Legion

A new season that’s weirder and more vivid than before. ... The new season is at once more opaque and more direct than the first one. The premiere is so full of digressions that the plot eventually begins to feel like the real digression, yet by the end of it there’s a clear structure in place for how David will be dealing with the Shadow King.

Thankfully, the show remains as experiential as ever—getting inside the head of an all-powerful mutant might be inadvisable, but on Legion, it actually seems possible. Just as important, the new season gives us ever more compelling reasons to make that trip.

The new episodes may not start off with the bang of the series premiere, but that first episode is still a doozy. What comes in its wake shows some improved creative discipline without losing the excitement that drives an unrestrained endeavor like this one.

There's still a tenuous connection to a sense-making plot (but only realistically if you watched Season 1). ... And yes, that gives me comfort only in the sense that what viewers will see in the opening episodes is such a perversely wonderful hallucinogenic experience--dance numbers, shape-shifting, the creepy sound of frozen people and their chattering teeth, explorations of color, astral plane hijinks and multiple WTF moments--that there's comfort in knowing it's not all just cinematic showboating, a Pollock/Rothko virtual reality with no meaning.

There’s a lot to catch up on from Legion‘s first season, and thus, the show’s first episode back is a bit of a tedious if arguably necessary affair. ... However, thanks primarily to the season premiere’s director, Tim Mielants, who does excellent work on AMC’s The Terror, one comes out of the first episode with feet placed firmly on the show’s narrative ground.

Better than season 1 in some regards, but weaker in spots, it’s difficult to say whether Legion’s second outing is an improvement over its predecessor or at a stalemate.

Legion presents itself as a maze, but it's more accurately an imaginatively adorned straight line in season two. The series performs an effective illusion: It can be uncanny, but it's rarely truly impenetrable. The flamboyant peculiarity of David's world convinces us that we're seeing something for the first time.

This is eye-popping TV, probably the first series to bear the influence of Seijun Suzuki, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Lady Gaga. Legion is as energetic as a film student--and just as pretentious.