Legion

[aelfgyfu_mead]

So I've finally finished watching the second season of Legion! I have thoughts and feels! And they're all spoilery! I hope at least nialla42 will help me work through them!

Comments

[aelfgyfu_mead]

Thanks for the link! I forgot you'd written on the whole season-I had read up to the point where you got to an episode I hadn't seen, the one with the alternate lives, and stopped reading there because I hadn't seen it yet. I meant to come back and then, of course, forgot.

So you're reading Division 3's treatment of Farouk and David as further delusions, and I can accept that reading. I wasn't sure what was going on, because they seemed to have dropped the really heavy-handed stuff about delusions, so I wasn't sure if they meant it to work only up to a point and no further, or to extend to the whole season. They did bring it back in David seeing the screens, which I guess I should have taken to mean yes: they're all sharing these delusions now. Except David, who has his own sets of delusions.

One more question that I meant to ask in my post: in the first season, Amy tells us (by telling other characters) how corrupted David's memories have been. He never had a dog; his shrink at Clockworks didn't know that. And she says at one point that Lenny was a man, and then we see some of the memories again with a man in place of Leonore: a big man in a shopping cart pushing David (or the other way around?). A big man on the floor with David, inhaling whatever that stuff is on the floor with David when Amy comes home with a cake. And she's scared of him in her memory. So I thought the Lenny we see most of the time in David's head, and then in Farouk's, wasn't the real Lenny with whom David got high and into various kinds of trouble before he was in Clockworks; she was the version he remembered, a version made real in his head and Farouk's, and then that's the version that he uses Amy's body to create. Except that didn't quite work, and it was really blown apart when Lenny goes back (home?) and people seem to recognize her.

So why did Amy remember Lenny as a man-a big and frightening man-if she was always a woman, not physical threatening but frightening in other ways? Were there two Lennys? Did Amy conflate someone else with Lenny? Am I hallucinating or misremembering? That same fan-run Legion Wikia has a bio for Lenny as a woman and nothing on these memories from Amy.

[nialla42]

There were little seeds of various delusions throughout the season. Melanie had the delusion that she was going to be able to be with Oliver which let Farouk into her head (I've been wondering if she's a mutant or plain human), Syd believed what not!Melanie was saying about David during the "show and tell" where Farouk was selecting bits out of context to make David look like a villain that could eventually destroy the world, because she'd already been primed to believe it.

After David wiped Syd's memory, all it took was Farouk being able to whisper the truth to a mouse, who then passed it (or some form of the truth) to Syd. With her back to believing the worst of David, knowing that he had sex with her without her consent is the final piece to prove that he's turning evil.

I don't think he's evil, but he is a mentally ill mutant with world killing abilities. He's like a child who can set off a nuke. It seems like sort of a self fulfilling prophecy deal. Everyone at Division 3 is convinced David's going to become evil in the future, so they're trying to stop him before he grows too powerful. As a result, David's powers level up to escape, which I think is what Farouk wanted to happen.

You haven't fallen down the Lenny/Benny rabbit hole yet? It's a bit weird, even for this show, because I don't think they realized how popular Lenny would be with viewers. Before he was in Clockworks, David had a friend named Benny, who was a violent drug addict. That's who Amy really saw doing drugs with David.

Once David was in Clockworks, Farouk altered his memories to make him think that Benny was Lenny, in order to get David to accept her as a friend. There's some question of whether we ever actually saw the "real" Lenore, or if it was all Farouk inserting an avatar into David's memories, like with the dog and the Angry Boy. After the first season, some wondered if she ever really existed, but she did according to her friends, and Farouk dug up her real body.

My theory is we didn't see the real Lenny, and she might not have been real at all, but her popularity meant things were retconned a bit. If you search for Benny in the Wikia, you'll see the info about him, but it's not explained in Lenny's entry.

[aelfgyfu_mead]

Oh, right! I had forgotten that the man wasn't Lenny, he was Benny. That's why I only found Lenny and not Benny in the Legion Wikia. My confusion is compounded by misremembering things: it wasn't Amy who walked in on Benny and David high; it was David's girlfriend.

But I'm relieved I'm not the only one who is confused about Lenny's actual existence and whether the person who is out there now, in what used to be Amy's body, is a real person who once existed outside Farouk's head. That they seem to recognize her when she goes back home (if one can call that home) suggests that she is-but then again, the first person to 'recognize' her has never met her and knows her as Cornflake Girl, and it's only after she announces that that all the other seriously drugged people accept Lenny as their queen. So she may not be the person who was there before.

Never was a cornflake girl
Thought I had a good solution
Hanging with the raisin girls. . . .

[nialla42]

Ironically, I think if you're not confused by Legion, you're not paying attention. :)

I think Lenore used to exist in the real world, but is not the person we're seeing now in Amy's reconstituted body. Lenny is a combination of Lenore + Benny + Amy + whatever unique ingredients Farouk added to the mix.

Is Lenny's violence actually an aspect of Benny? I've read that the clothes for patients at clockworks were color coded, with red being the most violent, and Lenny has that color. But then we go back to whether or not that was real, or David's warped memory. FWIW, David was yellow, while Syd was white. He was considered mid-level for violence, but she was not considered violent because she didn't want to touch anyone.

[aelfgyfu_mead]

I never even noticed the clothes! Is this something carried over from the comics, or have people just been studying the show closely?

[nialla42]

I read about the color coding in some reviews. As with everything in this show, there's no telling if it's intentional, but I did watch some of the Clockworks scenes with the colors in mind and the colors do seem to make sense.

I saw several reviews and posts talking about the color schemes used in the show, especially in season one. I you Google "legion color scheme" you'll see several.