and trauma they thrust in our faces, they make that pain and trauma feel all the more real – for in real life, one does sometimes feel rejected not just by other people but indeed by “the writers,” the universe, the moral law itself.

Quick thoughts on Legion finale

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Okay, new (?) Legion theory: the show has been narrated, a la Doc Scratch, by the Shadow King ever since the moment he got his body back.

This explains not only the way SK suddenly becomes a benign side character whose immense powers and psychopathy don’t really worry anyone, but also how the strange rhetoric about “insanity” very recently espoused in an obviously suspect manner by SK-in-Melanie’s-body starts suddenly being adopted by the show itself (as I boggled at here, right after finishing S2)

Continuing my Legion liveblogging I guess (previously)

The latest (third) episode was cool, but seemed like a diversion from the main story, which is apparently going to wrap itself up in only five more episodes?

What I’m most skeptical about them pulling off in only five episodes is any kind of real perspective shift that puts someone other than David in a protagonist-like role.  It’s weird, because Noah Hawley has done a whole bunch of interviews, both at the end of S2 and now at the start of S3, about how he’s so excited to step outside of David’s (implicit) perspective, to see him from the outside.  Maybe Syd’s been the real protagonist all along, he says.  Or, this new character Switch is great because she’s a vehicle for seeing David from the outside.

It’s weird because, however much the show succeeds or fails or its own terms, it definitely seems to be failing on this thing that the showrunning is externally asserting as his intent.  The show simply is written from David’s perspective and his alone; even when it critiques him, it’s the sort of critique you get inside your own head when you’re feeling down, from imagined versions of your friends/enemies/exes/et. al.

No one else has a clear personal story thread – or in some cases even a clearly delineated personality – that could stand on its own without David existing.  Everyone else reacts to him, and sometimes their reactions are disapproving or antagonistic, but they’re still reactions to him and are interesting to the writers mostly as such.  Who is Switch when she’s not being a vehicle for “seeing David from the outside”?  We know almost literally nothing about her.  For that matter, who is Syd without David?  What are her goals and dreams, her challenges, her baggage?

I’m sure there’s someone out there who would take me to task for not reading between the lines enough and picking up on how Syd is Actually A Real Character if you pay attention.  But, I dunno, it feels to me like saying Skylar White is as developed and engaging a character as her husband, just because she’s morally in the right to be wary of him.  She sure is.  But there’s a simple and infallible test here: would you watch a show only about Skylar without Walt?  Only about Syd, without David?  What would it even be about?  (We don’t even have enough information to judge whether such shows would be any good.  Maybe they’d be great!  After all, you can draw anything on a mostly blank canvas.)

I don’t have an entirely coherent thought here, but … OK, so the show is clearly in the same territory as something like Evangelion, where many of the specific events, characters, and sci-fi concepts are metaphorically “about” common and potent psychological experiences (heartbreak, feeling rejected, childhood trauma, yearning for an absent mother, these sorts of things), although it’s (thankfully) hard to come up with a single, rigid scheme of metaphorical correspondence that handles the whole thing and removes all ambiguity or specificity.

Hawley has said things to the effect of, oh, it’s a grandiose sci-fi depiction of a relationship and its surrounding emotions.  He talks about it being all about David and Syd, and whether they’ll get back together, as if it were a real-world romantic drama.  And I think we’re supposed to be able to engage with it on that level, viewing the fact that Syd is trying to kill David based on messages from the future, and that David has started a Manson-esque cult, as literalized and externalized versions of the things that go on in real people’s heads in real and familiar situations.

S3 makes a lot of sense when seen this way, but mostly – again – if the emotions are David’s.  The entire situation feels like some guy’s self-hating, post-breakup daydream.  Your ex is coming to kill you, because she’s convinced (perhaps rightly) of your immense moral turpitude (but at least she still cares about you, if only negatively!).  She is doing this in collaboration with this cool, in-command, effortlessly masculine guy (so different from you, you who are so twitchily desperate to prove your worth) who’s actually utterly horrible and abusive, who caused you great harm in the past, but who she and everyone else has somehow decided is okay at the same moment they decided you weren’t.  You’re now desperate for love, looking for it maybe in some bad ways, and also ruminating heavily on the past, especially on the other major female presence in your life … your mom.  Right?  It’s all very emotionally authentic, but the emotions are all David’s.  The other characters might as well be daydream phantoms, playing out their assigned daydream roles.

(In the real world, Syd would just be done with David at this point; appropriately enough, her only reason for continued involvement in his life is a message from the future, a writerly device that is both purely fantastical and purely arbitrary.  The dream must keep her in the frame somehow.)

And then there’s Lenny, the fourth part of this romantic/psychological square.  Lenny and Syd are two sides of a coin in the way that David and the Shadow King are two sides of a coin – implicit romantic rivals, opposed archetypes of the same gender.  The secondary members of each pair, Lenny and SK, aren’t judged by the same standards as the primary members: Syd et. al. make an alliance with the (present, existing) monstrous SK solely to oppose a (prophesied) monstrous David, and the same show that has Syd intoning Margaret Atwood quotes continues to treat Lenny (an addict serially abused by patriarch types) as wacky comic relief.  Really I think Lenny, much more than anyone else, has the potential to be the loose end that unravels the whole narcissistic, self-contained, David-centric tangle.  Either she’ll remain the wacky bad girl whose story doesn’t “matter,” which would dissolve the feminist pretensions of the David/Syd storyline whether the writers realize or not, or her storyline will eventually be treated with a gravity proportionate to the extent of her screentime, which will establish that there’s more in heaven and earth than David and his crush.  I expect the former but hope for the latter.

I don’t know what’s going on with the mental illness theme at all these days.  At most it’s come up occasionally as non-functional wallpaper – David’s not just a cult leader, he’s a cult leader who hallucinates occasionally! – which calls the central claim at the end of S2 (”you’re both”) even more into question, one would think.  But is that deliberate?  Is anything deliberate?  Who even knows.

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.

tsutsifrutsi:

nostalgebraist:

I did finally finish the second season of Legion and … hoo boy

I was wondering where they were going the mental illness theme, and uh, they definitely went somewhere with it, that’s for sure!  I kind of wish they hadn’t, now!

On the upside, the last few episodes were emotionally involving, had moments that felt real and raw, and made a (last-minute) attempt to move the show beyond mere stylish randomness.  On the downside, they were a complete mess that felt like two or more distinct storylines jammed together inconsistently and executed too fast, and – more egregiously – contained the most weirdly, brazenly incoherent and unreal portrayal of mental illness I’ve seen in mainstream “serious” fiction in a long time.

Honestly, I’m less angry about it than just plain confused how this thing got into the world in the first place.  Like, do the writers actually expect the audience to share their strange (and factually inaccurate) assumptions?  Are they knowingly straying from reality in favor of a stereotypical cartoon notion of “insanity,” and if so, how (and why) do they expect this to sync up with all the parts of the show that appear to be about real (albeit stylized) things happening to real humans?  (I am a bit angry that the social justice flavored critiques of the ending have taken this stuff completely in stride, but I guess that’s par for the course)

Specifically, the ending involves a long, elaborate set of conflations/confusions between:

1. Common, if awful, personality flaws that people can have without being mentally ill (and many do)

2. Psychopathy

3. Schizophrenia

For every pair of these (1+2, 2+3, 3+1), there are one or more moments where the two are implied to be the same thing, or to be connected by some deep link too obvious to spell out, or the like.  More on this under a cut because spoilers

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(Stop me if I’m way off; I haven’t actually watched the show.)

That actually sounds kind of sensible? Like, he is a relatively normal “bad person”; but he is being gaslighted by a group of abusive “friends” into believing that he is a crazy bad person; and this is extremely traumatic, enough to cause a weird dissociative fugue in pretty much anyone, A Clockwork Orange style—but this person likely does have specific traumas that are being dredged up here, making this an even more triggering event. So he ends up painting an impressionistic portrait of a moment of feeling like a world-killing Evil Overlord, (a Van Gogh mania in negative emotional valence—something usually more directly reacted to with self-harm, like with Van Gogh himself, or as described in, uh, that Nine Inch Nails album. You know the one. [All of them.])

Oh, and the beliefs of his “friends” are, I would guess, a statement about how society inescapably views mental illness and rotten character as two faces of the same coin. (See: everyone with NPD on Tumblr, who has to go around explaining all day that narcissism doesn’t somehow force you to do bad things to people, and nobody ever believes them and continues to think NPD by itself is a sufficient explanation for e.g. abusive parenting.)

Is this maybe a Poe’s Law thing? Is the story hitting you over the head insufficiently hard with the degree to which it’s implying that this is a societal satire: a portrait of a society that tries to both tell bad people they’re really just broken (medicalizing personality flaws) and broken people that they’re really just bad (moralizing mental illness)?

I like this from a pure “free play of interpretations” angle, but it is pretty inconsistent with the show’s moment-by-moment emotional cues (music, shot framing, etc.), and also inconsistent with stated authorial intent (in the interviews I link here).

I guess it’s conceivable that Noah Hawley is straight-up lying in interviews to maintain the sanctity of a planned, later twist – and this would have to be revealed as a twist, since if it’s “true” it has flown over the heads of every critic out there – but it seems implausible.

OTOH, now I’m thinking back to the end of the first season, when @disconcision predicted the show would eventually reveal the superhero stuff was all in his head the whole time.  Back then I was like “nah,” but after Season 2 I’m starting to think that’s the sort of “shocking” cliche this show would embrace, and it would provide room for Hawley’s statements to be technically true, correctly describing the current trajectory of the superhero narrative and implicitly silent about the mundane-reality narrative – or at least only applicable to it when translated across a bridge of metaphor.

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(via tsutsifrutsi)