Frequently Asked Questions

A collection of frequently asked questions about FX’s Legion, and our attempt at answering them.

## Availability

### How do I watch the show?

It’s currently available on Hulu in the US. It may be available on other platforms, especially in other countries.

### Is the show available on Blu-Ray?

Only season 1 is available on Blu-Ray. FX has stopped producing new Blu-Ray sets so it’s unlikely seasons 2 and 3 will be released on that format.

## General Questions

### When does Legion take place? Is it part of the X-Men Cinematic Universe?

The show is intentionally anachronistic, mixing elements from different time periods, though often with a very 60s/70s flair. The jumble of time is is playful and also meant to disorient the viewer.

The series has no direct connection to the X-Men movies and essentially takes place in its own universe.

### Are there any Mid/Post Credits Scenes?

There are two: one for Episode 8, and another for the series finale.

### Who set fire to Division 3 in the first episode?

There are two answers.

**Behind The Scenes**: There was originally an additional mutant on the Summerland team who had pyrokinetic abilities. He was edited out of the pilot but you can catch a glimpse of him in the beach scene at the end. He’s wearing a striped jacket.

**In-Universe**: One of the Summerlanders. It’s unclear in the narrative due to the removal of the pyro mutant, but without him it seems most likely that Rudy caused the fire, since he’s also shown to have powerful kinetic abilities.

**Bonus**: Despite Clark blaming him for it later, David could not have actually caused the fire.  Syd directed him to get underwater to protect him. He was not aware of the plan beyond Syd’s warning.

### What was the deal with the weird dog in the pilot?

It was left unexplained. However, dogs are used as a menacing element throughout season 1. This could have been an early version of that or possibly even foreshadowing.

### What was the deal with David’s dog King?

According to Amy, David never actually had a pet dog. King was one of several masks that Amahl Farouk wore while he inhabited David. He also used The Devil With the Yellow Eyes and The Angriest Boy In The World to torture and manipulate David.

### Why is it blue?

It’s always blue.

All jokes aside, in season 1, color was strongly used for thematic coding.

Red: Warning, danger and anger, seen primarily with Lenny/the Shadow King.

Green: Calming nature and “normality”, and also Amy’s dominant color.

Blue: Clarity (note the blues of Oliver’s ice cube) and also drugged calm (best represented by the blue Vapor drug David and Lenny use). Blue is also David’s color, countering Farouk’s red.

Other color themes are: white/beige for Melanie and Oliver, and the defensive warning colors of Syd’s wardrobe: yellow/orange and black.

We see this color coding return most strongly in season 3, with the use of blue and red in David’s cult.

## Spoilery Questions: Season 2

### What was the deal with the orb?

It appears that Future Cary made the orb, assisting Future Syd. They used it to go back in time and capture David.

### What was the deal with Future Syd?

Future Syd wanted to change the timeline to stop David from ending the world. After capturing David in the orb, she told David to help Farouk find his body, and then returned him a year after he was taken. She later told him that in her timeline, he killed Farouk in the desert.

It appears her goal was to change events so that when David and Farouk met in the La Desole desert, David would die instead of Farouk. David survived, but the timeline was changed despite that, as Farouk also survived.

### How did David end the world in the other timeline?

Unfortunately, the show simply does not answer this. We see a few brief images of an empty world, and then later we see Future David and Future Lenny in a tent filled with bones. Future David is on a throne, and Future Lenny is visibly pregnant.

## Characters

### Is Lenny real?

Yes. She was a fellow patient that David met in Clockworks and became close friends with. When Syd (in David’s body) accidentally killed Lenny, Farouk captured her soul and used it as a mask to torture and manipulate David. Farouk also created false memories in David’s mind, placing Lenny in the role of his male friend Benny.

In season 2, Farouk gives Lenny a new body by using a genetic altering gun with piece of Lenny’s corpse to transmute Amy’s body. Farouk then put Lenny’s soul into the transformed body, which still had Amy’s blue eyes and some remnant of her soul/mind/memories.

### Is Syd real?

Yes. The first episode of the show plays with the idea that Syd was never real and that she was part of David’s hallucinations, but this was the result of two things: First, Syd’s records were scrubbed from the hospital after she left, by either Summerland or the Divisions. Second, Clark’s interview was a series of emotional manipulations designed to test David’s powers and what triggers them. Questioning Syd’s reality was a way to push David emotionally.

Finally, there is also a scene in the first episode where Syd appears in David’s room without physically entering it. This scene is reversed in the fake Clockworks episode later in season 1. It appears to be merely an example of the surreal and playful imagery the show employs, perhaps suggesting the sense of being half-asleep when someone enters your room.

### How does Syd’s power work?

When Syd makes direct skin contact with someone (for example: David), her mutant power is triggered. First, Syd’s mind swaps with David’s mind. The result is that Syd’s mind is in David’s body, and David’s mind is in Syd’s body. Then, the swap ends, but this time the bodies teleport to where their respective minds are: Syd’s body teleports to where Syd’s mind is, and David’s body teleports to where David’s mind is. The result is that Syd and David have swapped their physical locations.

It appears that while a swap is taking place, Syd can use the borrowed body to touch others without triggering another swap.

### What is David’s mental illness?

Over the course of the series, David has had several diagnoses applied to him, and displayed the symptoms of others. Psychiatric illnesses are behavioral or mental patterns that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning. They are generally long-term or even lifelong, especially in the case of personality disorders.

The show was more than a little cagey about deciding what David’s diagnoses actually are. Here is what we know.

**Schizophrenia**: David was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was younger. Schizophrenia is a psychiatric diagnosis characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations (typically hearing voices), delusions, memory problems, and disorganized thinking. It is treated with antipsychotics.

If David was given antipsychotics in Clockworks, which heavily medicated its residents, they had little to no effect. David’s schizophrenia symptoms largely appear to have been a combination of Farouk’s mind games and David’s own psychic powers.

In season 3, the show implies that David’s birth mother, Gabrielle, had hereditary schizophrenia, and that therefore David inherited his “madness” from her. But Gabrielle was also suffering from Complex PTSD from surviving the Holocaust, what appeared to be untreated postpartum depression, and was being haunted by Farouk and by David’s attempts at changing the timeline. Once again, any apparent schizophrenia symptoms have other causes.

Diagnosis: David was probably not schizophrenic. He may have inherited a tendency to mental health issues.

**Dissociative Identity Disorder (aka Multiple Personality Disorder)**: David is seen to have additional “stress response” personalities, first in the appearance of Rational David in season 1, Dvd and Divad in season 2, and ultimately culminating in dozens of unnamed Davids in season 3. The show does not use the words DID, alters or any other official terminology, however DID and schizophrenia do have a long history of confusion when being represented in media. The comics version of David is confirmed as having DID (and still to this day people will call his DID ‘schizophrenia’ even though they are separate things).

Despite the lack of confirmation, aspects of DID are represented in the show. DID is largely the result of extreme childhood trauma, which David Haller suffered greatly. Alters are often “stress responses” that come into existence to aid the “main” identity. We see David’s alters frequently try to help him.  Therefore it seems likely that David has DID.

Diagnosis: Fairly strong yes.

**Narcissistic Personality Disorder**: This became David’s diagnosis at the end of season 2 and in season 3, and it’s the shakiest of them all.

A narcissist in the general sense is a person who thinks the world revolves around them. They typically have an exaggerated sense of self-importance, a need for admiration, and a lack of empathy for other people. Narcissism is a personality trait that is widespread in varying degrees, but need not be pathological.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a poorly studied diagnosis. Those with NPD typically value themselves over others, to the extent of openly disregarding the wishes and feelings of anyone else, and expect to be treated as superior, regardless of their actual status or achievements. Socially, the person with NPD usually exhibits a fragile ego, intolerance of criticism, and a tendency to belittle other people, in order to validate their own superiority.

David displayed little to no narcissistic traits in season 1 and most of season 2 and in fact was very empathetic and lacked entitlement. In season 3, he was obsessed with his suicidal goal of erasing his own timeline by stopping Farouk from ever possessing him, and showed little regard for anyone else. But he also believed that once the timeline was changed, everything would be undone, so none of it actually mattered. He was essentially proven correct by the series finale.

Diagnosis: Extremely unlikely. David did not have a history of NPD symptoms. David’s later actions were often lacking in empathy, but his mindset and actions are explained easily by other factors. “Being a jerk” is not a mental illness.

**Trauma**: The elephant in the room. When David was a baby, Amahl Farouk invaded him and then tortured him and fed off him for thirty years, gave him hallucinations and altered his memories and made him think he was “crazy” so he tried to kill himself, then spent six years in an abusive mental hospital. Bafflingly, most of the characters in the show simply ignore the enormous mental damage all of that would result in, and expect David to just be fine once Farouk has been physically removed from his body.

David is not fine. David has Complex PTSD, just like Gabrielle.

CPTSD is a psychological disorder that can develop in response to prolonged, repeated trauma. Symptoms can include prolonged feelings of terror, worthlessness, helplessness, and deformation of one's identity and sense of self. Dissociation, including DID, is a symptom of CPTSD. There are also issues with relationship boundaries (see: Syd/David), depression/suicide, emotional regulation, sleep disturbances, and cognition and behavioral problems. All of these are displayed by David throughout the show, with nothing to contradict.

Diagnosis: Without question, David has CPTSD.

To sum up: While the show deliberately leaves things ambiguous and open to interpretation, the most likely accurate diagnoses for David are CPTSD and DID.