Legion: mostly interesting, frequently frustrating, occasionally boring, always beautiful to look at. The second season has come to an end, and I have Many Thoughts on the subject. So let’s dig right in, shall we?
(Spoilers ahead.)
When we last saw our mutants, David’s ever-increasing dickishness was giving Farouk’s a run for its money. Episode 9 explores the theme of connectivity. Ptonomy is psychically trapped in Fukuyama’s mainframe. We learn that as a teen Fukuyama was conscripted by the feds to snoop on the masses and store secrets in his unreadable mind. But Ptonomy isn’t the only one chilling in the mainframe. The Mi-Go monk has hijacked some of the code, and Ptonomy does the same to him, learning the monk’s secrets. Using a hacked Vermillion, he tells David that Farouk is buried in Le Désolé. Meanwhile, Future Syd sends Farouk to his former driver who trades the location of his body for a permanent dream state.
David hatches a complicated plan predicated on using psychic manipulation to push his friends into position. Syd (finally!) realizes the foundation of her relationship with David was built on quicksand. She loves the man she thought David was, the man he claimed to be, but she sees through that now. If Future Syd is any indication, that love is about to implode. We see the time ticking down on their relationship as they wander the desert together looking for the monastery. Every out Syd offers him, David fails to take. Where Syd wants to see the man under the mask, David thinks that as long as he wears the mask he doesn’t have to be the man under it.
Episode 9 gives us a look at what Melanie’s been up to all this time. In short: not much. She’s been high on vapor for most of her time at Division 3, but when Oliver gatecrashed a while back he and the Shadow King got their hooks in her. Melanie descends so deeply into her delusions that she sees them in everyone else. Melanie’s subplot is boring at best, regressive at worst. She survived her husband’s coma by becoming a BAMF, but his reemergence and possession suddenly turns her so fragile she can’t cope? All she does lately is whinge about how much men suck. Her whole raison d’être now is to moon over her deadbeat beau. To sideline the tremendous Jean Smart in a role that requires her to do nothing but sit around? Ugh.
At least Lenny, Amy, Cary, and Kerry come out of this episode well. Both couples rely on each other, but while Cary and Kerry want to return to their literal pairing, Amy and Lenny are desperate to separate. Aubrey Plaza was a joy to behold during Lenny’s sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll escapades. It’s nice to see her using the wide range of her acting skills again. With Kerry, however, Legion again does a disservice to its female characters. Kerry has spent her entire existence twinned with Cary. Through him and her adventures outside him, she’s aware of the world. But at the restaurant she’s hardly more than a child. She doesn’t understand idioms or basic human interactions, in contrast to every episode she’s been in before. Double ugh.
In the 10th episode we enter the home stretch. Farouk has his long-lost body back, and not a moment too soon. I checked out of that whole plotline and its repetitive, time-wasting offshoots ages ago. By this point I was firmly in the camp of Either find his damn body or Shut the hell up about it. But before we get to that, we have to wade through the madness of Le Désolé. Syd is yanked down into a hole using the world’s most obvious trick. There, Melanie again talks about nothing but dudes and broken hearts. Syd retorts, “I get it. Oliver left, and you’re pissed. But that’s not what’s happening to me, and honestly, I’m kinda sick of talking about it.” Until she isn’t. Again, Syd falls for a blatant act of manipulation and lets Melanie turn her against David. Except it’s not Melanie—or not just her—but Farouk wearing her like he did Oliver and Lenny. Farouk!Melanie convinces Syd that David has reached his psychopathic final form, but is he truly wicked or did the Shadow King make him that way? The distinction is rather academic to Oliver after David tortures him to near death. As long as David won’t take off his sadistic mask it doesn’t matter whether he or Farouk put it on in the first place.
With Division 3’s goons, Cary and Kerry arrive at the hole when they’re attacked by warrior monks. In the trunk of the souped-up car David left for Lenny was a massive gun which she uses to put down the last of the monks after Cary goes to town on ‘em. Down in the hole, Vermillion, Syd, Cary, and Kerry are stalked by Melanie’s maze minotaur. Cary comes face to face with the new World’s Angriest Boy, aka David with a bloody drill in hand and Oliver’s body (the real Oliver, not one possessed by the Shadow King) at his feet. In the final moments, Farouk interrupts the plan David hatched in Clark’s mind—the one involving a giant tuning fork-like device that would temporarily disable all psychic powers.
Opinions on the finale are likely to be divisive. David giving into his dark side was inevitable but also thrilling to watch. However, the way they treated Syd left me cold. Syd was manipulated by Farouk!Melanie into trying to kill David, then manipulated by David into thinking she was in love with him, then manipulated again into freeing Farouk and trying to execute David. He takes it one step further by raping her into submission. The second he wiped her mind I immediately feared a rape scene was coming, and boy, did it—that Syd called it “sex” rather than rape is your regular reminder that a man wrote this show. Her assaults are no longer about her but about the men around her. The show places all the blame for David going full Sith on Syd. Sure, David is delusional and evil, but the way the last act is framed, the final straw falls squarely on Syd. Everything about it makes my skin crawl.
The rest of the episode before and after is fine enough. Melanie and Oliver narrate their lives in his psychic plane from 3 years in the future. David and Farouk fight with music and animation. Lenny intervenes twice: first to trigger the choke, thus rendering Farouk helpless, and again to stop Syd’s bullet from striking true. Farouk is brought back to Division 3 for a show trial, but escapes and turns the tables. Clark, Syd, Cary, Kerry, Fukuyama, and Vermillion trap David and try to execute him, but he escapes with Lenny. Honestly, it was a lot more of the same—David insisting he’s a good person, Syd insisting he’s not, Farouk manipulating everyone by forcing them to face the one thing they want hidden, yadda yadda yadda.
When I heard that Legion was getting an extended second season, going from 8 episodes to 11, I knew there would be growing pains. And sure enough, Legion went from tightly constructed and precise to overstuffed and meandering. The bloat isn’t as bad as I feared it would be, but it’s there, and it’s the opposite of fun. The wonkiness of the tenth episode is a good example. Originally, that was intended to be the final episode of the season, but FX expanded it at the last minute. It went from one overfull episode to two underfilled ones.
Speaking of storylines I could do without, I love you Jon Hamm, but it’s time to pack in the educational interstitials. They don’t add much to the proceedings except time, and we already have too much of that as it is. These scenes are exactly the kind of thing you’d expect from prestige tv. They were interesting the first few times, but they keep pulling the same rabbit out of the same hat and expecting us to still be amazed. Is the narrator a real person? If not and these scenes are meant for the audience only, then where did the mutant chick come from? Given how David easily dispatched it (and how quickly the show forgot about it), does it even matter?
Looking back, the second season has had its ups and downs. More downs than I’d like, but the ups were good enough to make up for most of them. The directing was stellar throughout, the soundtrack perfection, and the costume/set design gorgeous. But, and this is a pretty big “but,” Legion has some major issues to work through with regards to women. Do I really want to watch a show where the protagonist is a rapist? Or worse, where the show tries to redeem him into an anti-hero? Frankly, I’m not sure that I do.
Final Thoughts
- “Whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer.”
- “Gone to kill the monster.”
- “I love what we were. I’m just not sure if we’re that anymore.”
- I don’t especially care for Melanie’s insinuation that Kerry’s possible desire to be a “strong, sensual woman” is a delusion. Can we not punch down on trans people?
- “There is no world to save. It’s all in my head.”
- “I’m gonna go. You’re clearly having a senior moment.”
- “What if you’re not the hero?”
- “I’m a good person. So I deserve love.”
- “God has plans for you.”
- Some strong X-Men Legacy: Legion callouts in episode 10
- David is a villain who thinks he’s an anti-hero who can redeem himself into a hero. Syd is a rom-com heroine who realized she was trapped in an action movie.
- I don’t understand why Syd wouldn’t wait until David killed Farouk to then shoot him. Two world-ending birds, one stone.
- Amy hitching a ride in Lenny will not turn out well next season.
- Hey, old man Hawley, I don’t need some Gen X-er wagging his finger at me over my use of social media. The problems of the world today aren’t caused by teens on social media. As the Parkland kids have demonstrated, that’s where they’re gonna solve all the crap y’all dumped on us Millennials. Peddle your Black Mirror bullshit elsewhere.
Alex Brown is a YA librarian by day, local historian by night, pop culture critic/reviewer by passion, and QWoC all the time. Keep up with her every move on Twitter, check out her endless barrage of cute rat pics on Instagram, or follow along with her reading adventures on her blog.
“The show places all the blame for David going full Sith on Syd. Sure, David is delusional and evil, but the way the last act is framed, the final straw falls squarely on Syd. Everything about it makes my skin crawl.”
Boy howdy, I was with you on a lot of counts right up until here. That entire scene is framed like a horror movie, in that everything about it–music, angle, body language, the way David slips into the room like a malevolent spirit–is designed to make the viewer queasy and uncomfortable and horrified. All the blame in the final scene is on David for refusing to admit he did a damn thing wrong, using “I deserve love” as a justification for his abusive behavior and the fact that he straight-up raped Syd, to the point where he would rather DBZ the hell out and bail than take responsibility for his actions. I mean, Hawley’s come right out in an interview and said that all the blame is on David, if the not particularly subtle visual language employed wasn’t enough to hammer it home.
I’ve had some serious issues with a lot of the decisions made this season, from the way Syd and Melanie have been handled to Ptonomy more or less getting fridged to those awful bloody Hamm interstitials (yes Noah Hawley, technology is bad and should have stopped in 1977, we get it) to the way the show occasionally forgets to address a thing it thought might look cool two episodes back, but this feels like a fundamental misreading of visual cues. You can level a lot of crap at this season, but I don’t think this spitball sticks.
tl;dr: The only Syd-blaming I’ve seen has been in the AV Club comments section and attempt no landing there unless you want to barf long and hard. Good god.
My reactions to David finally breaking bad were mixed. On one hand, I feel Dan Stevens going full on villain was a joy to watch, but how it happened bugged me. Its been a running theme this season that David is still legitimately mentally ill, aside from what Faruk did to him. And him being in denial about that, and his fear at the prospect of going back to the institution make complete sense. And I sympathize with David because I feel like a big part of his turn to the dark side the result of him being pushed there by everyone else, then punished for becoming what they made him. Faruk’s claim that he was trying to make David love him are entirely undermined by the trauma he caused David. Then we have future Syd, who in typical time travel fashion, may have acted to push David down the very path her time travel was trying to prevent. Then we have present day Syd, who is manipulated by Faruk-Melanie into turning on, and trying to murder David. Then we have people holding David accountable for things he hasn’t yet done, and things that were done with his body under Faruk’s control. Even him torturing Oliver is muddied by the fact that he thought Oliver was still under Faruk’s control, and an to an extent, he was. All of this pushed me to be on David’s side. BUT… and its a big BUT. David made the conscious choice to psychically alter and rape Syd. It was an unequivocally bad thing to do. And I think it was unnecessary. Because I think David works better a tragic Villain, sick and manipulated.
And relatedly, I am really not feeling using any manner of sexual assault as yet another frickin’ plot point as-as. Not feeling it at all, regardless of where they go with it or how the fallout is handled. I smell Lady Issues on Hawley and it doesn’t give me a whole lot of hope that this won’t all turn into a big old mess come next season.
You can’t redeem David from this. You can’t let Syd forgive him; that would be a tremendously no good, very bad decision. So what the hell DO you do? He’s either gotta keep being a full-on villain from here on out or … I dunno, die. Which I’m told is a thing in the comics.
So.
“Amy hitching a ride in Lenny will not turn out well next season.”
The creep factor could go way up on that one, since we saw Lenny pregnant in the future-vision scene where David had become Legion, spiked hair straight up and all.
But I’m not yet prepared to completely believe that David raped Syd. If they stick with that, show’s over. There’s no more story left to tell if this series is supposed to be a “two-hander” (David/Syd), as Hawley said. He has also said things are not what they seem. He even said, “Who’s a hero and who’s a villain, it’s not that—there’s a sense that David’s story [that] he could be heading towards becoming a supervillain—or maybe Syd is.” We are probably being lied to. Misdirected for sure.
If the rapist was David, there’s no going back. I used to rail online against male writers like Alan Moore using rape as a way to convey evil. He even tried to redeem it in Watchmen by revealing Silhouette was a result of the Comedian’s rape of her mother. So, you know… some good came of it. Pure bullshit.
There are details here that make me less convinced David is the perpetrator. It could have been Farouk/David. We saw the dampening crown go into overload while Syd was sleeping. Farouk clearly implanted something in her mind thru the mouse. What the hell was the mouse saying? Sure wasn’t about to sing a Bryan Ferry song. Also a creep factor, why is the Admiral watching Syd have psychic sex? Shouldn’t someone have been able to tell whose astral form was actually present?
Syd already fell under the influence of Farouk!Melanie. David has been under the influence his whole life. The whole trial very next day thing was suspect. As was Farouk walking in, completely healed, as if he owned the place. It’s all a massive manipulation by the true villain to change perceptions about David. Farouk’s line to FutureSyd about the villain changing roles with the hero may be the inception point of the idea. Syd is the victim in more ways than one.
All this may be clearer on a re-watch, but I’m not prepared to do that. Enjoyed some of the episodes, like the alternate Davids one, but not the season overall.
I don’t know how I feel about this finale. It had some creative moments, like the animated astral-plane-battle music video. The way the battle played out reminded me of the Xavier-Shadow King astral plane battle from the ’90s animated series, and I wonder if that was an inspiration.
But there’s an underlying thread here that I dislike a lot, and that’s the stigmatization of mental illness — all this use of archaic, judgmental terms like “insane” and “mad” — and even more, the stigmatization of mental health treatment as some horrific, dehumanizing fate. Those attitudes do a lot of damage by keeping people from seeking out treatment when they need it.
But yes, the sexual assault makes David pretty much irredeemable now. If they try to walk it back and make him the good guy again, that’s a bridge too far. This show’s treatment of female characters has been problematical this season, reducing them to either supporters of men or victims of men or both.
Overall, I don’t think this season worked. The first season was striking and impressive, but its surrealism made sense given the unreliability of David’s perceptions, and it told a largely cohesive story overall. This season was just random weirdness and farce for its own sake, and the surrealism wasn’t just David’s subjective view, it was experienced by everyone in the show. And it didn’t really add up to anything. A number of threads were just left dangling, especially whatever the hell happened to Ptonomy (and it’s a really bad look for the show to discard its only black lead so cavalierly). There were some very creative set pieces, but without the underlying substance or purpose that season 1 had. And a lot of things just went too far into what would be pure spoof if the surrounding elements weren’t so dark.
Don’t blame the gen x-ers! Blame the baby boomers, yeah?
I had loved season 1. I was preparing for “binge watching” season 2 last weekend. I watched the first 3 episodes and was bored out of my mind. What was going on in those episodes…?? I quit it at that point.
Ep1s1 revealed doctors treated David for schz….. he was never ill. He has reality warping powers he used to not be able to control. We already know in advance the unreliable narrator is bullshit because oblivious superpowers are causing things or weird visuals for visuals sake. We already saw Syd describe rape in season 1 when she told him to gtf off. Now here’s flow blown rape without any genuine story
@9/xbimpyx: “Ep1s1 revealed doctors treated David for schz….. he was never ill. He has reality warping powers he used to not be able to control.”
That’s what we were led to believe, but as they explicitly said here in the finale, that was wrong — he was both. The belief was that he wasn’t mentally ill because he actually did have another personality living in his brain his whole life. But as Syd pointed out at the trial, having the Shadow King warping his psyche and tormenting him for decades did indeed have a very damaging effect on his psyche. So he had another personality in his brain and he was mentally ill in and of himself as a result of that. Like how you can be cured of a severe infection but still have lasting organ damage after the infection is gone.
@1: Fair enough. For me, I could see your point as what the show *wanted* to set up, but it was undone by how they repeatedly told Syd her breaking up with David would turn him into the world killer. Remember her convo with Clark? The show wants the blame on David (rightly so), but the framing implicates Syd in ways I don’t care for. And to clarify, I absolutely *don’t* think Syd is to blame. She shoulders no burdern in David’s assholery. But I also didn’t need to have the show keep pointing at her and stage-whispering about how if she dumps him he’ll destroy everything.
@@.-@: I knowwwwww…preggo Lenny with a hitchhiking Amy is so creepy and gross, and not in a fun way.
@5: Yeah, I’ve been really uncomfortable with how the show talks about mental illness. It’s really stigmatizing. He may be schizophrenic, but casting that as part-and-parcel with his evilness is unhelpful at the very least.
@6: Hawley was born in 1967 which makes him a Gen-Xer.
@11/Alex: Really? That would make me Generation X too, and I’ve never once in my life thought of myself that way. I always thought it was a term for the generation after mine.
@12: the start date can vary btwn 1961 and 1965 depending on who is defining it, and goes to 1981.
I know he is but I find it funny that you call it gen-x finger wagging when I think it’s more of a Hawley finger wagging, the generation being beside the point. It’s more of a luddite’s view than anything else. Besides, it’s easier to blame baby boomers for saddling all the generations to follow with tuition fees, never owning property and stealing all our pensions! Joking, of course…
I hate when rape is used as motivistion or symbolism. here it implies that character is too far gone to be redeemed. If character murders someone, in TV land it’s still OK, he will be redeemed. But add rape, and he cannot be redeemed by anything other than death, either his or the person he raped.
Its similar to using rape as motivation for character growth for either woman who was raped or her boyfriend.
The rape is what got you, not the going to town on a guy with a power drill?
That’s baffling frankly. Not that either is easy to stomach.
@17/Chris: It’s not baffling at all. Probably very few people in the audience of any work of fiction, at least here in the US, have ever been tortured. Presumably none of them have been murdered, at least not successfully. But a tragically high percentage of them have personally been raped or sexually abused. So using rape as a plot device is going to hit a lot of members of the audience on a far more personal, traumatic level than other forms of violence would. So it’s a device that needs to be used very carefully and judiciously if it’s used at all.
Moreover, the issue isn’t just that he did it. The question is what it means if the show tries to redeem him for it. Narratives that redeem rapists play into the same sexist values that promote rape, excuse rapists, and punish their victims in real life. So if the show ever tries to redeem David after this revelation, that’s going to alienate a lot of viewers, and for good reason. Maybe they have no intention of redeeming him, but that just raises other questions about where they do plan to go with him, given that he’s the title character of the show.
Come now, you think people don’t realise that being power drilled to near death is of a different magnitude altogether than sexual assault, if you could even call it that? You don’t have to have experienced both to draw that obvious conclusion.
Anyway, what I saw was not David’s inevitable fall, but him trying to undo Farouks manipulation across the entire episode, specifically also with Syd, ending in him reeling against it at the trial.
Yes, he changed Syds state of mind when talking failed him, but only back to what it was before Farouks very succesful manipulation happened. Much in the same way some turn to violence when words fail them. It was an all bets are off sort of war.
At the time it happened, the sex was consensual, if you can even call getting it on with an astral projection sex. The crime was the mind altering, but there are two sides to consider as to whether that was justified or not.
So actually, what rape? (assuming we’re all talking about the physical kind)
Season 2 was a hot mess, something you had to slog through to see the end of the story, rather than a riveting and engaging experience. Should have been like 4 episodes max. Don’t think I’ll be in the audience for the 3rd series, but not for the same reasons as the author at least.
@19. Chris: “So actually, what rape? (assuming we’re all talking about the physical kind).”
It’s possible Syd’s never had physical sex. Her powers are basically body switching. The Syd centric episode was somewhat confusing on that point. She switched bodies to have sex with her mom’s boyfriend, yet he was shocked to find Syd in the shower. And of course, he went to prison for rape. But should Syd’s body have ever been in that shower?
I’m a bit curious why many (most?) viewers assume what we saw was fact. After all the manipulation on the Roi’s part, why are taking at face value that David committed rape? He deprogrammed her from Melanie/Farouk’s stacked evidence against him. That’s one shortcut too far. Convenient for him, but wrong. But she smiles at him when he appears in her bed just before they engage in astral sex. The video the Admiral watches (which again creepy), shows her grinding alone. (Why she can’t consensually body switch with David has never been addressed. It’d still be just the two of them touching.)
Look again at the ramping up of the dampening crown on the SK. Look again at the stupid mouse whispering in Syd’s ear. And don’t forget Lenny has told us that she was repeatedly raped while a captive of Farouk.
Farouk is the rapist. His defeat of David is to frame him, to change how all his allies, especially his lover, see him.
David may be a villain next season. He may do awful things, but increasingly, I think it will be because everyone turned on him under Farouk’s control.
@19/Chris: It’s not about detached intellectualizations, it’s about actually having personally endured the psychological trauma. Something like 1 out of every 6 women in the United States has endured rape or attempted rape at some point in her life. Nearly all of them have symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of it, so even being reminded of the subject of rape can be deeply upsetting if not unbearable.
“At the time it happened, the sex was consensual, if you can even call getting it on with an astral projection sex. The crime was the mind altering, but there are two sides to consider as to whether that was justified or not.”
NO. NO, NO, NO. You are confusing the appearance of consent with the actuality. David forcibly altered Syd’s mind to make her want to say yes. That is the very essence of non-consent, no different than if he drugged her unconscious or made her say yes at gunpoint. To quote something I read just the other day, saying yes means nothing unless the speaker has the power to say no without consequence. If she doesn’t have the power to refuse, then there is no consent, by legal and moral definition.
Here’s a link for learning more about consent:
https://www.antiviolenceproject.org/info/consent/
@20/Sunspear: “He deprogrammed her from Melanie/Farouk’s stacked evidence against him.”
God, no. That’s how he rationalized it to himself, but he forcibly erased her memory without her consent in order to make her love him again.
@CLB: Guess I should give up. Nowhere I have commented has anyone seemed willing to give David the benefit of the doubt. After a season of lectures about delusion and not trusting what you see, viewers are all in on David as the rapist. If that’s the case, there’s no redemption. Next season can be a villain story, but I don’t know who’d watch that.
Farouk apparently has succeeded in changing viewers’ perceptions of the protagonist. Quite a feat for a fictional character. Does no one feel queasy by the trial scene that it’s so damn quick and easy for him to turn the tables? No skepticism? At all?
That is not critical viewing.
@22/Sunspear: Oh, I had my doubts throughout the whole episode (the whole season, in fact) about what was real. I was expecting for weeks that it would turn out that the whole “David will turn evil and you need to restore Farouk to fight him” thing was a delusion that Farouk induced in future Syd to engineer his resurrection. But that’s not where the finale itself took things. The finale built to the reveal that David really was going to turn bad, and indeed had never been good in the first place. That’s not where I wanted or expected it to go, but it’s where it did evidently go.
Besides, Noah Hawley has confirmed in interviews that, yes, David really has become the villain, and that Breaking Bad was part of his inspiration.
And even if you were right and it were just a trick, that would actually make things worse. If a male lead is accused of rape and it turns out to be a trick, that plays right into the cultural preconceptions and myths that lead to the vast majority of rapists getting away with it and the vast majority of victims being unbelieved and even penalized for being raped. Too many stories over the generations have used the trope of false rape accusations, and if Legion is perpetuating it in this day and age, that would be deeply misogynistic and ill-conceived. The show’s already treating its female characters pretty poorly, and what you’re proposing would compound that.
It would compound it. And the third season could turn into a disaster.
But I wouldn’t call it a trick on a story level. It’s the actions of the true villain. It may turn into a trick in the sense of fooling the audience. Plus, I don’t take Hawley at his word. He has misled (lied?) before, like in the ET interview before the season launched where he suggested Syd may become the villain. The Breaking Bad comparison is also really unearned. As carefully and methodically as that show built a foundation for Walter White, this show has done nothing but undermine David. It’s a counter-Breaking Bad.
And I still want to know what the Farouk mouse whispered in Syd’s ear while she was sleeping. Two powerful telepaths, one already established as a rapist… Not for a second would I have freed Farouk. The whole thing stinks.
@24/Sunspear: I’m not talking about in-story, I’m talking about the real world where rape is rampant because rape victims are disbelieved by default. We don’t need more stories perpetuating that narrative and painting people accused of rape as misjudged heroes.
And I didn’t make the Breaking Bad comparison, Noah Hawley himself did. He said that was his model. I agree the season was handled badly, but that doesn’t change the underlying intent.
I thought it was pretty obvious that the mouse whispered the truth that David had wiped from Syd’s mind. After all, she was all Stepford-wives lovey-dovey after the mind-wipe but remembered everything after the mouse visited. This isn’t a narrative where if one side is bad, the other side must be good. The evident theme here is that, yes, Farouk is a monster, but David is an even worse monster so that freeing a monster is the only hope of stopping him. Even a monster can use the truth when it suits him. And this wouldn’t be the first story where the villain turned out to reveal a painful truth that the hero didn’t want to face — with Syd being the real hero in this case.
@CLB: I know what you meant by Hawley inviting comparison with BB. I’m saying he didn’t earn it. Not by a long shot.
Guess we’ll find out next season which way it’ll go.
Ehm.. So, Sydney is forgiven for raping a man. Tricking him and sending him too jail, ruins his life. All of which we are witnessing through HER mind.
Yet he is the one who is irredeemable?
What we are shown is David removing Farouks manipulation, the command to kill him, from her mind. But because she is confused after Farouks earlier manipulation, it’s rape? I felt that yeah, it’s not a good time for him to join her or for them to have sex. Even thent we you are completely ignoring the fact that we see her on top of him from above, a clear directive, which would seems like an obvious clue to it all being consented.
Then we see Farouks manipulation again, yet another obvious clue to what then happens in the trial and you still all gobble it up like it’s fast food – because she suddenly screams rape.
We even had episodes explaining mass psychosis, hysteria and insanity ……… Are you that gullible?
Conclusion; Syd is a victim despite being clearly manipulative and irrational throughout the series. She blames him for leaving, when he was forced to. She blames him, showing irrational jealousy, when he’s conflicted and confused towards his feelings to her future self, because it’s the person he loves and she is hurting so he wants to help her. And even her future self uses his love for her, abusing his vulnerabilities, kissing him knowing he can’t help but be confused. Again future Syd manipulate him, this time to help the monster that has haunted and mentally tortured him since he was a baby – ultimately turning his madness-switch on – in order to kill him rather than to warn or help him understand. Then she helps Farouk, even knowing what he is capable of, selfishly destroying David’s future timeline as well. She even admits her being selfish…!
Every single bad decision in season two seems to be linked to her in every way..
Yet, David is irredeemable.
He is a villain.
Yes… NOW he is. And it’s Sydney’s irrationality and sociopathic stupidity that fed his illness and turned his love for her into a path in that direction.
I don’t see either of them as heroes. But don’t you fking dare claim Sydney is any better than David just because she’s a woman. The whole, “she’s a woman, therefore always a victim and not to blame for anything mentality” is so stupid and ironic it’s mind blowing. “She’s weak, so it can’t be her fault”
This is a prime example of that narcissistic thought process she possesses;
“You should stop what you’re doing when a woman wants to talk”
“I’m sorry, I’m about to kill the parasite that has terrorized the world for centuries, and tortured and manipulated me for thirty years. Can you wait 1 minute?”
“No. I’m your girlfriend. I’m much more important than you or the world.
“Btw. I’m the hero here, because Farouks told me so, and you are bad. Bang.”
….Give me a break.
Syd made a terrible mistake in her past and she regrets it and tries to repent for it. David is deliberately victimizing her in the present and feels no remorse. The difference is obvious. It has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with intention and repentance.