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Just finished binge watching both seasons. Season 1 is quite next level. Really amazing atmosphere, premise, pacing, acting...the whole shebang. Season 2 was enjoyable but good lord it was up its own rear end sometimes with the slow pace, indie rock soundtrack, gratuitous weird bits and overall meta-ness. I seem to recall Fargo annoyingly dialing up the same elements as the show progressed, so I hope Hawley can exercise some aesthetic restraint in S3. The shows are too much alike in many ways. And please, no more obviously filler throwaway episodes (S2E6). It was weird to be so intrigued while also tempted to fast-forward through some of the more redundant stretches. Strange tension that, but I did like how things ended up coming together and laying the groundwork for the anti-hero themes of S3. OldMemes posted:What I did like is because Dan Stevens is so likeable and charismatic as an actor is that they're able to use it against the audience. Like at the start of season 2, David is more upbeat than he was before, because he thinks that he's got a fresh start and can be is own man, so you root for him. Then he keeps making more and more morally ambigous choices, because hey, he's the main character, and you like him, and he's a flawed hero, but still the hero, right? Then episode 11 hits like a ton of bricks. Yeah, he definitely sells it 100%, but the misdirection also works because there's still the gray area of Farouk and his machinations. Vernacular fucked around with this message at 11:46 on Dec 12, 2018 |
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Dec 12, 2018 11:11
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Jonah Galtberg posted:Is episode 6 the one with all the different possible timelines? Because that was far and away my favourite epsiode of the season. Yeah. It just felt like a waste of time to spend an entire episode showing us the high likelihood of David abusing his powers regardless of timeline. Wasn't worth dragging the overall pace of the show to even more of a standstill.
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Dec 13, 2018 08:19
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Danger posted:If you didn’t like episode 6 then why are you even watching this show lol. In retrospect, my issue was more with the season as a whole than the episode itself (though I suspect that it would still be kind of dull with a re-watch). The show is moving at enough of a snail's pace as is, and then you throw in that episode...its kind of torturous, and there's a weird cognitive dissonance at work coming straight from a watch of season 1, which was taut and flowed smoothly plot-wise.
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Feb 4, 2019 18:16
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My memory about S1E1 is super hazy, but...wasn't Syd intentionally planted in the asylum to recruit David to the mutant crew? I always assumed that was the reason why she went along with the girlfriend thing so willingly.
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Feb 15, 2019 00:52
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The blatant Alice in Wonderland stuff all feels a little hackneyed and kind of detracts from the show's unique feel. Hopefully we don't get more trite Mad Hatter etc. references, the Legion aesthetic is strong enough to manage without them. Otherwise I'm thoroughly enjoying everything.
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Jul 3, 2019 04:49
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A well-developed aspect of Farouk’s character is that he enjoys the gamesmanship and artistry surrounding the use of his powers. E.g his “what’s the fun in that?” remark. Despite having poisoned David for most of his life, there is still some reason to buy that he wouldn’t always just deus ex machina his way through his social interactions, unlike David honestly, for whom -not- mind controlling people is beginning to look like the exception rather than the rule.
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Jul 3, 2019 09:01
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Oasx posted:That was an allround amazing episode. It was vintage Legion, on par with S01E07 (or whatever ep it was where everybody was frozen in the astral plane). The time eaters and cinematography were awesome. So I guess David now has the confidence/capability to manipulate time himself now that he's remembered his godlike status? Also, what was that last thing he said at the end of the episode?
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Jul 16, 2019 12:26
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I'm glad they wrote Lenny off the show (for now) because she kind of felt like dead weight all season. I'm surprised though that they didn't at least slightly allude to the fact that David's sister is buried inside her somewhere. Another great episode.
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Jul 23, 2019 15:33
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It definitely seems like she's under his control. There was also the scene showing Switch as a robot with a little wind-up lever on her neck, which could symbolize that as well, but it also reminds us that she's still a bit of an unknown quantity insofar as the whole backstory with her dad and the robots is concerned.
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Jul 24, 2019 05:05
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Codependent Poster posted:David didn't kill Cary or Kerry so he's not all bad. Plot armor ftw
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Jul 24, 2019 08:40
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Corte posted:I'm not saying Switch isn't being influenced by David. There's the scene where he is preaching to his flock and sends out those good vibes, Switch is clearly affected by that. Otherwise I haven't seen anything to suggest David is controlling her directly. Keep in mind she came to him and clearly has her own motivations, it also just makes for a more interesting story. If you're saying the last scene was meant to show David exerting his power to control Switch I didn't read it that way. I didn't interpret their interaction as her refusing David, she certainly was questioning him about how he felt about murdering most of Division 3. I think the musical sequence was a creative device to bookend this arc of the season, reflect on how far the characters have come and lead us into the final stretch. I think the musical sequences are most definitely Noah Hawley in part doing his thing and creating a weird Legion aesthetic, but these tropes of synchronization/choreography are just so prevalent and fit in too well with the show's overarching themes of power and control for us to outright shrug off the possibility that they directly signify psychic powers at work. Also, just fyi David quite literally said something to the effect of "wake up my darling" before Switch emerged from that protective pod and relegated Farouk to the world beyond time. So yeah there's that, the druggy cult scene where she partakes in the blue stuff, the fact that she's "willing" to inflict self-harm to serve David's agenda, the bit where she appears as a wind-up robot...again, too much going on there to discount the possibility that David is just using his powers on her. Though I do agree that her backstory (with her time traveling dad and robot-phobia) is still a big question mark so who knows what's really going on with them (maybe Switch's pops is being trapped in time by the blue meanies beyond her powers, and David himself is being used to help him get free). Nonetheless I do think the nature of being controlled directly via powers vs. indirectly via personal insecurities being taken advantage of etc. is one of the show's central contrasts, so yeah they're also being purposefully ambiguous about it at times. Like Farouk could very well be manipulating Division 3 through his powers, but he's also leveraging their very understandable fear of David in a strategic fashion. Lenny was mind-controlled on a couple occasions, but was also kind of indebted to David for rescuing her from Division 3. Etc, etc.
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Jul 26, 2019 11:57
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Nephthys posted:Davids sister existed to be someone completely innocent whose life was destroyed by her relation to him. As did Lenny, essentially, so it’s kind of fitting they would be combined. Though it’s hard to say how much of a close reading is appropriate in situations like this. Like it would make sense that they both have significance as people (women?) close to him who he used up until their demise, but I could also see them being cases of the writers just awkwardly writing them out of the show once they moved outside the scope of the main plot.
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Jul 29, 2019 05:18
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I'll be disappointed, and surprised really if the Switch storyline doesn't get suitably resolved - not just because she's endearing and sympathetic, but also because we haven't gotten the full picture yet. David's been mind controlling her no doubt (that interaction between David and Xavier confirmed this) but there are still some pretty glaring loose ends, e.g. her time traveling father, the robots, that "teacher" line, etc. I guess maybe that's all just Legion Weirdness but I hope they get tied back into the main arc somehow.
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Aug 8, 2019 18:49
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That episode/season/entire show was beautiful y'all. A truly imaginative series. Tuxedo Catfish posted:...so you don't have to think or deal with the consequences ever again is hosed up and nihilistic either way. Characters did this on multiple occasions though? Farouk was literally given a pair of glasses by his future self that allowed him to face the horrors of his own actions in the most grandiose way possible. Same thing with Charles and the cake. I'd agree that David may not have fully grasped the weight of his own actions, but I don't think he was the show's true moral fulcrum - that role shifted in varying degrees to Syd, Farouk, Switch and Charles (and in a way, his ultimate emasculation by Farouk/Charles was a poetic sort of punishment). So yeah, despite David's arc, I'd say characters coming face-to-face with their own history and taking action to deal with it is a pretty important part of the show's cosmology, based especially on how those supporting characters influenced the show's outcome. But at the same time, I think it's crucial to remember that the Legion universe is a utopian moral laboratory operating under otherworldly principles. If it's within the realm of possibility, how is undoing the action in question, erasing the conditions that led to its onset and hitting the reset button (assuming this all comes to fruition as planned, and we do have some evidence that it will, namely Switch assuming a sort of omniscient narrator role) not simply the most unequivocally compassionate way of resolving the conflict? Wouldn't -not- doing so be the less morally justifiable course of action? You're conveniently forgetting that this reality wherein the perpetrator bears the weight of their actions as a form of pedagogical penance also involves the victim being unnecessarily relegated to their own experience of suffering. Sure, we don't have the luxury of such a comprehensive do-over here on planet earth and we're all stuck with a more onerous manner of making sense of the actions done by us/others to others/us, but the folks in the show obviously aren't working within these constraints, so what's stopping them from hitting the reset button in a deus ex machina fashion?
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Aug 13, 2019 14:10
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JazzFlight posted:I liked the ending, but I’m always a sucker for extended timeskip epilogues, so I was hoping that at the very end we would jump to a future where we pan across from the Xavier School for Mutants sign to a class with teenage David. Then a new girl is introduced to the class and she greets him as Syd, implying that they eventually meet in better circumstances (and that her mother would have had a place to send her to learn her powers). They kinda had to leave it open-ended. Hawley and co did a really nice job of giving us a hopeful, cathartic ending while at the same time leaving enough hints that things could still potentially end up poorly for David. The "Mother" cover as the emotional peak of the show perfectly encapsulated this weird coexistence of comfort and chaos: things may feel warm and gooey but is this feeling to be trusted?
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Aug 18, 2019 09:49
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| # ¿ May 9, 2024 04:16 |
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AtraMorS posted:About that. That was definitely the musical peak of the episode, but the central conflict still hadn't been resolved at that point, and I think the show was suggesting that David would need both parents around if he was going to turn out okay and in control of himself. At the "Mother" point in the episode, Gabrielle had been convinced to love and nurture David, but Charles' would still be out of the picture, so we're getting hints of what it might be like if Gabrielle tried to raise David alone. Also, Gabrielle tells Charles at the end that "things don't make sense when you're not around" and "I can't do this without you." I think you're maybe being a bit too literal and missing the broader point within the context of the show intended by the musical number, which, it seems to me, is that well-intended conditioning -could- still inadvertently enable lovely behavior by/outcomes for David. That probably applies to Charles' parenting in addition to Gabrielle's. I don't think the final act of this show is meant to hinge on an evaluative stance taken toward single parent households or whatever. Key word "could". I'm all for the Good Feelingz of a happy Legion ending, but at the same time it would be weird if that wasn't packaged alongside an at least lukewarm chance that all these ostensibly good things are really just belying the sad, near inevitability of David's reality (shown amongst other ways by S02E06, as well as the fact that the series opens and closes with the same shot). Vernacular fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Aug 18, 2019 |
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Aug 18, 2019 20:58
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