Legion Takes Its Looping Time in “Chapter 15”

The A plot of Legion’s second season develops so slowly, it’s a good thing that everything surrounding it is so imaginative, visually interesting and wonderfully strange. In the latest chapter, we learn that Future Syd is actually trying to save the world from David, which is why she’s trying to help the antagonist of the last two seasons, Farouk. We find this out in a tightly written scene between Future Syd and the Shadow King, encircling each other around a throne. Navid Negahban has imbued Farouk with all the psychopathic charm you could ask for in a villain who may actually be the accidental hero.

But the rest of the episode revolves more around a seemingly unrelated thread wherein the black, oily spider-chicken creatures (the personification of mass delusion from Jon Hamm’s narrated interstitials) infest Division Three. Clark, Kerry, Ptonomy and Syd are all infected and fight their way through the robot-like Vermillion to Admiral Fukuyama. David stops them from killing Fukuyama, but not before a giant spider-chicken hatches from the body of Ptonomy.

Of course, when your hero/villain can bend reality to his whim, monsters who don’t think of themselves as gods aren’t much of a challenge. The ease with which David dispatches the creepy monster—and his monologue about the shitty timing of the attack—is pretty hilarious. He’s basically One-Punch Man, completely OP compared to anyone besides the Shadow King. But it’s also a pretty anti-climactic ending for something they’ve been setting up all season, unless there’s more to the corruption than we know. Maybe Ptonomy’s still-deluded mind getting uploaded to the Vermillion’s weird digital tree is going to cause something even more catastrophic? He’s not alone inside that bio-computer, but I have no idea what that means.

I have even less of an idea what Farouk’s pink goo car contraption is supposed to do. Noah Hawley seems unconcerned whether we understand details the first time they’re introduced, which is generally refreshing but requires a healthy dose of patience. Here, I’m just happy to watch Negahban hook up gadgets to his Rolls wearing his leather cap and goggles and breathing in whatever gas he’s made.

I was also happy to watch Clark’s dream—a mash-up of Charlie’s Angels and the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who, starring a trio of Vermillions. The mustachioed women androids just keep getting creepier.

But getting back to Post-Apocalyptic Syd—she’s playing David, but possibly still cares for him. She also seems to be stuck in some kind of time loop. Present Syd is a little jealous of her and reasonably mistrusting of Lenny. That’s another gripping pairing this episode, watching Aubrey Plaza spar with Rachel Keller. Poor Lenny may have suffered more than anyone the last two seasons, dying in a tragic accident, manipulated by Farouk first in David’s mind and then in the Shadow King’s, where she was repeatedly raped and released into Amy’s body and immediately imprisoned. But no one really knows what she is now, herself included—unless its all a ruse from Farouk.

How the Delusion epidemic relates to the apocalypse is still a mystery, one Legion doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to answer.