FX's "Legion"

I was nodding off, so, I only made it to the first commercial break...
I'll try to watch the rest later today.

 

I really like this show, though I'm no fan of the X-men. It's filled w/ psychology and some philosophy. The cutting between "levels" can be very disorienting and hard to keep up w/ what level the action is currently in sometimes, but that works for me as I imagine that's how David and the others experience this.

There are many scenes that are confusing at first, but then make sense w/ later action/ revelations.

Part of me wants him to hurry up and get some control, but I think the journey through his psyche and his "projections" is really intriguing. It does have a lot of Mr. Robot feel- most esp. in the area of the unreliable narrator- since David has so many false memories built as defenses and even real memories are not necessarily accuarte, as the show pointed out.

And I love the style and find it very fitting in how it's used.

 

The show's starting to lose me. I get that it's a trippy, slow burn. But it's just too little of all of the elements that tend to pull me into the show. If it's too ungrounded in any reality, and has trouble conforming to any internal sci-fi rules, and it just generally moves slowly, and if stuff the characters do doesn't make any sense, it all starts to lose me.

I just think stuff like the music montage with cross-cuts to different characters dancing in slow motion and the lab dude "experiencing" what is other half is to just be a bit too much of stylized wankery.

I did take some Dan Stevens screencap reaction shots with my phone camera for my own amusement that are kind of independently funny. I can't say he's especially good in this show, and I know I'm in the minority on that. But he so far kind of just has a very small set of reactions to everything. He has that "huh?" look on his face far too much. I feel like they're trying to make him both the "Chosen One" who has the most epic powers and is the lynchpin of the entire show, but also make him the "straight man" or "everyman", the "audience" sort of character. And I feel like they're not pulling that off well enough.

I still agree with that review that this show has a Rubik's cube at its core where there should be a heart. I don't care very much about any of these characters so far.

 

Four episodes in and still difficult watching. The dancing thing was indeed stylized wankery. I am so sick of samurai movie type slow-mo deaths. Death is ugly, rough and shocking, and they need to make some kind of attempt to show it's insanity and ruthlessness if they are going to be so brutal with their characters (Taboo I thought was doing this but had that scene with the sister in slow-mo off the bridge and her murdering her husband in bed).

It may have turned a corner finally though and I will tune in for episode 5.

 

Yes... a little 'time-killer'-esque.

 

This was probably the most trippy ep so far and it came very close to the edge of pure self indulgence. Except, at various points it pulled back from the edge with real and interesting insights that move the story along.

I loved how while scanning the old girlfriend's memory, Ptonomy comes across a fleeting, almost imperceptible glitch, which he then backs up and repeats several times until he can zero in on a suppressed memory represented by the glitch.

But also, strategically, the ep puts its cards on the table from the very beginning by asking: "what was real - that was the mission. We had seen things, heard things, but could we believe our eyes. could David?". So given that context and how the events were presented, my overall level of appreciation of this ep is pretty high.

 

Loved it at the start but I'm starting to wish they would get on with a more substantial plot now. The last three episodes have been very similar.

 

Sooooo, what's the song the guy from Flight Of The Concords first plays when he invites David into the ice?
I know someone here would know!

 

I'm pretty sure we're gonna be right about this, based on the name of the (now we know imaginary) dog.

 

Thanks much!
I know, I know... I coulda looked it up on my own......but... you know, this place is a COMMUNITY!
I love to get ALL my 'music information' HERE!

 

I'm admittedly not the fastest go-cart on the track, but while watching Eps 1-3 I kept thinking...where have I seen the actor portraying David before.....

Duh.

Matthew Crawley - Downton Abbey (Dan Stevens)

 

Really enjoying it, but the wife has trouble following the plot; not a lifetime marvelite like me though.

 

I gotta say, there's always a tightrope that these showrunners walk: the show can be vague and ephemeral for a few episodes, but eventually there's gotta be a point to the story and a destination for the journey. Mr. Robot's second season was way out there in terms of weirdness, but I think they paid for that with some steep losses in ratings. The showrunner of that series directed every episode and wrote a lot of them, so it's clear that what we saw was exactly what he wanted us to see.

In the case of Legion, I agree they're taking their sweet time to get to the point of it all. I think a lot of viewers today are spoiled by the Netflix/Amazon model where all the episodes are immediately available, so there's no interminable delay between shows, so you can get the instant gratification of getting the answers faster. The slow pace of the show is not a positive thing.

The best I can say is that this is not a cookie-cutter, predictable show, and they're trying some very unique and unusual things that I think would never be done on a traditional network series. I give them points for that.

 

I've read a ton of science-fiction and I'm worried this won't pay off, but will be back for episode 5.

 

Gosh, this is a visually delicious show. Certainly worth the price of my time (for now).

 

Just watched the latest ep.

cute.....
I remember reading how once the Pythons had planned to do an episode where the sound would drop off for a long time, and, once people had gotten fed up the point where they had the volume up real high, sound would come blasting up at them!
Does anyone here have good 'closed captioning', to see if any of the dialogue during this time can be 'read'?

 

I'm done, ...shark officially jumped.


Cat

 

Great episode.

 

There were no captions, but lip reading I'm pretty sure someone said MFer.

I don't know, you may not like what they did, but it makes complete sense the way the narrative has been going on about memories and reality.

 

Fantastically filmed and realized episode, and yes, the narrative is certainly being advanced, which is tough to pull off given the surreal nature of the show.

One revelatory tidbit I liked was in relation to David's mental state. It's been posited that he is mentally ill (schizophrenia or disassociative identity disorder), or that he isn't, but just seems so due to his powers (like telepathy -> hearing voices in his head, etc), or perhaps a combination of both.

Now we're exposed to a third possibility, that The Devil is a type of brain parasite that has been feeding off David's very special brain for decades, making him do despicable things he wouldn't do otherwise and then morphing or erasing the memory of those acts alter the fact, until next time.

I really like this angle because it mirrors a real life phenomena where an infectious agent alters the natural behavior of it's host in order for the parasite to reproduce. A real example is Toxoplasma gondii a parasite which makes mice/rodents unafraid of cats, and therefore more likely to be eaten, which is necessary for the parasite to reproduce.

 

Holding a minority viewpoint doesn't bother me in the slightest, and for those who like the abstract storytelling, I'm really glad Legion found an audience even though it ain't my cuppa.

I stuck around because the acting was solid and occasionally the story seemed to be heading somewhere, but I don't like being in a hamster wheel of totally disjointed alternate realities that are constantly being redefined. Eventually, it leaves an impression that the scriptwriters and director aren't sure where to go next. Vulnerable heroes are fine, but when their reality is frequently stretched out of shape and their characters manipulated beyond reason over time boredom sets in; it's a cumulative effect. Some folks have the patience for it, others don't. Trying to constantly figure out what's real inside David's head is not where I want to spend my time, but kudos to the actor. He is convincing.

In a series like this, the conundrum for me is when the story seems entirely predictable on one level, but impossible to figure out on another while the rules keep changing. It's like trying to solve a Rubik's Cube in one color. What's the use?


Cat

 

I completely understand your objection and I tend to share it, in the abstract. But in this case, there is much more substance to the narrative than mere head-trips for the sake of head-trips. There is real meat here which can easily be overlooked if one is resigned to simply seeing it as a mental masturbation.

By comparison, Mr. Robot S2 embarked on a similarly trippy narrative, but for me it was far less successful in execution and plotting, to the point where I found it tedious. I've not felt that way about this show so far.

 

I bought the ticket...I'm taking the ride!

 

There's a point at which a disjointed, obscured narrative isn't so much *confusing* at it is just *tedious*.

I'm finding some of the stylistic choices to be overwrought. I really tire of an episode where the "character snapping out of it and finding themselves in a different reality/room/time" is used like 27 times. I exaggerate, but this reality-within-reality-within-hallucination-within-shared group therapy, etc. just gets a bit boring. And I'm loathe to call this show boring, but it kind of is in its own weird way.

Sure, I watch and am confused at times (which is clearly the show's intention), and that's all fine, but the show isn't using enough hooks for me. How much should I care about these characters given how little information we've been given? The only character that has been fleshed out to any extent is David, and all of that "flesh" is of questionable veracity. So I'm left not caring so much.

I'm also a bit bummed that, at this stage anyway, the "superheroes murdering scores of people" thing isn't even an issue. In the new "Logan" movie for instance, you get a few moments when the characters grapple with having killed, *regardless* of who was killed. Not so much in "Legion", where, assuming *everything* isn't a hallucination, scores of people have been killed and nobody has really taken much of a moment to pause. To the degree we know about these characters, they're not even necessarily terribly likable. The thing with Sidney is kind of disappointing. "He's my man." Really?

I'm also not a fan of the sort of Ally McBeal-esque musical bits, like "Rainbow Connection" in this last episode. (Though, I'm grateful when David says he's "the magic man" that they didn't go into his own version of the Heart song!).

I'm not giving up on the show yet, but it has the potential to be one of those shows that may end up piling up on my DVR that I never get into watching, like the new awful season of "Gotham" or the entire second season of "Wayward Pines" that I never watched.