Originally published February 24, 2017. Updated April 16, 2018.
Rachel Bellwoar reviews the third episode of Legion…
‘Chapter Three’ of Legion is the middle ground to ‘Chapter One’s‘ roller coaster and ‘Chapter Two’s‘ backtracking. Waking up from memory work this episode, in a different room from where they went under, the trips are growing more dangerous instead of easy. Dr. Bird holds David to blame for his limited progress, but David remains adamant that he isn’t the one slamming doors in their faces. The question becomes, who is?
With Amy’s kidnapping leaving them crunched for time, Dr. Bird oversteps her role as therapist. Instead of waiting for David to reach his own conclusions, about what certain memories mean, she tells him what they mean. If David disagrees, she discounts his opinion. Memories start overlapping and David sees a hologram image of his old therapy sessions with Dr. Poole (Scott Lawrence). More traditional in style, those sessions still consisted of a doctor sticking to what he knew (schizophrenia), instead of listening to David’s feedback.
Dr. Bird has never encountered a mutant with David’s powers before. Why, then, she remains bent on having those powers fit standards is wasteful. Fear or haste is causing her to lose the control that should be David’s in the first place—that David takes back by kicking everyone out of his mind at the end of the episode. They’re supposed to be observers to David’s memories. What does it mean when people in those memories start taking notice of their intruders?
Positions between characters are constantly changing. Syd and David’s inability to touch becomes more overt this episode, when David shares with Syd the phantom hair sensation he’s been having since their Freaky Friday in the pilot. An opening montage, where Syd takes a shower, almost imperceptibly switches to David showering. Their connection is more than emotional but the closest they can get physically is sitting on opposite sides of a wall corner. Syd’s body switch power is inert during memory work, but it’s still child David she gets to hug, not adult David who she loves.
With his sister, David starts the episode as an observer of Amy’s kidnapping. New torture footage appears to him as through an old television screen, with static lines. After Lenny’s ghost lectures him on not rescuing Amy, he and Syd appear in the room where she’s being held, ghosts not fully present. The Eye is telling Amy she wasn’t a good sister, a possible motive for David’s slowness to action, but the Eye was one of Dr. Bird’s patients, before something happened to her husband. Now her husband is the voice of the coffee machine, that retells a story about a carpenter and his wife. Is Dr. Bird the wife in this story, or the white crane the carpenter saves?
Knowing what is significant in Legion is as difficult as knowing what’s real. After Dr. Loudermilk (Bill Irwin) makes light of giving David a shot of dye, the episode starts incorporating images of dye. When David appeared on Amy’s doorstep, after escaping Clockworks, it was Halloween. Now a flashback to David’s childhood has him wearing a metallic costume on Halloween, like the tin foil used to keep aliens out of your head. Are these details technically important to the plot or extraneous to the action?
Dr. Bird wants to help David know what’s real in his head. That’s what she said last episode, but this episode, using the same wording, she says she wants to know what’s real. Well, maybe the truth is they’re not dealing with memory. What if the reason David’s memory work isn’t working—that David is able to see a Yellow Demon and Dr. Bird can’t—is because the opposition they face isn’t from memory? It’s from the ‘not real.’
Rachel Bellwoar
