Legion is a superhero story unlike any other on screen

A series that isn't afraid to get weird

Dan Stevens.
(Image credit: Pari Dukovic/FX)

The Marvel television series Legion, the third and final season of which premiers on FX Monday night, has tread ground no other popular comic book show or movie has dared to: the landscape of the mind, with all of its infinite superheroic possibilities. The result is not simply a story with more imagination, more aesthetic and narrative potential, but a comic-book hero fully drawn, with depth and nuance and a clearly illustrated sense of self in an outsized, fictional world.

When Legion premiered in 2017, it immediately distinguished itself from the usual superhero fare with its tone and aesthetic: respectively off-kilter and modish, occasionally grim though nevertheless marked by the bright psychedelic hues and patterns of the ‘70s. But what was more surprising was the show's portrayal of its unreliable protagonist, David Haller, who is stuck in a mental hospital, unsure of what's real or imagined. Season one journeyed through David's thoughts and memories, jumping back and forward in time, erasing facts, revealing details, ultimately guiding David — and the viewer — toward a true view of his abilities and the parasitic mutant who plagues him. Rather than focusing entirely on the action in the outside world, the show switched back and forth between the world at large and David's own mind, where he encounters various incarnations of the villainous Shadow King, and where he himself is temporarily trapped.

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Maya Phillips

Maya Phillips is an arts, entertainment, and culture writer whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, Vulture, Slate, Mashable, American Theatre, Black Nerd Problems, and more. She is also a web producer at The New Yorker, and her debut poetry collection, Erou, is forthcoming in fall 2019 from Four Way Books. She lives in Brooklyn.