David sets in motion his plans to change the world, while his former friends continue to try to hunt him down to put an end to the threat they fear he represents.

There’s a well-understood critique of genre fiction that once you introduce time travel, you remove any effective stakes from proceedings. Characters dying, awful things happening, the heroes failing to save the day – all can be undone by simply pressing the time travel button, and therefore none carry any effective weight.

The introduction of time travel into Legion seems hell bent on turning this entire argument on its head. David wants to use time travel to undo the terrible things he did and re-make the world as a better, happier place, but he faces several obstacles, the least of which – surprisingly – are the physical constraints on his new pet time-traveller.

I was quite cruel to the writers last week because of how much time the episode spent focusing on how much pain David was in, so I’ll admit they deserve credit for one particular interaction in this episode where the folly of David’s own logic is put to him. He thinks if he can travel back and undo what he did, that makes it better. The logical fallacy being that he’ll still be the person that did it, and the only difference will be that his victim will remain blissfully unaware of that dark potential lurking within him – in a sense, he will be violating her all over again in a different way. Time travel, it turns out, isn’t the magical panacea you might expect once you really start to think about it.

Other slight issues also persist in the supposed utopia of David’s compound. Lenny is fiercely protective of her status as his number two, and views anyone else coming into their orbit as a potential threat to that. There’s also the small issue of David’s own emotional state being directly connected to the ‘drug’ that his followers imbibe. When he’s happy, that’s all fine. When he isn’t…

The team are still hunting him, and using every trick they can think of, but again there’s that issue of sneaking up on someone who can just have his minion hop back in time to warn him. It’s a thorny issue for sure, though one hopes that the show isn’t planning on spinning it out over the entire duration of the season.

Verdict: A significant improvement on last week, though it’s still difficult not to see the show as being a little too pleased with itself in general. 7/10

Greg D. Smith