The pilot was tonight, did anyone else watch? It’s the show I’ve been most excited about watching, since it’s from Noah Hawley, who also made Fargo. I really liked the first episode and am looking forward to the rest of the season.
I didn’t always follow what was going on, but I know that’s purposeful since the main character isn’t sure of what’s real. I know he’s a mutant of some sort, I’m not sure if I want to look up the backstory on him or find it out as the show goes along.
Dan Stevens and Aubrey Plaza were really good. The show looks beautiful and distinctive, it reminded me a bit of It Follows in that it’s not pinned to a certain time period.
Really enjoyed it. The best Legion comic stories have been mind-trippy, and this looks to be following in that tradition. Watching a series where the PoV is an unreliable narrator could be fun.
That was absolutely fantastic! I loved how nuts (no pun intended) it was, having to constantly question what is real. And gorgeously shot - looked like an HBO show in production values.
There’s a certain point where you can be wacky, misdirecting, and confusing in your storyline, but if you want to engage your audience, you have to give them something concrete to form a basis of the show.
I’m still not sure what was real, what was imagined, and what was just fantasy in the show. I’ll give it a few more episodes, but they better start giving some concrete, grounded-in-reality facts, or they’ll lose me.
As far as i can tell the basic plot was fairly straight forward. David is crazy and also a mutant, he is in a mental institution, he meets and falls in love with a mutant girl who’s power is switching bodies with whomever she touches (maybe temporarily, don’t really know how she and David switched back). They touch, she can’t deal with his power (which seems to be literally altering reality) and ends up causing an “incident” at the mental institution which kills one of the patients. David escapes in Syd’s body and eventually turns back into himself and gets captured by the government who want him because he is extremely powerful but also want Syd because she is a member of a group they are fighting against. He gets rescued by said group in an action scene that makes most X-Men movies look lame and here we are.
It was beautifully made and quite entertaining (and I expect I’ll go on watching). However, it has the baked-in weakness of all supernatural/super-hero stories: it’s tough to feel a lot of sympathy for the suffering of people who have, you know, supernatural powers.
They were doing the ‘horrors of dealing with schizophrenia’ theme pretty straightforwardly: this poor guy! He doesn’t know what’s real! Those around him don’t understand or believe him! …Except the Maybe-Government people who were interrogating him DID believe him, because they knew he has supernatural powers.
It’s all a bit muddy, thematically. But it looks great and the pacing and performances were great, too. So I’ll watch.
I think that the scenes where David is being interrogated in the swimming pool are reality, and the scenes where he’s in the institute are a mix of reality and stuff just happening in his mind. I’m not sure if his “sister” is real or not. I suspect that Aubrey Plaza’s character might have been a figment of David’s mind all along.
I think the mutant girl went into the institution undercover to find David, and by showing her his powers David revealed them to the bad guys, leading to her being hustled out, which Aubrey Plaza interrupted, leading to Bad Things.
I’m not sure that the sequence when David-in-Syd’s-body and the psychiatrist go back into the institution was happening in reality - the way it was shot was surreal and dreamlike. I suspect the missing institute patients trapped screaming in their doorless rooms was a representation of what is going on in David’s mind. Most of the other erratic, surreal sequences - the repetition of David’s abduction, the dance routine - seem to be happening in David’s mind.
The government guys say he’s a telepath, and when the golden-eyed demon shows up he displays telekinesis. If they’re going by the comic character, David Haller has a very large number of mutant powers, each with its own splinter personality. Aubrey Plaza might be one of those.
Ha, yeah it looks like there’s a tiny part in common and a lot of changes. The hair being an obvious change.
I agree, the overall story made sense, but if I had paused the episode at a lot of points, I wouldn’t have necessarily been able to say what was going on right then, or if it was real or not.
I agree to some extent, but it was just the pilot, and as things go on I could see it being clarified better.
I’ve got to say I was a little underwhelmed. It seemed to be trying way too hard—lots of weird and wacky and random that seemed to be there simply to say, hey, look how weird and wacky and random this is! (I mean, the dance scene…?)
And once you get beyond all that, the plot is basically X-Men by the numbers: shadowy government agency trying to control/erase mutants, mutant resistance, the works, all topped up with the well-worn Chosen One from unlikely origins that has yet to realize the full extent of his powers.
But of course, we’ve only seen the very first scene-setting episode, so maybe they’ll take this into some interesting direction yet—I’ll give it a couple of episodes. It helps that it was really well done: gorgeous shots and sets, and the action was on par with a major blockbuster (but damn, did that telekinetic guy ever make Jean Grey look like an amateur!).
Edit: Oh, and I totally didn’t understand how Syd’s power, and the escape, worked. Are the minds swapped? Then how does David just revert into his body? Or is it just that their bodies change, for some limited duration? But then, that also gives you the other’s power…?
I’m enjoying it. Dan Stephens is a great actor for this role. For all the Weird, his grounded persona seems…grounded.
I’ll see how the story disambiguates, or doesn’t, over a few episodes and see where it goes. It can’t stay so all over the place, but can’t simple down into a, as mentioned above, standard Marvel mutant origin.
The female lead’s name was Syd(ney) Barrett. The action mostly took place in a mental institution. There is another Syd Barrett who famously had mental problems. Also, when they’d escaped the mental institution, the song we hear sounds very similar to On The Run.
Yeah, I try to filter out the Pink Floyd name for the girl Syd. I think they reference it once in the show, too. If it ends up part of the plot, it matters; otherwise it’s an affectation.
Watched it and liked it a lot. Will definitely keep with it. As a reviewer on NPR said, this is not a show to multitask while watching. You need to pay attention.
ETA I think the scene at his sister’s took place between his accidental release from Clockwork and before he phoned them looking for Syd (and then being captured). I knew nothing about the comic character, so I’m watching this complete,y naive (same for Agents of Sheld and Agent Carter).
My wife and I finally got the time to watch the show tonight.
Wow.
I had a bunch more I was going to say about the show, but I think I’ll just leave it at that, for now. Except to say that I’m really impressed that Noah Hawley was able to stretch his range from the excellent Fargo to being equally good in an entirely different genre.
I do have my doubts that he will be able to maintain what he started as the series progresses - as others have noted, a lot of what makes the pilot so compelling will turn into frustration as the series rolls on. But, I’m hopeful that Hawley will be able to provide resolution where and when it is needed, and somehow keep the show interesting to watch.