Caught in a strange land, Syd must re-learn everything she thinks she knows in order to prepare herself for what’s to come.

Legion is not a show known for its conventionality in terms of storytelling, and this episode is no exception. Here, it decides to approach the further character development of Syd via an extended stop off in the Astral Plane, having her literally grow up from a small baby into a young woman ‘parented’ by Oliver and Melanie.

But this isn’t the Astral Plane as we remember it – that little contained space of Oliver’s with the record player and apparently endless supply of alcoholic beverages. This is a kind of fairytale fantasy land, wherein Oliver and Melanie are peasants of a kind, living in a succession of houses from Paper to Straw and so on, and Jason Mantzoukas appears as ‘The Wolf’, a dapper gentleman with a sinister air.

Legion increasingly feels these days like a show whose writers become far too self-indulgent, and never more so than here as the episode almost entirely consists of this extended metaphor. We see Syd slowly grow up in this weird other place, faithfully trailing around after her ‘father’ Oliver as he collects the things which people in the ‘real world’ discard and end up here and slowly demanding more and more that she be told the truth about things as she nears adulthood. Melanie, for her part, is mostly there to be a sort of passive mother/wife figure. Mantzoukas – who I don’t recall having seen in a straight role before – brings his trademark energy and unsettling edge to the part, but doesn’t really have any concrete parameters in which to work beyond those qualities.

It’s always nice to see Jermaine Clement and Jean Smart back again (indeed, I had been wondering what the show had done with them to this point in this season) but given the events of last episode, one can’t help but feel a little impatient. Out there in the real world, we know that David is doing potentially catastrophic things to time, and that he has just murdered most of Division Three as part of that quest. But rather than deal with any of that, the show wants us to concentrate exclusively on this slice of whimsy. By the time it builds to an actual confrontation, it resolves it in the most inane way possible, and then turns out to have been just another ‘lesson’ for young Syd anyway.

It does actually return to the overarching plot of the actual season in its closing minutes, but you may miss that having fallen sleep during its extended ‘look at what we can get away with’ sequence before that. If you do, trust me when I tell you that you won’t have missed much.

Verdict: Time was when part of Legion’s charm was its weirdness and refusal of conventional forms of narrative. At this stage, it’s taken that refusal and turned it into its sole feature, to the point of obtuseness. 5/10

Greg D. Smith