"Chapter 1" is the series premiere and the first episode of the first season of Legion. [1]
Synopsis[]
David considers whether the voices he hears might be real.
Plot[]
The adolescence of David Haller is shown in a montage set to The Who's "Happy Jack". He has a happy childhood, but soon develops symptoms of and is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, leading him to indulge in criminal activities. After being arrested, he makes the windows of the police car he is in explode. He is put on medication, which does not help him enough, and eventually tries to commit suicide by hanging using an electrical cord.
Five years later, David is visited on his birthday by his sister Amy at Clockworks Psychiatric Hospital, where he has been institutionalized since his suicide attempt. She tries to give him a cupcake, but is stopped by the guards. She insists that he seems to be getting better, although David still sees elderly people in the corners of the room laughing at him, which he does not share with her. He asks when he gets to come home, which she points out is for the doctors to decide. She starts to unconsciously eat his cupcake and he asks how it tastes, only to be led away by the guards for his medication, insisting that "something needs to happen soon." David takes his pill and sits with his friend and fellow patient Lenore "Lenny" Busker, who theorizes with him about the substance coming from a catatonic patient's mouth. He stops when he notices a new arrival to the hospital, the beautiful and reserved Sydney "Syd" Barrett, and he takes Lenny's Twizzlers to offer to her in hopes of getting to know her. He accidentally bumps into her while she gets her medication, causing her to leave the room hurriedly.
While David has a nightmare in his room, a male voice repeatedly asks the question "and how does that make you feel?" As he begins to writhe in his sleep, he has visions of Syd, Lenny, a boy made out of papier-mâché, and his youth. As his visions start to turn red, he sees himself asleep as a child, his own suicide attempt, and him in a kitchen as it explodes around him. He describes his delusion of "the devil with yellow eyes" over an image of him eating recording tape, and as he continues to writhe, the devil is revealed to be hiding in his walls, a pale, doughy, round figure. The visions climax and he awakens to find his bed floating in midair, only to crash down to the floor when he sits up. Hearing the noise, orderlies rush in the room and sedate him, and he has calmer visions of himself and Amy as children playing on a beach with a beagle.
David is revealed to be recounting this in a group therapy session led by Dr. Dennis Kissinger, with Lenny in attendance. As Syd joins them, David mentions something he did to a "Dr. Poole" while off his medication. As Kissinger attributes David's delusions to his brain chemistry, Syd scoffs and explains her views on the hospital when prompted: she believes that the patients are only there because of an outside insistence that they are not normal, and that their problems may not be strictly mental, nor problems at all. Kissinger notes that Syd has an aversion to touch and that animals need touch to feel love, and David states that Syd's lack of contact is sad. She counters that "you're in a mental hospital." She concludes that, despite their oddities and illnesses, they are ultimately "what makes you you." Now thoroughly smitten, David asks if she wants to be his girlfriend, and she agrees on the condition that they do not touch.
Over the next year, their relationship blossoms despite the physical limitation, and they begin to simulate holding hands by holding each end of a piece of cloth. One night, they share an intimate moment in front of a large window, where David positions them in the window's reflection to make it look like they are embracing, a sight that comforts both of them. A male voice interrupts the scene, revealing that David is actually an interrogation room with Clark Debussy, a man questioning him about his time at the hospital. He points out that Syd is not a recorded patient at Clockworks, despite David's insistence that "they took her," leading Clark to believe she was just a delusion of his. David asks how Clark can explain "what happened to Lenny" and "all of them," which Clark points out is what he is being questioned about to begin with. He insists that Clark can confirm his story if he just talks to Kissinger, which Clark seems doubtful of. At Clark's prompting, David explains how he ended up in Clockworks: after being expelled from college, his delusions became worse, leading him to not sleep and become more fitful, fighting often with his then girlfriend Philly, who soon left him. Deciding that "when a blade breaks, you don't fix it. You just get another blade," he decided to attempt suicide, despite the voices' insistence to stop. Cutting in and out between his questioning and a session with Kissinger, the latter points out that no noose was found in David's apartment, but there were rope burns on his neck. Kissinger asks if he still believes he has superpowers, and Clark interrupts, surprised at this idea. David promises that he does not believe it anymore.
David continues with his recollections, awakened by Syd one night while dreaming about a more normal life with her. She asks to sleep with him, avoiding touch by putting a pillow between them, because she is being released the next day. She asks him to get better so they can see each other outside Clockworks' walls, and he tries to kiss her but stops when she pulls away. Clark asks why David could not touch her, and he states that he at first thought it was a psychological issue before starting to refer to another explanation. He becomes aggravated, having been off his medication for a significant amount of time, and asks to take a break. Clark leaves the room to reveal that they are in a school, where the pool is being modified and the halls are crawling with armed guards. He meets with his superior, Brubaker, in the gymnasium, and they discuss their thoughts on David. Clark believes he is telling the truth, but as he perceives it, pointing out that while he believes he is mentally ill, a small part of him knows that the powers he described are real. Clark reveals that David is a mutant, and could possibly be the most powerful one they have ever encountered. While he wants to dig deeper into David's psyche, Brubaker states that their organization wants him killed before he realizes his powers are real. Clark negotiates a deal: he will have until the end of the day to extract more information out of David. Under a table in the room, a dog sits growling in a cage, bathed in red light.
During his food break, David sits in the interrogation room with a man who has been silently monitoring his questioning throughout. When he asks to eat alone, the man leaves the dog (notably the same breed as the one under the table) he had been whittling on the table and exits. The sight of the dog sends David back into his memories. In his old apartment, he has a violent argument with Philly and she storms out of the room, and, overcome with emotion, the kitchen's contents explode around him. As they swirl around him, he sees the devil watching him from the corner. He snaps out of it (the dog turned around and his tray of food now gone) just as Clark, the whittler, and several scientists return with equipment to monitor his brainwaves. He resists it and again becomes aggravated, calming down when he notices that everyone in the room seems afraid of him in the moment. To confirm this, he starts toward the scientists, causing them to jerk back. Clark insists that they are more afraid for him and convinces him to hook himself up to the equipment. He asks David about "the incident at Clockworks."
On the day of Syd's departure, she cannot find David and regretfully moves to leave without saying goodbye. Lenny stalls her at the door, allowing David to catch up to her. Despite the voices telling him not to, he kisses her, causing them both to collapse. When they sit up, David becomes frenzied and is restrained by orderlies, while Syd, seemingly in shock, is led away by Kissinger. His aggravation puts the facility on lockdown and riles up his fellow patients, and the emergency lights suddenly turn on and start to flicker. He sees the devil approaching him in the confusion, and the room Kissinger and Syd are in suddenly trembles. He leaves her alone to go investigate, where she walks to the mirror, stunned, and feels her breasts. Back in the interrogation room, David reveals that their kiss actually caused them to switch bodies, and Syd was the one being restrained while David was the one led away. As he again becomes overwhelmed, Clark's pen starts to tremble on the table, and he stops it with his hand. David asks to leave, but Clark again convinces him to continue.
David (still in Syd's body) and Kissinger find the hospital's main room deserted, and hear voices calling for help. They hurry to find the voices coming from the patient's rooms, which they are now sealed inside, their doors having vanished. They find Lenny dead, half embedded in a wall, and David hears his own voice—Syd, in his body, pounding on a wall and shouting for him to "get us out." As the authorities arrive on the scene, Kissinger escorts David out, not wanting who he believes to be Syd to lose her chance at a discharge by staying in the building. Despite his insistence that he is not Syd, Kissinger ignores him and hurries back into the building. A car pulls up in front of the hospital and a man and a young woman get out, followed by Clark himself. Back in the present, Clark is shocked by this and insists he was not there. Believing he is lying, David retreats to his aggressed state, causing Clark's pen to again shake and the machine monitoring his brainwaves to overload. Despite the whittling man slamming David's head on the table to try and subdue him, he makes Clark's pen fly into its owner's cheek. As Brubaker orders Davd gassed, he tears apart the room with his mind and knocks everyone present out, before being subdued by gas coming from the ceiling.
Still in Syd's body, David again recalls spending time with his sister and a beagle in their childhood, before he suddenly switches back into his body. Now free, he goes to Amy's house on Halloween night. She and her friendly husband Ben agree to host him until he gets back on his feet. He moves into their basement, and Amy promises him that things will "be good" before leaving him alone. He finds a lamp from his childhood, one with a rotating figure of constellations surrounding it, and turns it on. As he unpacks his suitcase, a now neatly groomed Lenny appears to him, asking how it felt to be in Syd's body. She confirms that Syd accidentally used David's powers while in his body and killed her in the process, but she is not that upset about being killed, as she felt her life was going nowhere. She insists "don't worry about me. It's you that's got problems. They're coming, and they're gonna kill you." The lamp flies into the wall, disintegrating, and Amy comes downstairs to check on the noise. David awkwardly bluffs it off, and she takes the sharp objects in the basement upstairs with her and bids him good night.
That night, while David sleeps, (the lamp now reformed) he hears Lenny's voice calling to him and his a dream of them dancing in Clockworks with the other patients, with Lenny herself dancing inside the pill dispensary. Syd, bathed in red light, tells David to wake up. He does so and realizes he is now in the water-filled pool outside the interrogation room, rigged to electrocute him to death if necessary. Clark, his cheek now bandaged, warns David that he will be killed if he tries anything. David begins to laugh and points out "I'm insane, you idiot. This is my delusion. It's not real." Having dropped the act of pretending Syd is not real, Clark demands to know her location, aware that the man and woman who he saw at the hospital took her in David's body, and he wants them both. David admits that he searched for her relentlessly upon his release but could not find her, and remembers calling Clockworks but getting nothing. He sees the man and woman approaching him and flees through the city, shaking them off. He begins to walk through a pillared structure and realizes Syd's face is on the back of a man's head, who warns him to not stop. She appears to him herself and points out that none of what he is experiencing is real, as she has been projected into his memory of the day he called Clockworks. The man and woman catch up to him and begin to follow him, and she makes David walk forward with her. She explains that he is actually in a government facility and needs to slowly slide out of his chair and into the water, and to submerge when he sees "the lights." The memory concludes as he is grabbed and thrown into a van by armed guards, where the whittler is waiting for him with a syringe.
In the present, David remembers exactly who he saw at the hospital—instead of Clark, he saw a middle-aged woman. As orange lights start to slowly form in the air, David slowly descends into the water. Clark again asks for Syd's location as the lights become more intense, and David dives as Clark's button to electrocute him vanishes, causing the soldiers to shoot at him until a flash of light flares above him. The charred bodies of the soldiers fall into the water with him, and he swims up to find Syd and the people who pursued him waiting, who she introduces as "Kerry" and "Ptonomy". As she helps him out of the pool, he tries to embrace her, but she reminds him that they cannot touch. She insists that "Melanie" is waiting, and the group leads him out of the building where the man who caused the explosion, a fellow telekinetic named Rudy, is waiting. He fights off the attacking guards, backed up by Ptonomy and Kerry, while David is attacked by a soldier. He kills him with his powers and they flee down to a nearby dock. David stops Syd, begging her to confirm that what is happening is real, and she promises that it is and that she loves him, putting her gloved hand on his face. He confirms that he loves her too just as Melanie Bird, the woman from the hospital, arrives with a boat. She reaches out her hand for David to take, and, despite the watching eyes of the nearby devil and a man in a suit, he takes it.
Cast[]
Trivia[]
- The Devil With The Yellow Eyes appears as one of David's toys in the opening montage.
- Several characters refer to an "incident at Red Hook." Red Hook is the name of the town next to Bard College, where Marvel character Jean Grey was buried. Jean Grey's father was a professor at Bard College and Jean Grey grew up in the area. [2]
- To depict David Haller losing control of his abilities in a kitchen, actor Dan Stevens was filmed separately from the practical effects, with the images layered together to create the final, slow-motion sequence. [3]
- During the episode there are various people that only David can see, such as: the old couple when talking to his sister, and the man in the greenery when he's sitting with Lenny. These are not actually delusions and are, in fact, some of David's personalities. [2]
- When Syd and David switch bodies, she is able to tap into the powers on one of his personalities. Known as Personality #5 in the comics, Personality #5 is a godlike mutant who describes himself as "The One True Legion". He has the ability to warp both time and reality which would explain how Syd was able to change the structure of the patients rooms, leaving no doors, as well as, trapping Lenny in the wall. [2]
- David is seen in a wheelchair early on in the episode in the hospital. This is a reference to his father in the comics, Professor Xavier.[2]
Episode Transcript[]
Gallery[]
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