TV Recap: Legion: Season 2, Episode 1 - Chapter 9

Legion started its sophomore season just last night, and the premiere was a heaping serving of psychedelic, sci-fi weirdness just as you’ve come to expect. And in what has become Legion’s fashion, just as we get answers, new nagging questions take their place. Good news, though: we didn’t have to wait long to get another fantastic dance number out of this cast.

The premiere of Legion first introduces a new threat, powerful enough to trap even the Shadow King and Oliver Bird, together. Jon Hamm then provides narration over a stark black screen, explaining that the maze of insanity is as complicated as our minds make it out to be. It’s in no way meant to be a comfort, however, as we’ll see.

David Haller, meanwhile, is found near-comatose and brought into Division 3, a joint effort between Summerland and the men The Eye employ. From there, a continuous question of how reliable David’s own mind can be remains. David is missing a full year of time (362 days, to be exact) with scant memory of where he’s been.

That doesn’t stop he and Syd from rekindling what was put on hold when he went missing, though—they have a wonderful, psychically-empowered reunion involving David’s headspace and body switching abound.

It turns out that in the year David’s been out of pocket, he and the Shadow King/Oliver Bird have been having encounters across the country—encounters that leave surrounding people catatonic, chattering their teeth in unison. It’s a deeply disturbing sound.

In an effort to fill in the blanks, Cary builds a Cerebro-like “giant daiquiri” made of glucose, bicarbonate and strawberry extract, to work as a sensory deprivation/channeling device for David. While inside, David’s memory comes back to him, where the PSYCHIC FREAKOUT DANCE BATTLE occurs and it’s pretty damned great to see Dan Stevens, Aubrey Plaza, and Jemaine Clement get into the breakdance fight, each flanked by their own stylish crews. It also goes a good way to explain how all the non-mutants in the vicinity wind up chittering catatonics.

But at episode’s close, there’s the further question of just how much of those memories David’s holding back, as he willingly agrees to help the Shadow King retrieve his/her body and bolster their power against a threat seemingly able to chain down both the Shadow King and Oliver. But David’s mind is still split as we saw last season and in the handy season 1 recap Marvel tweeted out last week, so how wholly he’s sided with the Shadow King, or if he’s even fully aware that he has, remains unaddressed.

Overall, it’s a strong debut, carrying forward questions of David’s sanity, the relationships built over season 1’s struggle against the Shadow King, and some interesting nods to comic fans thrown into the mix, to boot.

Check in next week for Chapter 10’s recap!