TV
Legion
While they might not start out that way, after a while a lot of the villains in superhero movies and TV series become boring and overused. In the Superman movies time and time again it’s Lex Luthor who’s the main baddie and in the X-Men universe it’s Magneto. Not to knock those characters, or the actors who portray them, but in the Superman and X-Men universes there’s literally hundreds of amazing villains that could be used, yet those standby bad guys get used time and time again.
Except the FX TV series Legion, which is part of the X-Men universe, doesn’t use Magneto, or even an antagonist many people would know. Instead, the creator of that series chose to use a relatively obscure villain, the Shadow King.
A little backstory — in the comic book universe David Haller is the son of Professor X and suffers from a condition of multiple personalities where each personality controls a different power. Haller was such a powerful mutant that he, abet accidentally, destroyed the entire X-Men comic book universe a few decades back. The TV series approaches things a bit differently, though still very interestingly.
In the first season of Legion, Haller (Dan Stevens) is a person who’s suffered his entire life with mental illness and ends up in an institution. But it’s an odd place where it seems as if some people there possess strange abilities. And as David begins exploring past memories he comes to realize that he too possesses said “strange abilities” when inexplicable past events suddenly becomes very explicable if the explanation was that David has superpowers. And the reason that David is in an institution rather than running around and using his powers for good is that there’s a mutant parasite called the Shadow King (mostly Aubrey Plaza) who’s attached itself to David’s psyche and is feeding off of him and his powers and keeps him in a delusional state.
I’m a comic book collector and while I’m intimately familiar with the likes of Luthor and Magneto, I was only dimly aware of the Shadow King. Which I really liked in Legion. If I don’t really know a character, then I really don’t know what they’re going to do next, unlike villains who get used all the time. The first season of Legion kept me guessing as to where it was going to end up right until the end which made for what I thought to be one of the best series of 2017.
Now comes a second season of Legion which began last week. Always a series that’s just as much style as substance, but is able to be BOTH rather than just style, the show picks up about one year after the events of last season with the Shadow King on the run and Haller kidnapped by a robotic orb. Now returned to the fold, Haller finds that the group of mutants he was working with in the first season to battle the Shadow King have joined forces with the mysterious “Division 3,” a sort’a government organization, since both came to the realization that the Shadow King’s more dangerous to the future planet than their small group of mutants
But David’s returned a bit different, he seems to be hiding things. And the one place you should never try and hid things is alongside other mutants who can read minds.
I was a bit concerned when watching this latest season of Legion as the show takes some time to ramp up. I was worried that this season was going to be more style than substance, but when the second season story kicked in and made my jaw drop all my fears about where Legion was headed dissipated and I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen next.
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