Legion Review: Chapter 16 (Season 2 Episode 8)

Legion Season 2 Episode 8, “Chapter 16,” fulfills its mandate and delivers one of the show’s most surreal episodes to date.

While Legion quite often is much more simplistic than it would like us to believe, it is, in the same respect, capable of episodes that make your brain feel like a fork caught in a blender.

The best example of this is the first season’s “Chapter 6” and “Chapter 7,” both of which sent you on a mad, wild adventure that made you wonder exactly what was real and what wasn’t while having wonderful flourishes thrown in for the sake of it.

“Chapter 16” does not quite rise to that level of surrealist tomfoolery, but it most certainly manages to be a striking, discombobulating experience that works in a similar (although altogether different) sandbox.

An important distinction — and one that Legion doesn’t always do well at — is its ability on this episode to have these weird things happening, but not be just for the sake of being weird. There are substantive reasons for things like Farouk riding in a dream car and showing Ptonomy navigating his way through the mind tree.

Speaking of Ptonomy, Legion desperately needs to figure out what they plan on doing with that character, because, up to this point, he has been terribly underused to the point that he is barely even a character.

For that matter, the show has never done well with characters that aren’t David or Syd, very often letting them act as tertiary and background characters and only bringing them to the forefront when it’s necessary to further David and Syd’s storyline. Legion can and should do better at this.

One thing that “Chapter 16” really cements is the impact that Dan Stevens has on this series.

If David were played by someone that isn’t Stevens, there’s an all too real chance that our connection to that character wouldn’t be as strong. When Syd and Clark are discussing David and she describes him as someone that probably isn’t capable of recognizing the real world, you believe that inherently because it’s wonderfully portrayed by Stevens constantly.

You buy David as someone that is vaguely disconnected from everything, and that’s sold through the performance.

“Chapter 16” does make one significant misstep, and that’s in its insistence in using Jon Hamm’s narrator sequence, which has been featured in every episode this season. Not only is it a rather banal examination of society, but it also undercuts the natural flow and rhythm of the episode.

This might not be as big of a deal if it had simply put this at the top of the episode like previous instances this season, but it’s thrown into the third act and practically kills the momentum.

At this point, that device has probably been used as much as it can be and needs to be discarded until there’s a good enough reason to bring it back.

Mostly, “Chapter 16” works as an offbeat setup for the final act of the season and how the show plans on getting us there.

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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