Legion Review: Chapter 15 (Season 2 Episode 7)

On Legion Season 2 Episode 7, “Chapter 15,” David adjusts to the Shadow King’s actions, as Division 3 comes under attack from insanity itself.

While it can’t be denied that “Chapter 15” is one interesting hour of television, it suffers largely from doing too much in one episode.

Previous episodes this season have had a very nice structure to them — tight stories with a distinct purpose in mind. But “Chapter 15” feels as if Legion took the plots of two episodes, condensed them down, and threw them together to create this one.

The two plots are cleanly divided into two disparate halves, and they both work for the most part. The biggest problem comes from there being too many things happening that we either don’t understand or aren’t able to understand at this time.

In the past, Legion was able to be fairly weird in ways that were somewhat discernible. Whether that involves a psychic dance-off or surviving in a nightmare prison, it was rooted in a kind of logic with threads that could be pulled at.

With “Chapter 15,” things such as Future Syd’s time room or Admiral Fukyama’s total ineffability don’t lead to any type of answer. Instead, they lend a needless opaqueness to the ongoing narrative. Again, this isn’t to say that Legion didn’t try similar things previously, but they were more isolated and easier to swallow.

At its core, however, “Chapter 15” is working with an idea that is perhaps not as profound as it would like to be: moral panic.

It’s this notion that, rational or not (most times not), humans lay their anxieties and problems at a specific external force, be that witches in the Salem Witch Trials or the current obsession with immigrants.

Legion would like us to believe that this paranoia and fear extends itself to the Shadow King in a similar way that it does to Admiral Fukyama towards the end of the episode. That doesn’t quite track and, if it even does, feels a bit disingenuous with the way that he has in the past and is still being portrayed.

That’s one of many reasons why that particular plot doesn’t entirely work. But the biggest of those is that the show thinks the reveal that David is the threat of the future is a lot more shocking than it actually is to the audience. Add onto that the Shadow King’s hackneyed monologue about heroism and villainy and it breaks apart pretty fast.

This could become a problem as the series continues and the plot gets closer and closer to David as the Big Bad of Legion. It will need to find a way to subvert our expectations of what that could eventually look like.

Given the audience’s understanding of what Legion is as a source material and concept, it would need to be quite good.

“We’re all villains” isn’t going to cut it, though.

What did you think of this episode of Legion? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Legion airs Tuesdays at 10/9c on FX.

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