Review: ‘Legion’ Resumes. Hold On to Your Brain.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/arts/television/review-legion-season-2-fx.html

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The second season of FX’s series “Legion” begins on Tuesday with a voice-over intoning: “You’re inside the maze now. You can’t escape.” It’s a description of insanity. It’s also, of course, a reference to the experience of watching “Legion.”

Starring Dan Stevens as David Haller, one of the lesser known but more powerful mutant heroes in the Marvel universe, “Legion” takes place largely inside people’s heads, where David roams at will. Settings and situations change instantly and continually, moving from one mental landscape to another without the need for actual movement.

The early episodes of Season 2 (four of 10 were available) jump among various childhoods, a fortune teller’s stand sitting on an empty prairie, a monastery in Tibet-ish mountains and an assortment of more abstract, generally frightening scenarios set against white screens or shadowy blackness.

The show’s creator and still-frequent writer, Noah Hawley, uses David’s psychic abilities to pull apart both the comic-book superhero story and the mainstream television drama. Nothing else on TV (including Netflix, Amazon and Hulu) has a surface texture as disorienting and attention-grabbing. The closest competition would be Mr. Hawley’s other stylized meta-series, “Fargo,” also on FX.

“Legion” isn’t that hard to follow — the attentive viewer will generally be able to tell when the action is taking place in real life and when it’s in the ether, except when Mr. Hawley is intentionally coy. He indulges the opportunity to dip in and out of unreliable narration, but he doesn’t abuse the privilege. He’s good about dropping in shots of people lying unconscious or standing frozen to let us know when we’re watching their minds wander.

What can be distracting in “Legion,” though, is Mr. Hawley’s seeming determination to continually top himself — to give each new setting, each new idea, its own distinct visual and conceptual identity.

It makes sense: a show set inside the mind reflects the infinite variety of the mind. In practice the constant embellishment and novelty can be wearying, especially at series length. Does a comic-book scenario in which crowds of people are being rendered catatonic require a parable about the nature of delusion that includes an animated Chinese fable, gigantic eggs and a man hacking off his leg in the shower?

The formal inventiveness deployed by Mr. Hawley and his crew of directors, who include the noted cinematographer Ellen Kuras (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) and the indie filmmaker Ana Lily Amirpour (“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”), is consistently impressive. It also consistently outstrips the storytelling. It’s easy, if maybe unfair, to think that all the filmmaking razzle-dazzle comes at the expense of the drama, which, when stripped down, consists of the usual series of battles and superhero clichés about friendship, honor and the toughness of the outsider.

The sense of comic-book business-as-usual is more acute in Season 2, now that David’s origin story — brilliantly extended over the course of Season 1 — is established. Spoilers here: David and his crew, including his body-swapping girlfriend, Syd (Rachel Keller), are now allied with Division III, the government mutant-hunting outfit that had imprisoned him. The focus is on finding the evil mutant Farouk, a.k.a., the Shadow King, a search that takes on apocalyptic dimensions.

The cast is virtually the same, with the welcome addition of Navid Negahban (the terrorist Abu Nazir from the early seasons of “Homeland”) as the Shadow King. Lily Rabe, excellent as usual, makes a guest appearance as Syd’s mother in a “Rashomon”-style episode that may be an indication that the show’s finally starting to run out of ideas. When every episode and scene of a show seems to be an answer to “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did …,” eventually you’re going to run out of answers.