Legion

[dr_tectonic]

There's an awful lot of very good TV out there right now, but I gotta say, if you haven't watched Legion? You are missing out.

So Thing Number One is that the storytelling is unlike anything else I've ever seen. It's confusing at the beginning -- and frankly, even after having watched the whole thing, there are things that I'm still not entirely clear about -- but somehow it doesn't matter. I found myself saying "I have no idea what is going on, and I have even less idea what's going to happen next, but I can't wait to find out." Plus on a visual / cinematic level, the show does all kinds of bizarro things you've never seen before, and it makes them work.

Thing Number Two is that the acting is amazing. Whoever did the casting for this show deserves an award, because so many of the roles involve playing a wild range or weird mixture of personalities or deeply strange characters or conveying complex thoughts and emotions with little to no dialogue, and if anybody failed to pull it off, the whole thing would fall flat, but everybody just nails it.

Thing Three is... I don't know what it is, because it all happened at a subconscious level for me. It's probably something about the camera angles and the lighting and the sound and all that stuff, but whatever it is, it's really good. Because you'll be watching the show and nothing in particular is happening, and all you can think is something is really, really wrong; something terrible is going to happen and there's no reason at all to think that, except that something unidentifiable is off-kilter. Plus there's all this mental/psychological stuff happening, and a whole lot of it is represented symbolically and never gets explained, but it's plenty clear what it means.

I didn't binge the show because I don't like binge-watching and also because it's a pretty tense show, and sometimes after an episode I'd be like, okay, I'm really looking forward to the next one but that is seriously all I can handle for tonight. But I never once got bored with it.

Comments

[barak]

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Legion because I've gotten tired of superhero-type stories. That said, this didn't feel at ALL like one, even though it is related to the X-Men.

The totally non-linear nature of the story telling worked so well in this case, that it helped progress the plot. That said, I have friends who were turned off because they couldn't figure out what was going on. I'm like.. "that's kind of the idea- eventually you will!"

The only slight question mark for the acting was the Sydney... she seemed kind of flat. Not sure if that came from a lack of development or the actress herself. But Aubrey Plaza (Lenny) definitely was the breakout actor in this- balls to the wall. I'm still giggling at her dance sequence or the silent-movie hallway scene.

Legion rocked. THat's all I'm saying, and I'm glad more people are appreciating it.

[dr_tectonic]

Syd was kinda flat, I agree, especially at the beginning, but I feel like she also had a lot of tricky acting to do with just body language and facial expression, and that she mostly pulled it off, especially in the last few episodes.

I want to shake the hand of whoever suggested Aubrey Plaza for that role. Because I would never have thought of it, and she was absolutely perfect.

[barak]

#EmmyforAubrey

[dendren]

I haven't bothered with Legion because I haven't enjoyed the different takes on him in comics. I've seen enough good reviews now thought that I'm intrigued. I have a feeling that the non-linear story telling actually would be a plus in TV media, but I just hated it in the comics. I'll have to give the show a shot and see how it is.

[dr_tectonic]

Definitely! They make very good use of non-linearity in the show, and it works well.

[nehrlich]

I really loved Legion. I have to admit that it really helped to read reviews after each episode (e.g. Alan Sepinwall, AV Club) to catch things I had missed, so that I could keep up with all that was going. But the cinematography was so well-done - it's maybe the first show since Breaking Bad where I kept thinking "Whoa, what a great framing of that shot!"

[flwyd]

That description reminds me of watching the anime mini-series Serial Experiments Lain. "Binge-watching" wasn't really a term yet, but I watched the whole series in one sitting with a couple friends and we couldn't imagine having to wait a week between episodes to figure out how in the heck to interpret what just happened.