Spoilers for Legion follow. Be forewarned. Shall we begin?
For the second week in a row, Legion flew by with a relatively action-packed episode as the gang tries to escape from the Astral plane. Not that anybody’s complaining — finally, it feels like we’re going somewhere!
Now that David is sealed away in a corner of his mind and Lenny’s on the rampage, the mental fantasy of Clockworks is not looking so good. Walter is still stalking Kerry for unspecified (but probably bad) reasons, and it gets worse — the patent NPCs that Lenny stocked the hospital with for added realism have all gone rogue. Like, 28 Days Later kind of rogue. It ain’t pretty, but it does give Lenny cover to interrogate Amy about the day that “The Man” brought David to them. Seems like Lenny’s looking for something that she thinks David has stored away somewhere, and given that the “something” has a big ol’ X-insignia on it, there’s a safe bet it’s got to do with that mysterious man from his past.
Speaking of which, in case it wasn’t patently obvious who Lenny is supposed to be at this point, Cary and Oliver have a nice conversation that spells it out for us: he’s Amahl Farouk, the Shadow King. The beagle inside David’s memories was a dead giveaway, says Cary. Finally, some very specific validation of one of my fan theories! (Also, perhaps I’m reading too much into it, but the fact that Oliver is convinced his wife Melanie is supposed to be Asian gave me some weird Psylocke inside joke vibes. Betsy Braddock was blonde and psychic too, after all.)
The two devise a plan to use Cary’s electronic headgear to isolate the Shadow King within David, and to find a way to stop the bullets currently frozen in time around them in the real world. Both, naturally, hinge on getting David out of his mental coffin prison somehow. Cary relays all of this to Syd — or, rather, she relays it to herself while he looks on dumbfounded — and gives her several pairs of thick-rimmed glasses from Oliver that will help her and the others see beyond the Shadow King’s illusions. I guess there are several layers of astral reality here, because the guts of the hospital are still there, but all the zombie patients are gone. Well, that’s a start!
We also pick Melanie up where we left her last week as well, projecting herself beyond the Astral plane so she can see what was going down before time stopped. There she finds Cary and reunites with Oliver (who unfortunately doesn’t remember her yet), and the three go about trying to shield David and Syd’s bodies from impending machine gun fire. But first, Melanie uncovers poor Rudy, whom Walter is currently shape-shifted into in the real world — he’s been stuffed in a closet with a knife in his chest. That would explain why he’s so comatose in the Astral plane, sitting in a wheelchair drooling while while Syd and Kerry wander around fleeing from Walter and trying to find David.
Luckily, David’s not alone wherever he is — he has himself! Or, at least, he has the rational part of his brain, which obviously speaks in a British accent. David reminds our distressed hero that he’s not actually trapped in a real coffin, so they conjure up a fancy lecture room with a chalkboard in his brain to work out all the facts. If you’ve been confused about what David’s deal is up to this point and why the Shadow King wants him so bad, this was a great way to get everybody up to speed, as well as a perfect opportunity to inundate us all with clever comic-related in-jokes about the obvious identity of David’s biological father. It’s also of particular joy to me that David writes on the chalkboard exactly the same way that comic book letterers do — all capitals,without crossbars in the “I.”
Anyway, because knowledge is power, David manages to bust a way out of his mental prison and starts storming Lenny’s office, stuck in a Doctor Strange-esque time loop. It’s good timing, too, because Lenny has finally tracked down the rest of David’s friends. Finally bored with Walter, she crumples him into a disgusting heap of body parts, and then turns her attention to Kerry and Syd — but not before realizing what Oliver’s trying to do and incapacitating him instead.
Time’s starting to speed up, so Melanie and Cary continue their plan without him, placing the headband on David just as he’s flexing his powers within the Astral Plane. Rudy finally gets to do something and stalls Lenny just a little bit longer. And, just like we all probably figured it would, when they all return to their bodies nothing bad happens; David catches the bullets before they hit anyone, and the Shadow King can’t do anything about it because he’s now stuck in the mental coffin. Hooray, the day is… saved? Wait, don’t we have one more episode left?
The gang returns to Summerland in oddly cheery spirits, save for Kerry, who’s upset that Cary abandoned her in the Astral plane. Everything else, though, is looking okay —Rudy isn’t dead, at least not yet; Oliver is back and making everyone breakfast; David and Amy finally get some time as a family together. But when they decide to finally go to Cary’s lab and do something about the Shadow King, they’re descended upon by members of Division 3. Oh yeah, those guys. Welp, so much for that happy ending, huh?
What do you think this is all leading up to in next week’s season finale? Let us know in the comments!
