Legion Review: Chapter 19 (Season 2 Episode 11)
Like the rest of this season (and series), it’s difficult to pin down whether or not Legion Season 2 Episode 11 “Chapter 19” is actually good or not.
It certainly tries to do something. If nothing else, it has that. The problem lies in that what it’s doing by the end of this episode isn’t terribly nuanced or interesting. In fact, its entire existence is meant to undermine everything that the series has done up to this point.
Legion has always been given credit for two things: its perfectly distinct visual style and its “weirdness.” The first one has been earned time and time again, but it’s that second one that this episode especially runs up against pretty spectacularly.
In many ways, Legion has proven itself to be a bit of a magic trick. It’s had this hat for all this time and has told us that it has something more substantial than “David is the bad guy” because it would have to, right? There’s no way it could just be something as simple as a villain’s origin story.
That’s the rub, though. We’ve gotten to it and the hat has exactly what we feared would be in it. The allure and mystique of the show made it seem more engaging than it ever was and, you know what, that’s on us. It’s our fault for assuming that this show is smarter than it actually is.
David turning evil is always the story that it planned on telling and, despite what’s been said here, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. There’s every possibility that Noah Hawley and Co. could turn this into something truly unexpected and subversive.
There’s no good faith here that will happen, however, and we’re more than likely going to get a conclusion that is the good guys against the villain, which is fine but incredibly boring and tiresome.
To its credit, and also blame, “Chapter 19” doesn’t shy away from how deluded and bad David is at this point of the story. The series makes the decision of pointedly attacking David with what essentially amounts to sexual assault without explicitly calling it that. It’s admirable to an extent because it could have just left that to hang.
On the other hand, and this feels like a much more important point that is condemnable to Legion, the series does the very thing that so many shows have done in the past that is equally abhorrent: Taking a woman of full autonomy and having her be raped to demonstrate how bad someone is.
It was bad when Game of Thrones did it; it was bad when Tyrant did it; and it’s bad for Legion, too.
At the end of the day, this is a show that would have us believe it’s a great deal more sophisticated than it actually is. In reality, it was always a moderately fascinating series that could never be faulted for its visual flair but isn’t working with anything reaching that same level of intrigue or intelligence.
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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Drew Koenig
Drew has an ongoing, borderline unhealthy obsession with pop culture, but with television in particular. When he's not aggressively trying to get out of a perpetual state of catching up, he can be found passionately defending the ending of Lost. More of his online work can be found at The Lost Cause and he also co-hosts The Lost Cause Pod.