What I’m Watching: Legion

Legion: Season 3, Episode 2 “Chapter 21” (B)

This episode had its mesmerizing moments, but as I’m increasingly aware of the limited time we have left, I’d rather things moved a bit more quickly. It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s not, and I don’t expect any more clarity on that before the show ends. At least there are some concrete developments, even if they took a while to play out, and it’s interesting to see when David chooses to use his mind control abilities. He did it several times over the course of the episode, first dismissing Lenny with a sudden hunger and then encouraging Cary to make the power-enhancing device so that he too could enter the time travel area only accessible by Switch. When he communicated with Syd in Luke Skywalker levitation fashion, he started to show her the magic of their first meeting before she shut it down and emphasized that they don’t love each other and it doesn’t matter what he can undo since he did it once already. Farouk offering to train her in how to lie after he was introduced playing “Oh Christmas Tree” on the piano in black-and-white suggests that David won’t be the only one giving in to his inner evil this season. Squirrel getting tossed out of the plane was a bold and somewhat reckless move on the part of the “good guys,” and it seems that David and Lenny set exactly the trap they wanted to get Cary, whose mirror combing scene was quite disconcerting. Whether it’s Cary talking or David feeding words into his brain, the notion that he’s going to save the world means that maybe David isn’t actually going to destroy it.