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Legion 2.4 Review – “Chapter Twelve”
Loading...Whether or not you enjoyed this week’s episode probably correlates with how much you enjoyed the finale of LOST. I suspect that viewers will either love or hate “Chapter Twelve,” and that very few of you will feel lukewarm about it. Like LOST, this episode takes a deep dive into a single character. Unlike LOST, we’re able to take this deep dive without having to watch the character die 56 minutes into the episode. So that was nice. As always, expect spoilers in this discussion of Legion, “Chapter Twelve.”
We’ll recall from last week that due to some crazy mutant goings on, members of Division Three became trapped in their own individual mazes. Each personal maze was centered around a core desire. David’s job was to help each of them identify this desire, and then talk them into coming back to the real world. He was pretty good at this, until Syd. This took a while…a whole episode, in fact. In the process, we got to learn a whole bunch about baby Syd. We were reminded that bullies are assholes, cutting sucks, and goldfish can chill a person right out. Syd’s life was difficult, as we’d imagine, but also normal in some unexpected ways. We have to think it was changed forever by…that one event we saw. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
In many milieus, snow and ice mean death. In Legion, ice has been used to show us people frozen in place. People like Oliver, who can’t move forward, who are stuck. But we’ve also seen stuck people in walls, or sitting poolside in the bright sun. We probably don’t want to put a ton of stock in what the cold weather may mean. But Syd is in a cool igloo with a cellophane fire during her down time in the maze. It’s a cool little set piece, and another one of those fun visuals Noah Hawley must be having a swell time putting together. It’s also fun seeing Syd as a fussy baby, a wide-eyed child, a bookish tween, and a rebellious mosh-pit rebel.
Questions abounded this week—about life though, not so much the plot we’re dealing with. Farouk wasn’t even mentioned this week. “Do you think ghosts like living in a haunted house?” It’s a good question. Funnily enough, Lily Rabe probably knows a great deal about what ghosts like since she played a particularly unhappy ghost on American Horror Story (among other characters including a possessed nun, a reticent witch, Aileen Wournos, and a troubled reality-show wife among others. We think Syd’s point is that no, ghosts would rather live someplace more cheerful than the place where they became angry ghosts in the first place. After all, ghosts are former people, and people are angriest when they don’t have choices. Other questions we’re faced with include “Who survives the apocalypse” and “What happens when something sits too long in a hot bath.”
It’s hard not to love the scene where Syd uses her body-switching powers to exact revenge on a grow creeper and a trio of bullies in one awful incident. Sure, that’s morally wrong and all. But we have to feel, at least a little, like those asshats all had it coming. It was the 60’s, and that was a white boy, so he’s probably not going to get a harsh punishment for assaulting three classmates. Honestly, his punishment will probably come down to who everyone’s parents are and whether his are more influential than the girl’s. Where is Syd’s dad anyway? He’s probably not in hell, so where? Then again, Joan doesn’t strike me as a particularly traditional woman. Maybe she was unmarried. Lily Rabe is a beautiful choice to play Syd’s mom. She played it with a subtlety that made it hard to tell exactly how close she felt with her daughter—we get a sense that she loved her, but that there was some emotional estrangement. It must be tough for a loving parent to have a kid who doesn’t want to be touched. We rarely saw them speaking to each other, though there didn’t appear to be any animosity either.
David demonstrates his lack of understanding of women as he attempts to figure out his girlfriend’s core wish. I also thought it had to do with the couple in the museum. But his incredibly egotistical interpretation of impostor syndrome made me cringe. David actually thought that Syd’s overriding wish was for David to still love her even after he knew the real her. Really? He thought that she thought his love was more important than anything else in her entire world? Did he accidentally stumble into a memory of someone reading a Twilight novel? So no, of course Syd’s major malfunction wasn’t all about her fear that David (a self-described mental case and drug addict) won’t love her anymore if he knew about the bad things she did.
Syd did to a terrible thing, though not with terrible intent. We heard about this thing in passing already, but it’s way far different when you see it. Syd switched into her mom so she could enjoy physical contact with her mom’s boyfriend. The emotional process of this is pretty normal. But because Syd is a mutant, and because her mom doesn’t even seem to know about Syd’s power (this was the most surprising part to me—how could she not know what happens when her daughter touches another living thing???) this all went very badly for Isaac. It sucks too. We all heard his terrified scream at the moment they switched back. He was horrified. But if you don’t know about mutants, there’s no possible way to explain that away. Plus Joan gets to spend the rest of her life second-guessing her judgement and probably not dating again for at least a decade. Meanwhile, we think Isaac spent the rest of his life in prison—a life that was probably drastically shortened thanks to everyone’s false assumptions.
So Syd’s core issue isn’t with her mom. It’s not about Isaac, or the goldfish. She isn’t longing to make out in a museum like a random couple carried away by emotional art. It’s not impostor syndrome or a fear that no one will love our most authentic selves. Nope. Syd is concerned about love. Because love makes us soft and weak and exactly the opposite of the people who survive tough times. “The world breaks everyone. Afterwards, some of us are stronger at the broken places.” That’s a metaphor we’ve no doubt all heard. Every culture has a saying about finding strength in failure, injury, bad luck, disappointment. Everyone wants to find a way to emerge stronger after tragedy. Hell, people hurt themselves on purpose because they think it makes them better able to handle pain. I imagine there’s a wide variance of how well that works.
Oh, and the Monk is dead, all the chattering teeth people are awake, and if you need to use the restroom you might want to start walking to the gas station now. If that feels like an afterthought in this review, know that it’s also a commentary of how it’s basically an afterthought in the context of this episode. Does that reveal something about what’s to come? Probably. That’s how this Hawley cat rolls. But I’m not sure I can hazard a guess with any specificity.
There’s a war coming, an apocalypse. Farouk has to be killed, or he has to not be killed, depending on which Syd you listen to. Are lovers better or stronger than fighters, or does it depend on which kind of strength you’re talking about? Does God love sinners best because he digs their bright burning light? Maybe, but anyone trying to tell you what any god loves or wants is trying to manipulate you and therefore cannot be trusted. Oh, and I said that this episode was kinda like the finale of LOST but I didn’t say how. It asks a million questions, gives a million more intriguing clues, but then sends us all away with a lesson to not sweat the small stuff. That it’s all about the big picture, about survival, the endgame and not paltry bullshit like museums and stupid classmates.
Just when you think that not much has happened this week and it’s all about back story—we find ourselves back in S1E1—credits and all. Lenny is back. She’s alive, and seemingly as herself. But honestly, we’ve seen so little of her as herself that it’s hard to know for sure. All that’s left here is to press on and see what Chapter Thirteen has in store for us. This was an exceptional episode of Legion, both in what it showed us and how it was defined. It offered heaps of the kind of killer music and cool visuals that we love, and used them to offer a compelling and cringeworthy back story of a character that we knew far too little about.
See you’s next week!
