LEGION

“If the idea of illness can become illness, what else about our reality is actually a disorder?” 

The comic book superhero character of Legion albeit obscure is not new, he’s the sometime mutant son of Professor Charles Xavier of the X-Men. In the ’90s however, the Legion character with his…. issues was deemed “too much” for an audience that nonetheless would still accept superheroes like Batman and other troubled protagonists who are firm believers that ends justify means. 

(Kinda in the same way “everyone” used to blindly accept the premise of traditional Disney princesses “all” having absent mums and needing to be rescued by strong men… And then after that we all swung the other way and it’s now fashionable to have “strong girls who can’t be told what to do” ….and goodness knows how many more pendulum swings into extremes we’re going to have before we arrive at the path of moderation, which m-ight look a little like this: True strength is knowing when to yield (and sure, when to not – but most “strong” characters don’t have a problem not yielding 😀 )… It was Malcolm Forbes who said, “Authority is shared only when the sharer is sure of his.” No, not… easy. Is it just me who starts getting worried if something seems easy – wha’m I not seeing, in the risk-reward relationship??? 😀 )

A-nyway, it’s a sign of the times, the latest fashionable lead character is not a rich, brooding dude with commitment and ego issues (and his own Lego Movie), but one who struggles with mental problems, constantly reminding himself he is a good person and therefore deserves to be loved, constantly justifying his actions, constantly leaving a wake of casualties as he barges through life.

In case you’re wondering, Legion is written by experienced author and increasingly sought after tv writer Noah Hawley, who has described his talent, “I don’t write these stories for the rewards that come back to me. I write them because I have to write them. It’s a sickness on some level. It’s a compulsion…” He’s elaborated on that with Jimmy Kimmel, “It’s like Bill Gates losing money when he stops to pick up a USD 10,000 bill,” he has to keep writing. This raved-about series by FX (owned by Disney) was filmed in Vancouver and British Columbia, btw… and you previously saw “David Haller” in…. Downton Abbey. There is an Easter Egg innit where one of his “rational personalities” puts on a British accent 🙂 ) And now –

Spoilers. MAJOR. You have been warned. (Oh wait, this thing carries a 16-and-above PG rating anyway, mainly for the implied drug taking and scary nightmares. Legion at his “most popular” gains a following among the young, attractive, pliable minds by replicating the effects of recreational drugs, thereby earning him a large number of drugged-to-the-eyeballs groupies… (Legion could cure addiction! Except… that’s not as cool a superpower as shooting lightning bolts, flying, or being rich) …and yet he remains perpetually unfulfilled by the adoration of his breathless and beautiful following, instead constantly seeking to travel back in time to “fix things” – especially himself.)

So the story goes… Young David Haller has known all his life that he suffers from severe mental illness, driving him to substance abuse (so he can escape the nightmares), violence (because “they” told him to do it), and attempted suicide (so “they” won’t get him.)

Six years after being committed, David meets Sydney in the mental hospital. (Sydney appears to be in because she can’t stand being touched.)

As their friendship blossoms and they fall in love (yuck did I really type that) a bizarre disaster one day occurs – all the doors of the patients’ rooms disappear, leaving some frantic people trapped in doorless cells and others stuck in the walls. In the ensuing chaos, Syd saves David from abduction and likely execution by a government agency hunting down mutants who have uncontrollable power.

It turns out Sydney’s ability is to switch minds with whoever she touches. (Including cats. In later seasons Syd does things like hop into her pet cat to roam the hallways unnoticed.) Sydney is part of a mutant group known as Summerland, whose nemesis is the mutant-hunting group Division 3. When Division 3 comes for David, Sydney switches places with him to save him… but loses control over his powers, hence the bizarre casualties in the walls etc.

Through therapy at Summerland, David discovers he has grown up carrying around Amahl Farouk a.k.a. The Shadow King in his mind – a 2000 year old mutant who has skilfully honed his abilities to selectively erase and replace David’s memories after feeding on his – wait for it – negative mental energy.

“Whether the threat is real, the response certainly is, and it is often excessive…

…Ask yourself: What’s more terrifying – fear… or the frightened?”

Charles Xavier a.k.a. David’s dad duelled and defeated Farouk, only to have remnants of his Voldemort-esque psyche take up residence in baby David’s head. That’s pretty much the whole first season but with many jump-scares and disturbing moments – for eg David has fake memories of his dad reading a children’s book with strangely violent images every bedtime (The Angriest Boy is a most disturbing child’s bedtime story, created for the purpose of the show) –

Scary? The real Shadow King/Amahl Farouk however, is very much not. He’s an elegant and sophisticated older gentleman, king of a (fictitious) middle eastern country… and furious in the first two seasons that Charles Xavier “who doesn’t know a thing about our culture nor even speak our language” sees fit to pass judgement he, Farouk, doesn’t do a good enough job as ruler of his people. (Landmine alert. HUGE.)

 

Not surprising in Season 3 they kinda diffused that risky conversation by making it a clearcut good guy/ bad guy situation, adding scenes where Farouk turned the previous ruler into a monkey 😀 (well, stuck his predecessor inside the head of a monkey).

When the other Summerland mutants use their own powers to replay David’s childhood memories, trying to piece together the root of his mental illness, they initially don’t give the warm, sunlight-filled images of David-as-a-child running around with his adoptive sister and his beloved Beagle a second look. That is, until they meet his sister and she happens to mention David never had a dog. And so they search harder….

“Human beings are the only animal that forms ideas about their world. We perceive it not through our bodies but through our minds. We must agree on what is real. Because of this, we are the only animal on Earth that goes mad.”

The drug dealer who leads juvenile David astray is, in his archived memories, also a completely different person – instead of the abusive older man of reality, what David perpetually remembers is the face of his then-best-friend and partner-in-crime Lenny Busker (also one of the Shadow King’s victims.) This is one of my favourite scenes of Farouk wearing “Lenny mask” and dancing wreaking havoc through David’s childhood memories, including when he seeks therapy:

Aside from mind-boggling graphics and brilliant music videos that enhance the storyline, there is a larger theme of how we are all non-heroes – protagonists – and how, through the long endurance run that is Life, the characters in the show all go from doing terrible things to redeeming themselves to abruptly doing more terrible things in the name of noble purposes, to trying to save the world in the most fantastical ways, in a tv series that spans 3 seasons:

1) David Haller believes throughout his young life that he has severe mental problems. When he discovers he has super powers and the psyche of another mutant in his mind, he blames “the parasite” for his mental illness AND every bad choice he ever makes. He couldn’t control his powers because of this parasite in his mind. He turned to substance abuse because of this parasite in his mind. He is schizophrenic because of this parasite in his mind. His real parents didn’t want him because of this parasite in his mind. Eventually learning to control his powers after many casualties, David confronts his tormentor, the supposed root of all his problems, nearly killing him.

“Ever tried to un-mix the ingredients after you’ve made the soup?”

The soup is arrived at based on all the ingredients in the recipe. All. The ingredients. To go back and remove some of said ingredients is to change the result irrevocably, regardless whether it’s something you can perceive on your palate, regardless whether you can taste the difference in the end product. (Therein lies your wiggle room. And yes, you can change your tastes as well. For the better, also for the worse..) But it is a different product…

In final throes, Zombie-like Lenny explains to Sydney telepathically that David has spent his entire lifetime with him – Farouk – in his mind, never functioning without Farouk’s presence. Are they willing to take the chance that killing off the last remnants of Farouk will leave David unharmed?

Not wanting to take the risk, Sydney allows Farouk to inhabit her mind briefly in order to get him to disengage from David’s mind, which he has in a death grip – but then he quickly moves through her to possess one of their other teammates and escapes with his new host before they can contain him.

David hunts down Farouk, resulting in some trippy dream-sequence fights that happen in people’s heads – the eg below is when David is hooked up to something similar to Charles Xavier’s Cerebro and psychically pursuing someone who knows the location of Farouk’s physical body (which he wants to permanently destroy – great shades of Harry Potter), and is blocked by Farouk who is now wearing the faces of not just Lenny but also Oliver Bird (the bearded team mate Farouk possessed and escaped in).. And so, Dance Fight 😀 Hold out for the 90second mark…:

https://youtu.be/FzD1Ko7fFeo

(Some netizens think the old professor in the lab (played by comedian Bill Irwin) is the best dancer 😀 )

2.With newfound control over his powers, David begins to use them more and more questionably. Except now he doesn’t have the excuse of “parasite in my head made me do it.” Truth be told, David hasn’t had much practice in self-regulation, he has always had Farouk in his head. The end always seems to justify the means, his sense of right and wrong shifts bit by bit, until he reaches the point where he’s erasing Sydney’s memories when he does something wrong so she only remembers how sweet and innocent he was when she first fell for him. (Sound familiar? Isn’t that just a step away from what Farouk did to him?) He also uses his powers to make her always agree with him. His justification is, “I am a good person and I (therefore) deserve to be loved.” (Like, Whoa! Seriously trippy mind-game right…)

David’s misuse of his powers gives Farouk the ammunition to turn his friends against him, convincing them it is David who will end the world, and no one else is powerful enough to stop him. And so they wrestle.

“But my dreams – they are as empty –

As my conscience seeks to be…”

https://youtu.be/TcdaTzRu5ek

“No. More. Violence!”

“- Or what, more violence?”

David – Legion – now becomes the new supervillain and his friends reluctantly accept that in order to save the world David’s going to have to be either in therapy or taken down. In other words, his friends – esp Syd, after Farouk shows her what David has really done to her without her knowledge or consent – dupe him into locating Farouk so they can enlist Farouk’s help in containing him. David. (Yes, really. In fact it is only Switch in Season 3, having not yet been “wronged” by David, who refuses to help Farouk throughout, rationalising that David is after all still human.)

3. Disillusioned, David escapes his containment facility with best friend Lenny and sets up a giant drug den with a house-sized pig for his followers to suckle their drugs out of searches far and wide for mutants with time-travelling abilities, coming across Jia-Yi a.k.a Switch (played by Lauren Tsai*), a juvenile time-traveller-in-training just coming into her extraordinary abilities. What he wants is easy enough to understand – he wants to end Farouk before Farouk can ever duel Charles Xavier and possess him. (Ever thought David spends a lot of effort travelling back in time to undo his original circumstances and no effort living with what he’s got?)

*In interviews, Tsai has credited Youtube videos of Japanese reality show Terrace House with helping her at audition to get the part (Switch speaks both Chinese and Japanese and is almost completely deviant from the comic book Switch), and her self-taught (also thru Youtube) artistic skills were later incorporated into the Legion storyline as well..

With Switch’s help, David travels back in time and eventually decides to pick a big fight with his dad, that escalates into an intended fight to the death (because then he decides it’s the dad’s fault for giving him up, causing his deep seated insecurity and neediness) foiled only by the arrival of Farouk from the Future, to warn his past self.

So NOW we’re off to the races, and it turns out – as time goes by with David “free” of Farouk – that he does have multiple personality disorder for real. (Hence his nickname – Legion.) Except for some lapses during times of acute stress, he learns to lock away his other personalities almost perpetually. The idea however is that he is not exactly “pure of heart,” or for that matter even whole, and his disability is a pretty “taboo” one. In addition, at times the demons drown out his better angels, the other personalities overwhelming the main David psyche.

When he travels back in time and confronts the Farouk of the past who originally inhabited his mind when he was a baby, David uses his lifelong “weakness” to overwhelm and disarm him (Farouk, powerful mutant as he may be, doesn’t have multiple personality disorder :D)

Redemption, reconciliation… 

If you started out watching Season 1, all the things David has gone through, all the things perceived done to him by Farouk – this terrible predatory older man who uses such a powerful gift as his for such evil – you would never believe the role of Good and Bad guy could eventually become so reversed in Season 2, simply from David then being free of his inhibitor-parasite and able to use his powers fully. 

To love the “bad boy” almost proves Sydney’s undoing. The justifications for his actions, her struggle to end him, her losing her own mind to his mental illness….

https://youtu.be/CoMBjFYjN9k

 

In fact, David’s faithful bestie Lenny (the real one, not the Farouk-put-on one) at one point ends up killing herself in despair at his condition – a powerful visual reminder that even if you should be so “self-sacrificing” for whatever “noble cause” you are pursuing, unless you were truly alone in this world, you have to spare a thought for your (real) friends’ well-being as well.

David in his desperation to “fix things” uses Switch, the little juvenile time traveller, more and more cruelly, until her physical body begins to fall apart from the strain of overusing her powers. And still he keeps time travelling just one more time. If he can use her just one more time to fix just one more thing it’ll all be ok!

It’s why they tell you to put the oxygen mask on yourself first before you help others who need you

Farouk breaks free of the time cell Switch imprisons him in, and exits at the same point in time where David has now travelled – the fateful duel between Professor Charles Xavier and Former Farouk – to warn his former self. While David then takes on Former Farouk, Current Farouk begins a conversation with Charles Xavier…

“I lived in your son’s mind for 33 years… felt what he felt, thought what he thought….”

Over time, the host, the “victim,” the captive, changes his captor. 2000 years as a powerful mutant ruler who calls himself a god, it is the 33 humble years holed up in David’s mind with no physical body, even as David can hide nothing from him, when no “act” nor artifice nor vain notion would ever suffice, that moves the great Shadow King, eventually forever changing him. And it began, without a notion of where it would end, like so many things in real life.

“I’m not that guy who thinks he has all the answers. Writing is a way of communicating, and if enough people say, ‘I don’t get it,’ it’s worth looking at.”
– Noah Hawley

“Was I really this bitter and filled with hate? How petty you (now) seem,” Future Farouk tells Former Farouk, whom David has easily bested with the hand he was dealt in life – his “worst” card, the mental illness, becoming his trump.

And with hindsight, everyone gets their second chance.