Marvel’s X-Men-adjacent series Legion will continue on to season 3, as FX just made the renewal official. The news comes ahead of the season 2 finale, a sure sign of confidence the network has in the series as well as its creator Noah Hawley, the force behind FX’s loosely connected midwestern crime anthology Fargo.
After a loopy, but visually inventive first outing, season 2 of Legion has dug its heels in on the show’s mind-bending ways. The story this season concerns the race to discover the whereabouts of Amahl Farouk’s (Navid Negahban) body before the psychic parasite does. The situation has put David (Dan Stevens) and the rest of the Summerland mutants in league with Division 3, making for not only strange bedfellows, but also a circuitous, storyline that, despite already being two episodes longer than first season, necessitated the recent addition of an eleventh episode.
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Whether or not this means the conflict between David and the Shadow King (aka, Farouk) will be resolved in the next two episodes remains to be seen, but whatever Hawley has planned is apparently impressive enough that FX wants to see more. A statement from Nick Schier, Co-President of Original Programming for FX Networks, sang the series’ praises while looking forward to a boundary-pushing third installment:
“Legion has redefined the superhero drama and exceeded all expectations as the intensity and revelation build through the second season. We are incredibly proud of Noah Hawley’s achievement and are honored to continue the series as it pushes the boundaries of conventional television storytelling. We are also grateful for the contributions of our executive producers, John Cameron, Lauren Shuler Donner, Simon Kinberg, and Jeph Loeb with Marvel Television, as well as our outstanding cast and crew of this groundbreaking show.”
To its credit, Legion has managed to go to some surprising places this season, while at the same time not really going anywhere at all. In addition to jumping in and out of the astral plane, the race against Farouk has involved time travel (of sorts), the explorations of multiple David-centric timelines, body swapping, uploading a man’s mind into a computer, and battling the physical manifestation of a delusion. As an added bonus, the season’s been treated to voiceover narration by Jon Hamm (who will be joined by Stevens in Hawley’s upcoming feature film, Pale Blue Dot).
Though the show has its detractors, Legion continues to impress with its willingness to be visually adventurous and bold in terms of its unconventional storytelling methods. After a cliffhanger ending to the first season, it will be interesting to see what sort of tricks Hawley has up his sleeve for not just the end of season 2, but the beginning of season 3.
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Source: FX Networks