Head Trip

A Marvel mutant discovers his powers in Legion.

- Matt Zoller Seitz

LEGION IS A TRIP: brainy, tight, yet so decadently inventive that I found myself laughing out loud at the sheer audacity of the damned thing. The first three episodes of this X-Men–styled mutant melodrama are superb, and the pilot in particular is an all-timer, but the whole thing is so aesthetically fresh that I could see myself continuing to watch it even if it suddenly became dumb as hell, just to see what new storytelling trick showrunner Noah Hawley and his collaborators have up their puffy magicians’ sleeves.

Told mainly from the point of view of a telekinetic loner named David Haller (Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens), this is a fractured, highly subjective saga, jumping around in time from the hero’s childhood through his present incarceration in a mental hospital and ahead to events that won’t be fully explained until much later. As David jousts with sinister jailers, befriends a blissed-out wiseass played by Aubrey Plaza, and becomes smitten with a beautiful loner named Sydney Barrett (Rachel Keller) who says she doesn’t like to be touched, he also travels deep inside his own tortured mind, revisiting, and in some cases revising, the story he’d presented to us and others, discovering contradictions and lies, filling in gaps created by trauma or repression, and otherwise making sense of himself.