I think the writers made David deliberately a tragic hero in the classical sense, not a hollywood hero – his nature is ambivalent, yet his fate inevitable due to expectation.
Though you could also look at the story as an allegory of our competing and (ultimately) irreconcilable desires for freedom and security.
David symbolizes the freedom of the other – and everything that comes with it, including its effect on everyone else’s freedom.
And depending on prevalent expectation (or should we call it delusion?) the feelings toward this freedom fluctuate between hope and fear.
But no matter the feeling, they all seek to direct freedom’s potential toward a goal they want to see fulfilled – which means that they all desire to control the freedom of the other for their own sake.
They want to reap the fruits of freedom but they also want to be safe from its repercussions.
Depending on character, they all choose different paths to achieve this. But the effect is the same: conflict and disenchantment (definitely in its negative sense but, potentially, also as a positive - as an end to delusion).
Convoluted doesn’t even come close. More random. They threw various ideas from brainstorming sessions up there in random order without any concern of tying them together or whether or not they went together at all, let alone were consistent with an arc.
But that was less my problem with it than the discontinuities in the characters: the show established certain personalities, traits, and motivations, and then, without character growth showed them next as someone very other than that. His “break” the most concordant development of the batch … and Shadow King stayed in a coherent line.
It was a pretty show to watch but if it gets picked up again for another season I won’t be there. First season had been so good though!
The first episode was a mess. The second episode picked up and I had a brief flicker of hope, but it’s been a pile of slop ever since. This entire season seemed to be about spending the special effects budget and then trying (or not) to string the scenes together. It was boring and annoying. This is the most spectacular self-destruction of a show I can remember in years.
I really couldn’t disagree more - I think they laid the groundwork reasonably well even going back to the first season.
However as I write this I do have to bear in mind that I always wondered if they would go this direction, because the original comic book character was always deeply, deeply insane. So could be I found the shift more palatable because I half-expected it.
I continue to see Noah Hawley’s vision for the show as coherent—I’m not seeing the “mess” some of you mention. Remember that the main character is supposed to be the son of one of fiction’s most powerful human beings: Charles Xavier. And David is obviously just as powerful.
For me this is the story of how someone who has abilities so superior to the abilities of those around him, can negotiate the question “am I a good person?” Because the temptation to make use of those superior abilities to exploit others would be ever-present.
The supernatural elements (mainly the Shadow King as an actual person who can inhabit other people’s bodies, as opposed to being a metaphor for aspects of one individual’s personality) complicate the message. At the same time they, possibly,make it more accessible, since they open up a variety of interpretations.
…Hawley discusses the finale in an interview on the SyFy site (oddly enough–season 3 will continue on FX). I can’t claim that he supports my reading of the show, but on the other hand he doesn’t contradict it: http://www.syfy.com/syfywire/legion-creator-noah-hawley-explains-why-that-big-finale-twist-was-always-part-of-the-plan
Again, David’s and Shadow King’s characters’ arc were the least disjointed of the batch. Not that I could make sense of how the physical manifestation of delusion infecting others, or Shadow King’s decision to send Lennie back by way of destroying David’s sister, or the alternate realities, fit those arcs, but hey. And putting Ptonomy in the tree/computer/whatever with the little old lady whispering hush just to drop it there? Fine.
But Syd going from preaching the need to be hard ass and do what needs to be done to OMG he’s torturing the Shadow King to try to save me, how horrible! For that sake Melanie becoming such a crazy basket case and to Shadow King lackey? Huh?
The special weapon that Kerry/Carey had to special deliver … a rifle that comes out of bag bigger on the inside than the outside? That somehow David knew would be needed to ping the giant tuning fork and to be aimed at Syd but magically hit the bullet she fired at him?
Fantasical worlds inhabited by character with special powers work when the rules of the world, whatever they are, stay the rules of the world, and we can understand what those rules are. They did that in season one but here they had no rules for the world at all.
While I mostly agree with your sentiment, I doubt that this is true.
The main theme of this season (well, the series) was “delusion” - and it looks to me as if the writers tried to show us what they are and how fundamentally they are us by constructing and deconstructing them within the story and on its meta-level at the same time.
What we see in the world and what we think up in our heads to make it all fit, is the construction of a delusion; when we share one, we create culture or madness. Or both. It’s not real - though it is.
We are so fundamentally our delusions that it doesn’t matter if we recognize them for what they are, because we can’t stop re-creating them continuously in new shapes: the red pill (to jump into another narrative for a moment) has no effect but to make us even more delusional - or mad. Both.
There is no assured recognition of reality.
Legion’s story mirrors this idea (imo) by following certain rules of the visual narrative and by establishing some of their own just to tar them down and build them up again.
The question is not if anything we see is real but in what way it’s unreal?
Does the bag that is bigger on the inside, for example, just tell us that the people who watch this should not trust anything they see or that the people in the narrative should not trust it as well?
The impossibilities might break the rules - or they follow them. Both.
Yet, I agree that the narrative is a mess. If my interpretation of the intents behind the story are anywhere close to the writers’ actual goals, I think they failed by losing (much of) their audience [if what I heard is correct] - they lost me in episode 9 because I got bored, and I mostly watched the remaining two chapters to get the whole picture - which I didn’t get … obviously.
We met David at Clockworks, in an orange tracksuit, and learned that he and Lenny had been in a drug-addled gang causing random mayhem before being institutionalized. David was then made a useful member of society at Summerland, by being conditioned via Ptonomy’s mind powers.
It’s not really a surprise that we’ve ended up with David and Lenny back out on the street ready for mayhem, me droogs.
Where I think the writers went off the rails and plowed into a mountainside was by having David spout an incel mantra (“I deserve to be love”), while inflicting rape-allegory mind control on Syd – in this #MeToo era. I don’t discount the value of considering whether people who commit horrible acts can be redeemed or deserve sympathy or whatever – one of my favorite authors is Stephen Donaldson – but that sort of narrative takes skill and nuance that Legion just doesn’t seem to be showing. Instead, the writers seem to have become enamored by visual spectacle and narrative twists.
Some fair objections in the past several posts, fellow-viewers. Season 3 will have to be very carefully written to overcome those (and others).
I will say, Noah Hawley shares some limitations with his hero David Lynch: a little too much reliance on the visuals and a little too much tolerance for narrative ambiguities.
Yes, I really felt that this season was very much into the visuals and not enough into the characters and the story. By the end I was hanging on by my fingernails.
That would be nice. I hope it happens.
I think it more likely that the Shadow King infected David when he was interrogating whatsisname to find Syd. At the end he said something like, “I’m sorry David.” I’d be hard pressed to say who isn’t infected.
Eh… By this point, who could know? I wish they’d brought up multiple personalities way before and also tied them to specific powers, as in the comics. To be honest, I’ve been watching the last half of the season solely for the visuals and Aubrey Plaza’s crazy-eyes.
All of the meta-fwankery could make sense, it’s just that the series doesn’t at this point and the finale doesn’t help. Btw, it might just be me, but what happened to the orb thingy from last seasons finale, post credits?
The orb thingy turned out to have been sent by future-Syd to kidnap David. She gives him a cryptic message which he interprets as meaning that he should help the Shadow King. He keeps this a secret, though, when he returns to the group about a year later.
And just ignore the timeywhimey of how trying to stop the future from happening is what caused David to start keeping secrets which is what sets the path to the future.
Note that in one of the alt-universe pieces, David is attacked by a group of CO-attired thugs (before he evaporates them).
A mantra, it is pointed out, which is delusional in itself (and Syd uses the rape to prove it to David).
In the original timeline David does beat out Farouk’s brains in the desert (according to future-Syd), which is why Syd eventually stops him. Unfortunately, NOT beating out Farouk’s brains in the desert doesn’t seem to change that part of the future, although whether David will subsequently go on a genocidal spree remains to be seen.
The season worked for me, and in part by playing against traditional narrative expectations. In season 1 we start out with “David is crazy” and then move on to “David is crazy but has powers” and then to “David isn’t crazy; he has powers AND a monster in his head” and, at the end, we arrive at “David has powers but isn’t crazy and the monster is out of his head”. Except (as Syd and Farouk both point out), the truth is that David actually IS crazy; it wasn’t the monster making him so. The monster was…well, not a “gift” but certainly a separate add-on.
We (the audience) are even warned along the way about the dangers of seeing what we want to believe is true rather than what is really there. And we wanted to believe that David was the good guy who would save the day and get the girl. But the truth is that David - while not evil per se - is delusional, secretive, manipulative and (when he feels it is justified) violent. We see this in his behavior, and in the behavior of his alt-universe selves*. He may believe himself to be the good guy who deserves the girl, just as we do, but in the end this is not the truth, and the truth finally breaks him.
Which is not to say that I don’t have some quibbles: the others were far too lenient with Farouk in the end (you’d have thought they’d have him on a very short leash instead of wandering freely, for starters), and they didn’t really plan very well for the strong possibility that their little intervention at the end wouldn’t be received very well. But, on the whole, even if the ending wasn’t happy for anyone, the storyline still made sense to me.
The other purpose of the alt-universe episode, IMHO, was to show the fate of the alt-Amys. We had just seen Amy-prime come to an unpleasant end of sorts via body hijack, but none of the other paths followed had significantly better consequences. At best she lives to see her brother murder people in front of her and then die himself. At worst she becomes the fearful puppet of David/Farouk. She gets no happy ending either.