A road trip to Las Vegas with the intent of killing Billy’s dad results in Marcus accidentally taking way too many drugs and experiencing things from a confusing and scary perspective.

For those who don’t know (I had to look it up) Saudade is ‘a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves’ according to Wikipedia. It actually fits the themes of this episode quite well, buried as they may be under the Marcus-eye-view of proceedings from the wrong end of a quite titanic amount of acid he accidentally drops fairly early on.

It’s beginning to feel a bit cliché pointing out the various conventions this show is making use of in its own way but yes, this is the ‘road trip’ episode, wherein a bunch of our heroes jump in a car and go to Vegas for adventures. The difference here being, the main driver (so to speak) of the adventure is Billy’s desire – expressed to Marcus at the very end of the last instalment – to kill his father.

And it’s fascinating how the show chooses to deal with this – Billy knows that his family will continue to suffer under a father who has never been anything but emotionally and physically abusive toward him. He knows that the only way in which his mother and brother may be safe is if his father is killed, and he owes the man nothing from a pragmatic point of view, but at the end of the day it’s still his father, and that means it isn’t as straightforward as all that.

Marcus mainly spends the episode drugged to the eyeballs, but in amongst the trippy visuals, weird characters popping up that only he can see and that endless monologuing, it’s possible to discern some profundities. Indeed, one shot in particular of Billy from Marcus’ perspective really hammers home the central message of the tale – that just because these kids are capable of doing awful things doesn’t change the fundamental fact that they’re still just kids, with all the fragilities and uncertainties that go with that simple fact.

On the B plot, Maria has tagged along for the trip (along with Saya and Willie) to have a bit of fun away from the controlling clutches of Chico, and it’s nice to see her get to have a wild time with Saya and genuinely let her hair down. But the episode also emphasises her own sense of loss – the idea that she’s not just a simple girl in an abusive relationship but a small cog in a terrible machine geared against her, and perhaps the most awful part of the prison that is her existence is her own crystal-clear perception of it.

Our mysterious nemesis also edges ever closer, hunting down Marcus for reasons which still aren’t fully clear. What’s obvious is that the show has serious intentions for him, and I perhaps may end up owing the writers an apology for my earlier perceptions of certain elements of his character and how casually they seemed to have been slapped on. I’m coming to learn that this show doesn’t do anything without reason, and certainly this episode indicates there may be more to this character than simply a one-note big bad.

Verdict: More cerebral than the core conceit might suggest. There’s whole chunks out of this episode that would sit proudly alongside the very best of season one of Legion, though perhaps with slightly less of an air of slight pretension. 9/10

Greg D. Smith