Follow The Pregnant Virgin
When it comes to artistic, stylish and outright trippy TV shows, few compare to Legion. Despite an overlong second season, Legion continued to deliver trippy visuals wrapped up in a hedonistic superhero setting, ending with a tantalising cliffhanger. It’s one of those shows that really blurs the line between arthouse and mainstream superhero title, much to the credit of the show itself. Now onto its third and final season, we begin the first episode with the rules of time travel presented to us before cutting to an Asian girl wearing headphones. She’s given signs to follow, including a bus with the words “Pregnant Virgin” imprinted on the side and a strange door with a specific symbol on. Through here, we see her in a white room surrounded by shirts on coat rails. Eventually she manages to decipher a riddle around an orange fish and as a reward, we’re graced with a song. From here, we find out her name is Switch. Forced to wait in a room with a large, yellow clock, Lenny shows up before eventually agreeing to let her see David who tries to get her to open her mind. They discuss time travel and it turns out David has recruited her to be a time traveller for him. He wants her to go back in time for an unspecified purpose but before she does, he asks how far she can go. Before he can get an answer, guards storm the facility and attack David. He overpowers them for now but loses his arm in the process before Syd arrives and shoots him in the back. Switch then creates a portal and rolls through it to the other side after seeing David dead, lying in a pool of his own blood. She walks down a dark corridor where we receive more time travel lessons, including a warning not to go too far back in time for fear of waking the demon. Switch heads back again, this time warning David prior to the guards arriving. He teleports them into the thick of action above where we receive an impressive one-shot scene of David destroying guards until he comes face to face with Farouk. David is shot in the back again but before the guards can get to her, she teleports out and travels back to the corridor again, this time picking a door that says 2 hours. In doing so, she comes face to face with Farouk himself but refuses to trust or work with him, teleporting out courtesy of the tea tray infront of them. We then cut to Farouk’s air ship where he wonders what they need to do to stop a time traveller that can travel through time and change the past. Farouk warns Syd away but she defiantly wants to go with the team on the ground. This leads us back to the familiar scenario from before but from the perspective of the soldiers. Just as they’re about to storm the complex, it explodes, leaving a massive crater in its wake and one final fragment on the ground. Legion’s clever use of time travel and continuing trippy visuals work really well here, delivering a concise and well written episode that feels quicker in pace than it actually is. Switch’s introduction and the conceptual idea of time travel with the corridor is certainly original and slots in nicely with the hedonistic, trippy design of the entire show. If you’ve made it this far into the lifespan of Legion, you’ll know to expect the unexpected. Given what we receive here, Legion certainly continues to make good on that promise. Quite whether the show will stick to style over substance issue remains to be seen, but for now Legion gets off to a promising start with a really strong opening episode.
