Don’t Come Around Here No More – Legion ‘Chapter 13’ Review

Legion has always played fast and loose with our traditional ideas of reality and consciousness. So much of what we accepted as real throughout season one turned out to be an elaborate trick on the part of the Shadow King, to the point now that every event is poked and probed as we look for signs that what we’re witnessing is actually something else. It can be a bit of a head trip, to say the least, and it creates a series that demands attention and concentration, but the effort, so far, has been well rewarded.

Chapter 13 takes the physical and the mental and blurs the boundaries further. We know the Shadow King lives inside Oliver, but the way the show demonstrates this parasitic relationship deviates between the reverse (Oliver trapped inside Amahl Farouk’s mental prison) and an odd couple road trip. Lenny, who we discovered was rarely actually there last season, accompanies Oliver’s consciousness in Farouk’s prison and his bodily form when it attacks Division III. But was she there then or just another projection?

The end of Chapter 12 saw Lenny very much in the flesh. This week, she’s being held at Division III and interrogated, first by Clark and later by Ptonomy, while she insists she needs to speak to David. But Lenny was dead and only her consciousness remained, so how has she returned in a very real form that everyone – not just David – can see? Legion takes its time explaining how this came to be and it’s not good news for David.

From the first scene of Aubrey Plaza in her upside-down cell, something seemed off. My intitial thought was, “Huh, I don’t remember Aubrey Plaza’s eyes ever being that colour before.” When Ptonomy – who remembers everything – gets her eyes colour wrong, the signs were clear that this wasn’t my faulty memory, but some trickery on the show’s part. It’s only when David shows up and delves into Lenny’s mind that the real nefarious deed becomes apparent. Lenny’s body belonged to David’s sister.

Oliver and Farouk have been skulking around in the desert all this while, and the show’s reveal that these events aren’t happening concurrently with Lenny’s interrogation is masterly. It’s a hammer blow for David and dredges up all sorts of questions. When Lenny comforts a distraught David, is that Lenny or some vestige of Amy left inside her? Why would Future Syd have told David to help Farouk if it was going to lead to this? Does that have anything to do with Syd’s lesson last week that David needs strength over love? If it does, how much longer can we go on convinced that Syd is one of the good guys? One thing we know for certain is that we’re running out of people to trust.

Questions, questions, questions

• Ptonomy sees inside Admiral Fukuyama’s basket and sees a grown version of the ‘delusion chick’ that crawled inside his ear. Does this mean something’s up with Fukuyama or that Farouk is just planting that seed in Ptonomy’s mind?
• The scene where Oliver uses the weapon to put Lenny into Amy’s body is set to the strains of Noah Hawley and Jeff Russo’s sinister cover of Tom Petty’s ‘Don’t Come Around Here No More’. The video for Petty’s original is a trippy riff on Alice in Wonderland. Does that imply some deeper relevance to the choice of song?
• Farouk promised David that nobody else would be killed. Does this mean Farouk lied or is Amy still in there somewhere?
• Oliver tells Farouk he’s going to kill him. The only hint he’ll give as to how is “one and one don’t always equal two.” Could this mean Oliver using a little of Farouk’s own medicine and remaining inside Farouk when the Shadow King reclaims his body?
• First the cow, now a horse, what’s with the magically appearing animals?