‘Legion’ Is the Most Brilliant, Awards-Worthy Show You’re Not Watching

Noah Hawley’s superhero show has been getting a bad rap. Though Legion‘s first season was a critically acclaimed centerpiece in conversations about great television, Season 2 has barely made a ripple. The critical love is still there, but this season’s viewership has been dwindling and the series has been accused of being too narratively confusing. I for one am sick of all this negativity. This past year Legion has accomplished some of the most complicated and inspired storytelling in the history of television, and it’s time this show gets the love it so deserves.

It’s true this last season of Legion has been confusing. No one can deny that. But for me this show has never been a show you watch for its clear story structure. When it comes to Legion, the narrative doesn’t rest in plot points. It rests in its characters’ emotions.

If you watch Legion as a by-the-numbers superhero drama like Marvel’s Jessica Jones or even DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, you’re going to be frustrated. Though the series has a clear superhero at its center (Dan Stevens‘ David Haller), a well-organized superhero team (Summerland), a nefarious villain (Navid Negahban’s Farouk), and a seemingly clear goal (to stop Farouk from destroying the world), it’s almost impenetrably weird. There are just too many layers preventing the average viewer from logically following Season 2’s story. Multiple episodes take place in mental traps designed to imprison the members of Summerland. Characters often prefer to monologue about morality instead of coming up with anything that resembles an actionable plan. And whether David is helping or trying to hurt his arc foe Farouk fluctuates so often you need a graph to track their relationship. Add in the fact that every detail we see in Legion is supposed to be filtered through David’s unhinged mind and that David has no problem lying — to his enemies, his allies, the love of his life, the audience, himself —and the point-by-point summary of what happens in Legion can feel exhaustingly dense.

But unlike other superhero fare, Legion was never meant to be watched for its set pieces or its straightforward battles. Instead it’s a show as emotional and internal as its protagonist. Once you start following Legion Season 2 through its emotional arcs rather than its otherworldly action sequences, this season starts to make a lot more sense. And the story it’s telling is an achingly bleak one.

Even during its elaborate Bollywood dance number, Legion‘s first season was always a sweet love story between two superheroes who met in an asylum, David and Syd (Rachel Keller). Each episode painted a new way the two loved each other, another sacrifice they would make. It was a season that loved its central relationship as much as these characters loved each other.

Season 2 isn’t that. This season started with David re-emerging into existence after being trapped in his own psyche for a year. However, he doesn’t rejoin the team he was forced to abandon apologetically. He swaggers back into Syd and his team’s life, completely confident that he knows what’s best and hyper aware of his own near omnipotence. His timid uncertainty has evaporated, but that doesn’t mean what’s left is better. While David makes his return, Syd stands behind him, talking a big game about the importance of standing by “her man.” Though her sincerity is there, time and time again her words feel false. There are cracks in this relationship, and they’re starting to become clear to both Syd and the audience.

It doesn’t exactly matter why things happen in Legion. Why the mutant with dual personalities Cary (Bill Irwin) and Kerry (Amber Midthunder) split isn’t relevant. Exactly how David’s magnetic druggie best friend Lenny (Aubrey Plaza) exists in the nefarious Farouk’s consciousness isn’t important. Clear explanations for Syd’s future self and  why Legion spent an episode focusing on the many different paths in life David could have taken never appear. And none of these explanations matter. What matters instead is the emotional weight behind these moments. How will two people who have been cohabiting their whole lives exist when they’re apart? How long can someone, even a character as independent as Lenny, exist in isolation? How far will David blindly follow Syd? If you strip him of his newfound allies and romance, who is David? Time after time, this season has constructed elaborate questions and used the nebulous rules of science fiction to force its characters to find answers. In this way, each new episode of Legion is a new character study that’s more nuanced, painful, and heartfelt than the last.

And yet threaded through this mysteries-and-answers format there’s another emotional arc unwinding, one that questions David’s sanity alongside his ego. If you could bend the laws of the universe and consciousness to your will, Legion asks, how would that change you? And how would that change the people you loved? The series doesn’t have a clear answer to those questions, but it’s smart enough to ask the questions.

So often we think about superhero stories having roughly the same stakes as the normal world. The enemies may be more punchable than sickness or climate change, but our heroes typically want the same things we want — to save their loved ones and the world. But power doesn’t just change people’s decisions. It changes the scope of what they consider to be important, sometimes irreparably so. It’s these breaks between “normalcy” and the potential of superheroes that Legion portrays hauntingly well as it dances through moral theory, mental illness, emotional limits, psychic powers, and stunning visuals.

When Season 2 first premiered, I noted in my review that David was never meant to be the hero. He may have the right look and say the right things, but he’s always been a bit too ready to lie and a bit too self-involved to be what we consider heroic. However, that’s never made him a bad character. David’s biggest strength has never been his nearly limitless powers but his ability to be so authentically fragile, he can almost effortlessly bend both his allies and the audience to his will. David Haller is a hero only because that’s what we’ve desperately wanted him to be for two years. The fact that Legion has tricked us so well for so long long is a mark of how brilliant this show is at every level. And the fact it can keep up this ruse while also delivering some of the most visually haunting scenes of 2018 and incorporating drops from The Who and The Kinks is just icing on the cake.

Stream Legion on FX+ and FXNOW