As Legion barrels towards a final confrontation between David and Farouk, many mysteries are revealed in this week’s episode! “What’s more terrifying—fear, or the frightened?”
Legion – “Chapter 15”, Season 2, Episode 07
Airdate: May 15th, 2018
Director: Charlie McDowell
Writer: Noah Hawley (creator)
Based on the Marvel Comics Created by: Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz
What You Should Know:
After our interlude into the multiverse last episode, we return to the main timeline, in which Lenny is alive and has now taken over David’s sister Amy’s body, and Ptonomy is still struggling with the influence of the “delusion”/earwig in his mind that caused him to lose control when last we saw him.
What You’ll Find Out (and What It Might Mean):
John Hamm’s narrator bookends this fairly straight-forward and highly revelatory narrative, beginning with a discussion on public anxiety. The discussion of public anxiety and its transformation into excessive and often irrational fear and response is framed by a silent, visual comparison of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 (I’m presuming Salem rather than the earlier historical moments of witch trials in Scotland and England) and the 1950s hysteria surrounding the United States comics industry, sparked by Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954), that led to a US Congressional inquiry and eventually the establishment of the Comics Code of Authority (CCA) in 1956. In both cases, as the narrator puts it, the rational concern becomes amplified by cultural forces, leading to irrational fear and excessive response.
Why this discussion, and why now? As we will eventually learn from Future Syd, the coming apocalypse that leads to her future is not an outside threat, but in fact, comes from David. In sending David to try and help Farouk, Syd has asked David to become his own gravedigger, a fact that Future Syd heavily implies although never outright says when she is confronted by Farouk. In doing so, whether it turns out to be a reality or not, Future Syd starts both the viewers as well as the denizens of the show on a path towards a public anxiety, likely in response to David’s newly defined power set (again, only implied). If David has the power to alter reality, as the last episode seems to have shown, then a rational concern of the implications of said power in the hands of an emotionally volatile David will, according to the theory, lead to irrational fear of David. We see the seeds of this fear prior to Farouk and Future Syd’s confrontation, as David confronts Farouk on the astral plane. Farouk tries to construct an argument around the notion that David should be happy to have Amy gone, as she had been holding him back, but in failing to convince David, Farouk infantilizes him, banishing him to another part of the astral plane with ease. This show of force by Farouk leads to David facing a projection of Amy, a delusion controlled by Farouk to remind David of how insignificant he truly is. This delusion backfires, however, when David reaches deep within himself to assert his authority, causing a noticeable look of fear in Amy/Farouk’s eyes.
While present Syd attempts to convince David that Farouk just wants him distracted (a point she raises again when confronting the imprisoned Lenny, claiming Lenny is nothing more than a distraction), David begins to grapple with the question of Future Syd’s honesty. He will later confront Future Syd on her decision to not warn him about Amy’s “death”, exclaiming “You’re not Syd. Not my Syd.” And there may be some truth to that beyond the questions raised by Ptonomy a few episodes ago regarding the nature of the present (is anything really the present, or is there only past and future? And if change is always occurring, can any version of Future Syd match the mythical Present Syd?). When we encounter Future Syd, her visage is always accompanied by audio distortions and glitch-like jump-cuts. It is entirely possible that the entire construction of Future Syd is, in a sense, a delusion, begging the question of motive. Later, we will see an instance of Future Syd, peering through a porthole at Syd with concern, or perhaps puzzlement.
While David spends ill-advised time with Future Syd, back at Division 3, the black delusion creatures, still of unknown origin, spread rampant, infecting Syd along with nearly everybody else. As Syd, Ptonomy, Clark, and Kerry investigate, they are all confronted by numerous Vermillions and vision of Fukuyama as a monster in disguise. This Gang of Four fight their way through Vermillions in the attempt to reach and confront Fukuyama, only to finally reach him, remove the basket, and reveal a man underneath. But they do not see a man; rather, they see the monster of their delusions, a rational concern turned to irrational fear and excessive reaction.
Luckily for Fukuyama, upon David’s emergence from the isolation chamber, he begins to discover that something is amiss as he steps on the thousands of delusion eggshells. When David enters Fukuyama’s chamber, he can see the delusions rooting around in the heads of his friends and plucks them from the minds of Syd and Clark before Ptonomy’s delusion, the oldest of the bunch, shreds Ptonomy like a cocoon and emerges a massive delusion. David chases the delusion to the dining hall and enters its mind, offering the delusion the chance to leave peacefully. The delusion, however, seemingly devoid of internal logic, lunges at David, and David destroys it.
The narrator returns, this time to collate all of the previous narrations into a single, cohesive discussion, transcribed in full here:
“A delusion is an idea. An idea can be contagious. Humans are pattern-seeking animals. By which, I mean we prefer ideas that fit a pattern. In other words, we don’t believe what we see. We see what we believe. And when we are stressed or our beliefs are challenged—when we feel threatened—the ideas we have can become irrational, one delusion leading to another, and another as the human mind struggles to maintain its identity. And when this occurs, what starts as an egg can become a monster.”
This would appear to be not only a recap of the immediate past events but also a potential warning for the future of David and his friends. With four episodes to go, this season is poised for large events now that most of the previous mysteries have been resolved.
In the final sequence, Ptonomy, broken, is plugged into the Division 3 mainframe to preserve what can be salvaged of our lost hero. Surrounded by binary code and a giant cooling fan, Ptonomy has become data. Also here, however, is a mysterious elderly woman, rocking in her rocking chair, who ominously whispers, “Shh.”
Rating: 10/10
Final Thought: The reveal of David as potentially the “big bad” for the season should not have come as a surprise, but with so much misdirection, it still caught me off guard a bit. I am not willing, however, to fully abandon my Phoenix theory from several episodes ago, mostly because I am stubborn.
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