Legion is an American series created for by Noah Hawley, based on the Marvel Comics character Legion. It is connected to the X-Men film series, the first television series to be so. As the premiere episode opens we meet David Haller, a man who is in no way “super”. In the hands of actor Dan Stevens who is a strung-out patient who hears voices and sees a ghoulish yellow-eyed figure in the dark corner. He wears a yellow tracksuit, has darkened circles around his eyes and has lost his grip on reality, diagnosed by his doctors as a schizophrenic. Except that David might not actually be mentally ill. He might just be telepathic.
Legion doesn’t ignore the elements that make up X-men movies and comics; there are government agents who want to control and abolish mutants, a school for gifted individuals, and the identity crisis that most of the marvel’s most famous mutants have to come to term with. The plot is actually compressed and limited within the characters so as the story revolve around Legion, he would take us to the journey in a unique way (never seen before in comics adapted series or movies). His story unfolds with non-linear precision. We flash to David’s childhood, to his visits with his sister Amy, to previous sessions with an unhelpful therapist. One minute he’s being interrogated by the government lackeys, who are both interested and afraid of his powers, and the next he’s engaged in a Bollywood dance in the mental hospital surrounded by his deranged fellow patients. It’s a show about the mind and the inability to channel one’s thoughts and memories in a way that feels cohesive.
