#LEGION BUBBLE TROUBLE SERIES#

Indeed, Legion’s plot, setting, and genre are so ambiguous that they add up to something revolutionary: a superhero-comic adaptation that’s deeply, deliberately, and thrillingly challenging to watch. Viewers will find that they share the man’s bafflement when the show debuts February 8 - and that’s entirely by design. This time, Stevens gives some answers, but the man struggles to interpret them, narrowing his eyes and eventually just shaking his head in benighted resignation. “What is that thingon your head?” he asks.

Does that mean the answer is no? If it’s not an insignia, does it have some other significance? Could it just be something that the costume designer thought looked nifty? Does Stevens even know? The man points again, this time at a metal object wrapped around Stevens’s skull. Stevens registers his co-performer’s question about it, then shrugs and changes the subject to the weather. Instead of certainty and two-fisted narrative clarity, Legion presents a heap of broken images, a collection of arresting vignettes that lock the eye and ear but rarely explain themselves. There isn’t even a consensus among the characters about what constitutes reality and whether the memories they recount for the audience ever actually happened. There are no laser blasts or secret identities. Although David originated in X-Men comics, the show is narratively and tonally unconnected to the universe of the long-running X-Men film franchise. In Legion ’s lushly shot cosmology, there are no capes or uniforms. Indeed, it forces you to ask what a superhero story would look like if you stripped away almost all of the superhero-y trappings. In an era where the global entertainment economy is fueled by a thick stream of barely distinguishable superhero movies and television, Hawley’s project feels blissfully unique. It’s a reasonable question, given that the show circles around the David Haller character, who has been wreaking havoc across the superhuman-redolent Marvel Comics universe for decades. “Is that” - the man pauses and wiggles his index finger in the direction of a cryptic geometric shape on David’s T-shirt - “your superhero insignia?” The man (whose presence constitutes a significant spoiler, so we’ll stay mum on his identity) stands in the mud of a remote forest 40 miles from Vancouver and points at the chest of the actor playing David, the svelte and stubbled Englishman Dan Stevens. The actor is about to do another take of a scene in which a willowy telekinetic named David Haller executes a wild display of his psychic powers.

#LEGION BUBBLE TROUBLE SERIES#

We’re in the home stretch of production on the first season of this FX drama, the much-anticipated new series from Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley. It’s rainy and cold, and one of the actors on Legion is confused about whether he signed up to be on a superhero show.

Legion bubble trouble