For two seasons now,
Legion has been building up to a critical moment and tonight's season finale finally delivered on that moment with the series' biggest twist yet as we finally learned that the all-powerful David Haller (Dan Stevens) isn't the hero of this story, he's the villain.
While many had begun to presume that this was exactly where the show was heading, tonight's episode delivered us confirmation as the world-ending threat future Syd (Rachel Keller) warned present-day David about was not the Shadow King (Navid Negahban), but was, in fact, David himself. The omega-level mutant has been spiraling for weeks now and it all came to a head tonight when he began mentally manipulating the woman he loved, which is just a line you don't cross.
While speaking with
Entertainment Weekly, Primetime Emmy Award-winning showrunner Noah Hawley shared some insight on the shocker and confirmed that this always where he planned on taking David and his multiple personalities.
"Yeah. For me, I always had this question in my mind, what would happen if Walter White was a supervillain? That Breaking Bad superhero show. This idea, especially in the X-Men universe, that the moral line between good and evil is often fudge-able. Magneto, who sometimes is their villain and sometimes is on their side, and the idea of what the right thing to do is can shift depending on the circumstances. So I wanted to evolve the show so that you realize over time that maybe David’s not the hero of your show, but maybe Syd is the hero of your show.
Once you see that, it becomes a different show on some level. You’ll watch it with different eyes at that point — which doesn’t mean that David can’t come back or that in the end he doesn’t find his way back. But on some level, the whole show is a mental-illness parable, the idea that [David] tried to kill himself and he went into the hospital, and they straightened him out and they gave him his meds, and they let him out and he took his meds for a while, and then he decided he didn’t need them and then he went off them, and now he’s in this psychotic break, except he replaced the word “meds” with the word “love.” He realized he had this love story and the love was making him a better person — a saner, more stable person — and then he started lying to the woman that he loved and not being consistent. When he turned his back on the love story, everything started to fall apart for him."
On another note, Hawley also revealed that the pending Disney/Fox merger is unlikely to affect the next season of
Legion since it's still a long way away from being even close to official. "
I don’t think that was a concern. I think there’s always a question as to if the merger goes through and Marvel has direct control over the X-Men, as to what’s gonna happen both on the film and TV sides, it’s sort of a big unknown. But, obviously, the Disney merger isn’t a done deal. I think it’s us operating as business as usual. We’re just going to make the things we want to make until somebody tells us to stop."
So, what did you think of the finale? Sound off with your thoughts below!