What secrets will Ptonomy discover now that he is inside the Division 3 mainframe? Reminder- A loss of meaning is not normal.
Legion – “Chapter 16”, Season 2, Episode 08
Airdate: May 22nd, 2018
Director:
Writer: Noah Hawley (creator)
Based on the Marvel Comics Created by: Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz
What You Should Know:
The delusion creatures are now defeated, but poor Ptonomy paid the cost, resulting in his being uploaded into the Division 3 mainframe.
What You’ll Find Out (and What It Might Mean):
“To create fear, hold up a mirror” – Mi-Go Monk Adage
As David and Syd attempt to chart a course forward, Ptonomy, now residing inside the mainframe, comes upon several revelations. We first see Ptonomy witnessing Admiral Fukuyama’s origin story, from being recruited by Brubaker (whom you may remember from Season 1 as the senior Division 3 agent that ran the operation to interrogate David and later met his demise when David assaulted Division 3) through operations designed to protect Fukuyama from psychic intrusion, turning the young mutant (a healing factor is heavily implied) into a government secret keeper.
As we journey through Fukuyama’s origin, two texts are brought up that are worth exploring for just a moment. The first of these texts is Unheimlich, a collection of essays on what is often translated in English to be “the uncanny”, written by Sigmund Freud. This book, that Fukuyama is reading at the moment of his recruitment, contains several essays that examine the idea of the uncanny from multiple angles, but stripping the essays of much of their nuance, we can rudimentarily state that the uncanny is a device in which something is made eerie through being familiar, but not fully familiar. Almost, but not quite. Much horror writing leans heavy on the device in order to create a sense of unease in the consumer. For instance, in the classic horror film Psycho, we watch in terror as a woman is murdered in her own shower. The uncanny plays a large role in making this cinematic sequence so memorable, in that the shower is an extremely familiar scene for most viewers—a place where nearly every day, we stand, vulnerable and naked, while water pours forth and obstructs sound, yet we rarely feel fear—that becomes unfamiliar by the introduction of the killer in the room. Familiar, but not fully so. Another classic example of the uncanny comes in the form of the science-fiction automaton, which look human and yet are not, a notion that must have been in mind when choosing the adjective to describe the comics X-Men. We see numerous instances of the uncanny at work in Legion, to such a degree that it is almost shocking to see it only now brought up. Vermillion is one such prominent example among a sea of others.
The second text, not named, is the 1961 children’s book, The Phantom Tollbooth, written by Norton Juster, that is being read to post-op Fukuyama by the Shush Woman, whom Ptonomy first encountered at the end of the last episode. The Phantom Tollbooth follows a young boy named Milo, who is granted a magic tollbooth which he uses to enter the Kingdom of Knowledge, a lovely analogy for the young Fukuyama, who is poised to be granted access to vast amounts of digitized and classified information to hold onto. The book thematically explores Milo’s love of learning, but at the same time seems to challenge the notion of traditional institutional learning, mocking systems of rote memorization and other processes along the way, which seems to fit into the world of Legion quite well as we, the viewers, are being constantly barraged by a variety of high philosophical concepts in highly unconventional ways.
In the midst of Fukuyama’s origin, Ptonomy is distracted and led to where the consciousness of the Mi-Go monk has also been uploaded to the mainframe, and upon contact with the monk, he discovers the location of Farouk’s body, which he then passes to David by manifesting into a Vermillion. As David learns of the location, Oliver and Farouk simultaneously approach the Shush Woman, now frail and living in a retirement home. She exchanges the location of the body for the promise of being able to inhabit a dream world rather than the world she is. In the process, she asks about the professor in passing, worth noting for our comics fans out there.
One tiny detail that has been recurring for a few episodes but has never struck me quite as clear as today, is that there appear to be multiple David voices inside David’s head, a clear callback to the Season 1 question of whether or not David is actually “mad” or simply appears so because he is powerful. While in the isolation tank, the two voices debate who to bring into their circle of trust, and David begins to plan for the recovery of Farouk’s body. Prior to setting out to recover the body, David does three not-insignificant things: he visits and frees Lenny, leaves a note for Syd, and leaves some sort of suggestion in the minds of Clark and Cary.
And just like that, the race to the body is on, with Farouk in the lead, and Oliver excerpting the great beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, adding to the literary depth of this episode. After having a heart to heart with Clark, Syd does the inevitable and pursues David to assist her love. The desert, Le Désolé (another bit of clever wordplay, as “je suis désolé” can be translated as “I’m sorry,” but désolé on its own translates to the feminine form for desolation, despite carrying a masculine article, of which I am relatively certain is intentionally disorienting), is equipped with perception-altering defenses, a zone where time and space are relative, bearing a secret key to the puzzle that Farouk seems to possess, but David, alas, does not.
Mid-race, our John Hamm narrator returns to give us “the most alarming delusion of all,” Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave” from The Republic. In his discussion of the allegory, the narrator draws parallels to screen culture and social media of today, making our devices take the place of the cave in which we are trapped, unable to see the fire casting the shadows, and the shadows become other people. He explains that “this is the delusion of the narcissist” in which other people are not real, but shadows. *Note: I watched this episode with my father-in-law. It was his first episode of the series and remarked about the strength of the social commentary here, something that I also feel is a strength of the series* I won’t spell out every detail of this sequence, but I highly recommend watching, researching the allegory of the cave if you are unfamiliar with it, and forging your own opinions as to the validity of the comparison and how it may relate to our ongoing narrative.
Following the narrative interlude, Syd and David stumble onto a tent which contains their skeletons, “a geographic disorder… a crossroad of possibilities” which opens up a discussion between the two on the nature of life and death. Following this, we return briefly to Division 3 to see Clark being instructed via suggestion by David to “find the clock of the long now” and being assaulted by Melanie (and then the assault is rewound), in which it appears Melanie is being controlled remotely by Farouk/Oliver. We close on the image of some sort of minotaur-esque monster seemingly guarding Farouk’s body, a possible allusion to the minotaur of Melanie’s psychic-cage when she was afflicted by the plague.
Rating: 10/10
Final Thought: I apologize for the length of this week’s entry into the world of Legion, but trust me when I say, this article is much shorter than it could have been. The levels of depth explored by this episode were astounding, and a true marvel in modern story-telling.
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