After a year and three days, FX’s Legion is finally back with its second season! This review will continue spoilers, you have been warned.

So the episode starts off 362 days after the events of last season’s finale and everything we know has changed, since the audience doesn’t know what happened in those 362 days we are looking through the same mindset as David who believes that he has only been gone for a few hours. This episode gives us hints and bits and pieces of what happened and we now know that the Shadow King is on the run to find his original body which when he does he will become unstoppable. It’s a race against time for both the Shadow King and Division 3 where David’s allies are now working.

If I’m going to be completely honest I forgot what watching an episode of Legion felt like. Is it always this confusing? I mean I gathered enough information to continue watching.

The episode focuses on what David remembers during his absence and people are starting to suspect whether he’s telling the truth or not. They think that there’s a possibility that the Shadow King is still lurking around his brain. This is eventually proven wrong when Cary does a couple of tests to find out. David then meets up with Syd and they make up for lost time. One thing I noticed is how well the episode established the fact that these characters have changed, Syd for example has felt a big void since David left her and it shows, she’s afraid he’ll leave her again.

This episode much like the rest of the series uses visual storytelling and they Noah Hawley does an amazing job with this throughout the episode but in one specific part, he excels. The part I’m talking about is the visual representations of delusions. He uses two stories (the man who dreamt of becoming a butterfly and the man who thought he had a leg which wasn’t his) and an analogy of two chicks, one which is clean and fluffy and the other deformed and covered in black goo.

Now this show has a weird thing for metaphorical dance scenes, I know this is supposed to mean something metaphorically like it’s a battle of the mind with them being in the astral plane but I thought it was useless to include, not saying it was bad but without it the episode would’ve stayed the same.

The last 12 minutes were what really sparked my interest. The black deformed chick from earlier comes to hide under David and Syd’s bed. Exactly after this happens David has a dream that a future Syd was the one who sent the orb to capture David and that he needs to help the Shadow King find his original body. Taken aback by this David starts to see Syd in a new light. It is left unknown whether this was the parasite (black chick from the Shadow King) or not. In my opinion it was clever to make them not trust each other or at least suspect each other, it adds a more intense layer to their relationship.

I’m a big fan of this show because of how Hawley uses a lot of aspects like sound, music, colour and even the aspect ratio to elevate the story and to help with the visual narrating. An excellent example of this is the dream David has, from the lighting to the visual aid to guide us, it makes for a great scene.

In the end this episode did it’s job. I am intrigued, I am looking forward to next week. Glad this show is back!

RATING: A-