Before I sat down to watch this, I knew it was going to be a bit of a mind trip. It was “broken” legion from the comics after all. I have to admit I had not read the solo series Marvel released so my POV on Legion was a bit dated.
My litmus test for this series was actually going to be my wife’s reaction as we watched it. She’s a casual “comic movie fan” and if she could get on board with what I suspected was going to be a psychedelic episode I knew FOX could go somewhere with this.To be completely honest I can think of about 40 different characters that they could have done a series with, and Legion wasn’t on that list.
Within the first 5 minutes I heard “This is doing nothing for me so far” as the delusions of a fractured psyche played out across the screen in front of us. Then something happened. Dan Stevens begin to act….and it got better from there.
If anything can make this series a success I suspect the acting chops of Dan Brown and Rachel Keller can help with that. I feel terrible saying “acting chops” there, as both of them have extensive professional training with names like “Carnegie” and “Cambridge” attached to it, and I made them sound like street carnie. For the record , there is an excellent little dance number in the episode that I thought showed a range of these actors right out of the gate.
The story itself had a nice pace to it and I did do a little internal fist bump when the name “mutant” was talked about with a fear I had not felt since the 80,s-90’s.They gave me enough to be interested ,but not too much to think they hot shotted the storyline which is become rarer and rarer in todays TV universe. I’m going to watch the first 8 episodes(full season) for sure and go from there.
Trailer is below and the series airs Wednesdays on FX.
