FX’s Legion
Chapter 23
Directed by Dan Kwan
Written by Olivia Dufault and Charles Yu

* For a recap & review of Chapter 22, click here.
* For a recap & review of Chapter 24, click here.
Ptonomy (Jeremie Harris) isn’t like he used to be, now that he’s one of the Vermillion. He and Kerry (Amber Midthunder) talk. She feels everything’s become too different from how it was once. She misses Cary (Bill Irwin). There’s a “narrative compromise” in the Vermillion and something’s going very wrong. Suddenly there’s a glitch in time.
Hmm. Wonder why?
Kerry winds up in Syd’s (Rachel Keller) room. They realise something’s “wrong with time.” Syd knows it’s David (Dan Stevens) using Switch (Lauren Tsai). They need Cary (Bill Irwin), and he’s with Legion. At the commune, Lenny (Aubrey Plaza) and her hippy girlfriend are deciding what to name their child. She suggests they go on the road together. That’s when David and Switch re-enter from the Hall of Time. And things are just a little fucked up. The same moment keeps repeating, over and over.
Time everywhere is changing.

Division 3’s plane is nearly infiltrated by a Time Eater. It reaches out through a digital screen trying to break into their present. Lucky for them, Farouk (Navid Negahban) is there to prevent it from totally coming across.
But where there’s one Time Eater, there are more.

“Are you mad at Daddy?”

At the commune, David speaks to his people. He asks Switch about why the recent time loop happened. She tells him about “demons” in the Hall of Time— she’s speaking of the Time Eaters. The demons are constantly trying to find a way into time, because they live just outside it. Apparently they giggle and look similar to cats. Yes, super creepy! David eases his followers’ minds. Lenny doesn’t want to be placated. She wants him to “get mad” and save everybody. Should be careful what she wishes for, given his Legion personality— nothing more than a malevolent god— is breaking through further.

Before David can use his ungodly powers to force Switch to go back through time, after she says she doesn’t want to— David really has a problem with consent, no?— the Time Eaters have come to play. He sends Lenny and Switch off so he can face the demons. They cackle in the dark. It takes a second and David’s trapped in a cell somewhere. He’s in the concentration camps, where he hears someone in the darkness: his mother.

We’re given a brief clip of FX’s The Shield, from its pilot episode. A wonderfully meta bit of time glitching. Up in the air, Farouk tells Clark (Hamish Linklater) and the others about the Time Eaters, comparing them to termites. They’ve got to figure out a way to deal with the demons, now that David’s let them out, albeit accidentally. Not going to be a simple task. Particularly with time shifting all around them. Syd has a conversation with her teen self as timelines converge.
One sorta good thing? Cary’s remembering what’s happened to him. He goes looking through the commune after Time Eaters invade the lab. He finds Switch hiding. They see others frozen in pockets of time. He gets them to a phone and contacts Division 3, getting themselves back to the plane.

“I am the Alpha and the Omega.
I eat monsters for breakfast.”

The Holocaust cell where David sits, powerless to help himself or his mother, he tries to convince his mother he can help. He talks about the future, only sounding like a madman. He thinks there’s a way to change things by explaining this to her. Except it’s all a manipulation by the Time Eaters. They return to fuck with David more.

Elsewhere, Farouk takes Clark and Kerry to “the time between time,” where the Eaters can’t get an advantage over them. They find a strange hybrid animal, which Farouk skins for food, and they camp nearby. After that they walk into the hills and look into the distance where there’s a bunker.

On the plane, Syd’s messed with by the Time Eaters using her younger self. Down on the ground at the commune, Lenny’s experiencing the same thing, as the baby’s born and grows older before her eyes. An entire life passes before Lenny, seeing her child grow up and have her own child, becoming a teenage Violet and then a middle-aged Violet and finally an elderly Violet on her deathbed.
Then, it’s all gone.

In the time between time, Farouk, Clark, and Kerry face one of the Time Eaters. The Shadow King slices it in half with a sword he regurgitates. There are only more to face. Syd and David each struggle against the Time Eaters, too. David only gets more delusional: “I am God.” He’s able to break free. He finds Lenny in a terrible state, and realises Switch has been taken.
Legion’s taking over, more every day. He’s ready for war.

“Nothing that hurts me is real.
No one who hates me is real.”

A terrifying episode. Genuinely horrific stuff! The Time Eaters are haunting. What’s most haunting is David himself. The more he becomes Legion, the more his troubling persona evolves. It’s going to a whole lot of wild fun to see how it all winds down before the end of this final season.

Chapter 24 is next.