Legion (TV series)

David Haller was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a young age and has been a patient in various psychiatric hospitals since. He was committed to the latest facility by his adoptive sister, Amy Haller. After Haller has an encounter with fellow patient Syd Barrett, he is confronted with the possibility that there may be more to him than mental illness. Another incident led to the death of his friend Lenore "Lenny" Busker. Hunted by the government agency Division 3 in the first season, Haller is saved by Syd and a group of mutants at a facility called Summerland, who explain that he is also a psychic mutant. Haller eventually discovers that his mind is infected by a parasitic mutant, another psychic named Amahl Farouk / Shadow King, and struggles to force the villain from his mind. In the second season, Haller returns after a year spent trapped in a mysterious orb. In his absence, his Summerland allies have joined forces with Division 3 to stop Farouk's plan to find his real body and amass world-ending power. Farouk uses Oliver Bird and a device stolen from Division 3 to enable Lenny to be reborn in Amy's body. In the third season, due to Shadow King's evidence, David flees from Division 3 with Lenny where they set up a place for his cult as David gets a time-traveling mutant named Switch on his side. He plans to improve Switch's powers in order to protect the world. David kidnaps Cary Loudermilk to help him amplify Switch's powers. David then uses Switch to go back to when he was a child and witnesses various parts of his parents' past. This includes his father Charles Xavier going to war and meeting his mother Gabrielle Haller at a mental facility, his father locating and meeting Farouk, and how Farouk got into him in the first place. This brings both sides into conflict with the Time Eaters, extra-dimensional creatures threatening to destroy all of time in response to David's attempts to change it. ==Cast and characters==

• Dan Stevens as David Haller / Legion: The mutant son of Charles Xavier, David was diagnosed with schizophrenia at a young age and meets the "girl of his dreams" in a psychiatric hospital. The character possesses various psychic abilities, including telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation. Stevens joined the series because of showrunner Noah Hawley's involvement, and did extensive research on mental health to prepare for the role, talking to both mentally ill persons and doctors. Hawley and the cast kept secrets from Stevens about the character and plot so that he could identify with David's confusion about himself and reality. • Rachel Keller as Sydney "Syd" Barrett: A young mutant woman who becomes David's girlfriend. Syd's mind trades places with that of anyone she touches, with hers entering their body, and vice versa. Because of her abilities, the character is portrayed as "withdrawn". She is named after Roger "Syd" Barrett of the rock band Pink Floyd, whose music was an important influence on showrunner Noah Hawley. • Aubrey Plaza as Lenore "Lenny" Busker and Amahl Farouk / Shadow King: David's friend, an "impossible optimist" despite a history of drug and alcohol abuse. The character dies in the first episode, but returns as the main form and persona, out of several, adopted by the powerful mutant Amahl Farouk within David's mind. Farouk later gives Busker a new body to use, created by infusing Amy Haller's body with Busker's DNA. Busker was originally written for a middle-aged man, until Hawley met Plaza and rethought the character. However, Plaza insisted that the character's dialogue not be changed for her, instead choosing to play the character as both male and female, preceding their reveal as the Shadow King. This led to Busker "making crass remarks about women and muttering vintage phrases". • Bill Irwin as Cary Loudermilk: A mutant scientist, one of the founders of Summerland and one of Bird's specialists. The character is introduced in the second episode, but Hawley sought to cast Irwin, for his "playful approach to characters", during filming on the pilot, before the character's role had been written. Hawley "had to pitch him the weird, crazy character dynamic and that the show is about memory and identity", and Irwin agreed to join the project. • Jeremie Harris as Ptonomy Wallace: A former child prodigy and a mutant, one of Bird's specialists. A "memory artist", Ptonomy "remembers everything, and has the ability to take people back into their own memories". • Amber Midthunder as Kerry Loudermilk: A mutant who lives inside Cary's body; their mutant power allows them to coexist in one body or to become separate physical persons. Kerry only ages when she is outside Cary, leaving her physically much younger than he is. • Katie Aselton as Amy Haller (season 1; recurring season 2): David's adoptive older sister, who tries to remain positive despite his history of mental illness. Hawley said that she defined herself as normal "against her brother. She finds herself being looked at as if she might be crazy, as well." • Jean Smart as Melanie Bird (seasons 1–2; special guest season 3): A demanding psychiatric therapist. Smart joined the series immediately when asked by Hawley, despite knowing nothing about the show and its source material, due to her previous Emmy-nominated work with him on the second season of Fargo. • Navid Negahban as Amahl Farouk / Shadow King (seasons 2–3): A malevolent presence in David's mind who takes on several different forms. The character, a psychic with similar capabilities to David, was portrayed in a main capacity in the first season by Plaza, while Quinton Boisclair, Devyn Dalton, Kirby Morrow and Jemaine Clement have played his alternate forms. • Jemaine Clement as Oliver Bird (season 2; recurring season 1; special guest season 3): Melanie's mutant husband. He has spent the last 20 years on the astral plane. • Hamish Linklater as Clark Debussy / The Interrogator (seasons 2–3; recurring season 1): An "Interrogator" for Division 3. • Lauren Tsai as Jia-Yi / Switch (season 3): A young mutant with time-traveling abilities. ==Episodes==

Season 1 (2017) Season 2 (2018) Season 3 (2019) ==Production==

Development . After completing work on the first season of Fargo at FX in 2014, Noah Hawley was presented with the opportunity to develop the first live-action television series based on the X-Men comics, of which he was a fan when growing up. Writing Kinberg teased in November 2015 that the series would tell "X-Men stories in a slightly different way and even with a slightly different tone" from the films, noting the differences in tone between the "operatic" X-Men films and the "irreverent and hysterical" Deadpool, and feeling that Legion gives "us an opportunity to go even further ... in some ways to sort of blow up the paradigm of comic book or superhero stories and almost do our Breaking Bad of superhero stories." For the onscreen confirmation that Xavier is Haller's father in "Chapter 7", with Xavier's signature wheelchair shown in a brief flashback, the series' production was able to choose from any of the variant wheelchairs used throughout the film series. They settled on the version from X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), with the prop used in that film being brought out of storage for the show. ==Broadcast and release==

Legion aired on FX in the United States, in region 2 on October 2, 2017, and in region 4 on November 22, 2017. The second season was released as a manufacture on demand DVD in region 1 on October 30, 2018. Outside the U.S., all 3 seasons of Legion are available to stream on Disney+ and can be found in the Star or Marvel hubs. ==Reception==

Ratings Writing for Screen Rant, J.M. Brandt noted that FX extensively advertised the series, but was debuting the 90 minute (with commercials) premiere at 10:00pm on a Wednesday night, later than other genre "monster hits" like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. Brandt felt that the series' success would heavily depend on DVR viewing "to bolster what might be a likely smallish live audience". A 91% approval rating for the second season was reported by Rotten Tomatoes, with an average rating of 7.75/10 based on 160 reviews, and a critical consensus reading, "Legion returns with a smart, strange second season that settles into a straighter narrative without sacrificing its unique sensibilities." Allison Shoemaker from Consequence has a less positive review of the show. Shoemaker wrote that season 2 "looks great and not much else" and that it "ends on a note that's hollow and hard to accept." Shoemaker also criticizes the character development of some of the side characters, and thought that they were very underdeveloped. She wrote "when you fall in love with a show, you sometimes make excuses for awhile and hope it gets its shit together. 'Well, Lenny is fascinating,' you say, justifying the paper-thin characterizations (and not just of women; Ptonomy, Oliver, and Clark are also all underdeveloped.)." Shoemaker's overall verdict of the season was that "There's so much mess and emptiness. Looks great. Less filling." She gave the finale a D+ grade and the overall season a C+. Rotten Tomatoes reported a 93% approval rating for the third season, with an average rating of 7.9/10 based on 71 reviews. and a critical consensus reading, "In its final season, Legion remains a singular piece of visually arresting, mind-bending television that never fails to surprise." In a less favorable review with a similar critique to Shoemaker's review of Season 2, David Sims from The Atlantic called the third season "visually dazzling, but little else." He writes that "The set design is striking, and Hawley's direction even more so: The pilot is rife with elaborately choreographed shots in which not a detail is out of place. It's truly cinematic stuff that deserves to be taken in on the biggest screen possible." However, he critiques the show for not being able to stick to one main message and having messily delivered themes, which makes the overall story weaker. He wrote that the show "isn't sure if it wants to be a show about David's abilities, or about mental illness" and that "it tries so hard to dazzle that it forgets to tell a meaningful story." Analysis Discussing the series' exploration of mental illness, Charles Pulliam-Moore of io9 stated that schizophrenia is widely featured in popular culture and is generally misrepresented and noted that giving Haller schizophrenia was a change from the comics where the character had dissociative identity disorder. He felt that the series takes advantage of this change both to show "mind-bending, trippy moments meant to convey to viewers how fractured and disorienting David's perceptions of reality can be" and by having characters like Melanie Bird insist that Haller can improve with treatment and counselling. Pulliam-Moore explained that other telepaths with mental illnesses in the X-Men franchise—Jason Stryker in X2, Jean Grey in X-Men: The Last Stand, and Charles Xavier in Logan—were all treated with drugs, and praised the alternative therapy explored in the series, as well as the fact that the removal of the Shadow King from Haller's mind was not an excuse to ignore the mental illness issues moving forward. He concluded, "It's that idea—that healing is an ongoing, complex, and dynamic process—that made Legions first season so strong", and hoped that it would be continued in the second season of the series. Accolades ==References==