This Legion episode centers on Lenny Busker (or Dr. Busker) playing psychoanalyst to the team at the Clockworks Psychiatric Hospital.
Lenny and Melanie
Dr. Lenny (Aubrey Plaza) recites her patient Melanie’s (Jean Smart) problems. Her husband has been dead for 20 years, but she won’t accept it. She has deluded herself into thinking he is frozen and will return. His voice is recorded everywhere at her facility. Melanie refuses to move on.
Lenny and Ptonomy
Ptonomy (Jeremie Harris) describes his mother’s death. When he was five, his mother was loading the dishwasher. She suddenly collapsed to the floor. Ptonomy was under the table playing with Play-Doh when it happened. Ptonomy can remember every detail of that moment. Dr. Lenny tells him he is stuck in that moment. “I like to think I’m a time traveler”, he responds.
Lenny and Cary/Kerry
Dr. Lenny asks Cary and Kerry (Bill Irwin and Amber Midthunder) if they can see how unhealthy this attachment with each other is. Their response, they know they don’t share the same body but they like being around each other. It isn’t hurting anyone.
Lenny and Walter
Two truly evil beings are in session now. Dr. Lenny points out that Walter (Mackenzie Gray) was the last boy in his class to mature. His voice hadn’t changed and there was no hair ‘down there’. Walter insists it is not a race, it only matters where you end up. Lenny thinks that is why Walter feels isolated from others, but he is the one isolating himself from other people. I don’t think this is going to help Walter be any less evil. I also don’t think Lenny cares.
Lenny and Sydney
Syd (Rachel Keller) doesn’t feel this is real. Something is wrong. Lenny looks bored and angry by now. She tells Syd their session is over.
Syd walks down the hallway and sees a brown bedroom door. Before she can investigate she is called to the nursing station for her meds. Melanie is watering a plant while Cary and Kerry play ping-pong. Amy (Katie Aselton) is a Nurse Ratched type character in this world. Before she will give Syd her meds she says she has to pat her down. Syd points out she doesn’t like to be touched, Nurse Amy doesn’t care, instead of patting her down, she fells Syd up and pats her butt.
Ptonomy and David (Dan Stevens) have the same conversation that David and Lenny had watching a semi-comatose patient drool, except this time the drooling patient is Rudy (Brad Mann). They speculate what this man’s back story could be, Ptonomy thinks he could have had a dog because everybody loves dogs. David quickly answers, “Not me.” I guess the Devil with Yellow Eyes manifestation as King doesn’t exist in this world. Syd sits down with them and tries to tell them about the door, but Lenny interrupts her to get David for his session. She stares Syd down.
Lenny and David
David feels good, he has a sense of peace. He has his mania under control. David has a new mental illness in this world, he suffers from manic depression. Is that considered a move up in the mental illness world?
David, Syd, and Ptonomy are sitting in the cafeteria ready to eat cherry pie. Amy takes David’s pie from him and won’t let Syd give her pie to him. David sulks like a child. Syd’s pie has bugs crawling all over it. She tosses it on the floor. When they look at it on the floor there are no bugs. The song “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone with a Bassnectar remix begins to play. The scene switches to Lenny sexily dancing to the chaos she has caused in David’s life. It reminds you of an opening number in a James Bond movie.
Lenny looks in on Syd sleeping. Syd dreams of the bedroom door and what is behind it. David comes into her room the same way Syd came into his room in Chapter 1. Syd remarks she has been feeling déjà vu. She asks David should they be trying to be released from the hospital. David is happy to be there, he feels like he is in control of himself here. David has completely bought in to this delusion.
Syd is walking down the hall, she doesn’t see the bedroom door. Later she describes her dream of the group being gunned down by the Eye to Cary and Kerry. Cary dreams about a big ice cube. Kerry dreams about an old fashioned diving suit. Melanie dreams of love. Syd is trying to figure out why the door is missing. Cary comes up with different scientific reasons why it is missing. While they are walking down the hallway, Cary does a scarf trick to amuse Kerry. Walter is leering at Kerry. She can feel someone staring at her. When she turns around no one is there. Cary is going to bed next door. Kerry has to sleep alone. She is nervous about it. After knocking on the wall to let each other know they are there, they turn in. A large ice cube appears in Cary’s room, he is transported to the astral plane. He sees someone in a diving suit. Cary tries to say hello in different languages. He follows the man in the diving suit.
Syd is reading, David is painting a portrait of Syd. She is still trying to figure out what is going on. David tries to discourage her from doing this. He tells Syd she is there because of delusional thinking, she sees things that are not there. Syd tell him that diagnosis describes his condition, being schizophrenic. David objects, he suffers from manic depression. Syd is the one who is psychotic.
Syd leaves David and sees a wound on the wall; it is bleeding. It causes her to remember seeing Lenny merged in the wall, she remembers David and her kissing and switching bodies, David’s rescue from Division III, the white room, the shooting. Lenny walks up behind her with headphones for music therapy. It is the musical sound of crickets. It puts Syd in a trance and she floats down the hallway peacefully to her bed. Ptonomy dreams of the day his mom died, except it is the grown up version of him under the kitchen table watching her collapse. The cricket music stops and Kerry is jolted out of her sleep. She knocks on the wall for Cary but he doesn’t answer. She goes to his room but he isn’t there. Outside the door Walter is waiting for her, acting like the Big Bad Wolf to Kerry’s Little Red Riding Hood. Kerry gets past him and runs in fear.
David walks down the hallway and he sees the bedroom door. Amy tells him he is unwanted. No one wants him around. He is a freak, disgusting. She makes a retching sound and dry heaves. David gets away from her. Melanie is watering plants and staring into space when she sees the diving suit. She is excited, she welcomes her love. He beckons her to follow. She walks through the wall into another room. It is the room in David and Amy’s childhood home, from the scene in the last episode where the Eye is shooting at David and Syd. The bullets are still hot. She can’t move David and Syd out of the way. We see the eyes of the Devil with the Yellow Eyes watching her.
David goes to Lenny’s office. Lenny doesn’t think it is a good idea for David to keep seeing Syd. She is messing up her plans for David. She doesn’t understand our need for love. The only thing that matters is God, because he is power. That is the only reason life matters. Walter understands. We see him chasing Kerry. She tells him the story of a fungus that takes over an ant’s central nervous system and eventually burst through the top of the ant’s head. She is David’s fungus. Lenny is all over David and starts grinding on him. She doesn’t give a damn about his mind, she wants his body. She puts David in a box in his mind. David frantically screams and bangs on the box.
Syd is still sleeping. The song “Oh, You Pretty Things” by Lisa Hannigan begins. Cary is in the diving suit and he wakes her up.
***
We spent the entire episode in Clockworks. It is sad that when David sent the crew to somewhere he felt safe it would be a mental hospital. Lenny is the therapist and she has Amy has her henchwoman. She uses the mutants’ powers and experiences against them to make them believe they are insane. Syd is the only one who can sense something is wrong with this world. It might be her connection to David and Lenny that allows her to feel this is wrong. That makes her dangerous to Lenny. David is happy to give up control to this place. He feels like he is in control of his emotions and he doesn’t have to try to do anything. He is content to stay there the rest of his life. The only thing David has here that he had before is his love for Syd. That seems to be his constant. Luckily Oliver wasn’t dragged into this world and is on the outside trying to liberate them. He makes contact with Cary. Since Cary was in the diving suit when he woke up Syd that could have been Cary who beckoned Melanie. At least three of the mutants are aware what is going on and can fight back. I guess David is aware too but he is in more trouble than anyone else at the moment. Lenny is through with the deceptions and has imprisoned David in a small corner of his mind. The only person who might be having as rough a time as David is Kerry. In this world she isn’t the fighter she is in the real world. She is a frightened girl being chased by Walter, the Eye. He is giving off a real serial killer vibe here. Special mention has to be given to Aubrey Plaza’s dance number. How can something be so scary and sexy at the same time? She is knocking it out of the park nearly every episode.
Grade: A
- Moon Knight: Steven Grant of the Giftshop - April 6, 2022
- Eternals: Through the Ages - April 3, 2022
- Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings: Slackers - March 12, 2022