Legion

David Haller (Dan Stevens) has spent years in a psychiatric hospital, told he is schizophrenic. The voices, the series says, are not only voices. Noah Hawley, who had already turned Fargo into a television series in 2014, takes a comic-book character almost nobody had heard of and builds three seasons around a man who cannot tell which of his memories happened. The first eight episodes are among the best television made from a comic. The nineteen that follow are longer, odder and less disciplined, and we would tell you to watch the first run and make up your own mind about the rest.

The hospital is done in a 1960s that never quite existed: mustard walls, teal tracksuits, orange plastic chairs, a canteen the size of a gymnasium. Nothing tells you the year and nothing tells you the country. The frame changes shape in the middle of a scene. A conversation plays once from the front, then again from behind with different words in it. Old pop songs run against a score that mostly hums. The point is that David cannot trust what he sees, and neither can we.

Stevens plays David as a polite, frightened man who apologises for things that were not his fault and lets the panic show only in his hands. Rachel Keller, as Sydney Barrett, a fellow patient who will not let anyone touch her, gives him someone to be careful around. The pilot’s set piece is a kiss in a hospital corridor; the corridor comes apart around them, and we sat forward, because the series had spent forty minutes teaching us to believe nothing and then made something we badly wanted to be real. Aubrey Plaza’s Lenny Busker, David’s friend on the ward, starts as comic relief, all filthy jokes and dead eyes, and becomes something else we will not describe.

The people who take David in are good company. Jean Smart’s Melanie Bird runs Summerland, a retreat for others like him, with the calm of a woman who has stopped explaining. Jeremie Harris’s Ptonomy Wallace can walk into your memories, which the series stages as rooms you can enter. Bill Irwin and Amber Midthunder play Cary and Kerry Loudermilk, a scientist and a fighter who share one body and argue about whose turn it is, and Irwin gets more comedy out of stepping through a door than most actors get from a script. Hamish Linklater’s Clark Debussy, the government man, is given the opening of the first season’s finale to himself, at home, bandaged, and it is the closest the series comes to an ordinary scene. It is one of its best.

Then comes the second season: eleven episodes where eight would do. The set pieces are still striking one at a time, a plague that leaves people frozen with their teeth chattering, a fight settled by a dance number, a disembodied narrator giving short lectures on delusion. They do not add up. Somewhere in the fifth or sixth hour we were bored, and then we were cross about it, because a series that had earned our trust was spending it on a spectacle a week and a plot that moved in circles. Navid Negahban’s Amahl Farouk, the villain the first season only glimpsed, is the best thing in it: a courteous, well-dressed man who never raises his voice. The third season, back at eight episodes, brings in Lauren Tsai as Switch, a girl who can move through time, and tightens up. By then the series is mostly talking to itself.

Eighteen directors are credited across the twenty-seven episodes, among them Hiro Murai, Ana Lily Amirpour, Andrew Stanton and Dan Kwan, and the look holds from first to last, which is the harder achievement. Hawley heads a writing staff that includes Nathaniel Halpern, Jennifer Yale and Charles Yu, and the tone is his: people explaining their childhoods to each other in full sentences, then being interrupted by something impossible. Set against the X-Men films it is nominally related to, it barely qualifies. There is hardly a costume in it and nobody saves a city.

Most critics wrote about the first eight episodes, and about those we agree. Watch them at night with the sound up and nobody talking. If you carry on, know that the series will never explain itself, and that after a while it stops trying.