When Legion first hit the streaming waves in 2017, it was hailed as a Marvel product that managed to take the capes and tights confines and reinvent them.
Now the show is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, so if you didn’t catch it back then, you might be able to now.
The eight-parter stars Dan Stevens as David Haller – a man who neither screams ‘super’ nor ‘hero’. We meet him as a patient at a psychiatric facility dealing with intrusive thoughts.
The doctors have diagnosed him as a schizophrenic, but it turns out that the voices he’s been hearing and the yellow-eyed figure in dark corners he keeps seeing aren’t a symptom of mental illness after all. He might have telepathy.
The unconventional Disney premise comes from the Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley, who takes us inside David’s head to try to discern what is real and what is imagined.
Fans of the comics might be aware that David is canonically the son of X-Men mutant head honcho Charles Xavier.
We are in that parallel universe where mutants exist, but there is no mention of the X-Men or the Professor in this show. Instead, it stands alone as its own piece of television, so there’s no need to catch up on several other Marvel properties beforehand.
We follow David as he grapples with his mental health in the hospital, alongside his pal and fellow in-patient Lenny Busker, played by Aubrey Plaza, who has a grip on reality that is as tenuous as David’s.
It’s only after a strange encounter with a new patient – Syd, played by Rachel Keller, who harbours her own superpower and turns into a burgeoning love interest – that David starts to suspect he might be reckoning with something beyond mental illness.
What other shows can you stream on Amazon Prime?
- Steal. Ordinary office worker Zara (Sophie Turner) becomes entangled in a major heist at work alongside her best friend.
- Memory of a Killer. Revolves around a later-in-life hitman who begins to develop dementia.
- Clarice. A spin-off series for the widely-acclaimed Silence of the Lambs.
With a near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score of 91% and plenty of praise from viewers, this promises to be one that’s a bit different to your usual TV fare.
One viewer even likened it to Alice in Wonderland crossed with X-Man, writing on IMDb: ‘It’s wild and crazy but strangely enough it makes a lot of sense and it’s not hard to follow. Brilliant, one-of-a-kind show I will not forget anytime soon. May have to watch it again soon.’
Many others had strong praise in their reviews, with one adding: ‘A visual masterpiece and an incredibly compelling narrative. It’s a hallucinogenic mind trip that you’ll remember.’
Does Legion sound like one for you?
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Definitely
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I'm less sure
Legion is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video and Disney Plus.
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