Bill Irwin, while relegated to the background in early episodes, eventually got to put his elastic clown training to good use as the smart but sometimes befuddled Cary. Both Keller and Smart are knockouts as vulnerable yet intelligent ladies who often have to problem solve for the rest of the team despite (or because of) their tragic underpinnings. In the seventh episode, Stevens got the chance to play opposite himself - a British David and an American David side by side, which was a funny sequence that also worked on a meta level because Stevens is British himself IRL. I already mentioned Plaza, but Stevens must be praised too for playing what is actually a very flashy role in such a chill manner David is maybe the most powerful person on earth, but he’s also just a regular guy. “Road to Nowhere,” sung by Keller herself, dance numbers featuring the cast, and a silent movie-style action scene with intertitle cards and “Bolero” on the soundtrack are just a few such memorable sequences. But all the while, Hawley and his team would always maintain a visual flair on Legion that is hardly matched elsewhere in the television world - hey, turn down that psychic noise with this giant volume knob, David! - while also serving up great musical montages on a weekly basis. While Season 1 never got boring, the show did skirt closely to becoming a bit too samey in its first few episodes as the questions surrounding David and his past got a little repetitive. The actress went next level with Lenny, and she created an unforgettable TV villain along the way. ![]() ![]() But as “Psychic” Lenny’s true nature was revealed throughout the eight episodes of Season 1, Plaza’s performance was pulled and stretched and morphed into something new and different and increasingly horrific with each passing week. The Lenny/Devil thread and how it connected to David was the main mystery of the season, and any appearance of the Devil - a sort of Humpty Dumpty on bad acid - is sure to creep out just about anyone who lays eyes on him/it. At first depicted as an (annoying) fellow inmate at Clockworks, even after she died Lenny would continue to appear to David in his visions eventually we would learn that this version of Lenny was just another aspect of the so, so creepy Devil with Yellow Eyes, a parasitic psychic being that had been living inside David’s mind - and feeding off of him - ever since he was a baby. These folks know David’s immense, untapped power offers great potential in their battle against the mysterious anti-mutant government force known as Division 3.Īubrey Plaza’s Lenny would also prove to be an integral part of the show as the weeks progressed. Soon enough David would escape Clockworks and find himself in the company of some like-minded (ahem) individuals, fellow mutants like Bill Irwin and Amber Midthunder’s Cary and Kerry Loudermilk (the latter “lives” inside the former, but comes out into the world when fighting and kick-a$$ery needs to be done) and Jeremie Harris’s Ptonomy Wallace (a master of mining memories), plus the non-mutant leader of the group, Jean Smart’s Melanie Bird. The two humorously decide to become “boyfriend and girlfriend” right off the bat, but as the season progresses we learn that Syd is also the key to David freeing himself of the darkness inside him. Her thing is she doesn’t like people to touch her, which X-Men fans know sounds a lot like the power-absorbing Rogue. Like David, the “is she a mutant or is she just crazy” question also hovers over Syd initially (who, yes, Hawley named after the Pink Floyd musician). Indeed, after that amazing opening sequence, the pilot spends the bulk of its running time in the Clockworks Psychiatric Hospital where David (Dan Stevens) meets fellow patient Syd Barrett (Fargo’s Rachel Keller). Legion would ask that question time and again throughout the first season, as it pondered how much of what we were seeing was real and how much of it was taking place inside David’s mind. His mutant powers are exploding, and perhaps uncontrollable. The first moments of the Legion pilot were instantly iconic, tracing the course of David’s life from infant to adulthood in a montage set to the tune of The Who’s “Happy Jack.” As the young David ages, we see an increasingly disturbed individual emerge, one plagued - cursed - by visions and voices and pyrokinetic eruptions. ![]() (For the record, the character of Legion was created by Marvel's Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz.) The visual bravura, affecting characters and weaving storytelling approach of that show, however, would only prove to be a precursor to the lovely insanity - pun intended - of Legion. Of course, I should’ve known all along that Legion would be something different at the very least, what with series creator Noah Hawley having already wowed viewers with his other FX mindbender, Fargo.
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