'Legion' recap: 'Chapter 12'

Legion + Bon Iver = Instant emotions.

It was only a matter of time before Legion made us all choke up. The latest episode, “Chapter 12,” takes a step back from the show’s typical mile-a-minute pace and instead gives us something much slower and more intimate.

That something is Syd. A character we’ve been following for the very first episode, but perhaps have never fully understood.

Picking up where the previous episode left off, David has entered Syd’s “sunken place” and is now looking for a way to free her from the Monk’s maze.

That maze comes off as a tundra — at least, in some moments. Other moments it’s an art museum and other moments still it’s flashbacks to Syd’s life. The real, conscious Syd seems to be the one hiding inside an igloo and is crawling down a dark tunnel.

A tunnel that leads to her mother’s birth canal, because that’s how all the flashbacks start. We then see Syd’s childhood shown through one long montage — most of which is filled with some sadness and pain.

Syd’s relationship with her mother, Joan (Lily Rabe), seems steady though. Granted, there’s no dialogue in the first round of flashbacks as it’s all set to “22 (Over Soon)” by Bon Iver, but there’s some connection between the two.

David is watching all of this too, by the way. He has no idea why, exactly, he’s being shown this but he knows he has to crack the code to free Syd.

Repeatedly, at the end of every montage cycle, David is brought back to the art museum. It’s a place that has some significance to Syd’s past, and she’s always there waiting for him to ask what he’s learned.

David’s first guess is a fair one: an art museum is the one place that Syd can feel like a part of society. She can engage with culture without having to touch or say anything to anyone.

Wrong. In fact, not even close.

So David goes around again. The teenage punk rebellion years, the bullying from school girls, all of it.

This time there’s a new addition though. When in high-school, a boy corners Syd on a basketball court and demands a kiss. Syd refuses and the boy shoves her against a fence. Three girls then walk by, laughing at Syd, which sets her off. Syd gives the boy the kiss he wanted, the two swap bodies and Syd, now in the form of a husky lacrosse player, nearly beats the three girls to death with a lacrosse stick. By the time anyone has shown up, Syd has switched into his normal body and the guy is carried off.

Based on this, David’s second guess is that Syd wants to be able to actually touch and feel people. There’s a couple that’s making out in the museum that Syd often looms over, so David is sure that she, basically, wants to be that couple.

Wrong again.

Around and around he goes. He’s given a few more glimpses of new areas of Syd’s life, such as when she tried to cut herself with a scissors, but David’s pretty clueless at this point.

It’s when he tries to intervene during Syd’s childhood that he gets his first big clue. David goes up to a very young Syd and asks if she’s alright. To David’s surprise, Syd responds that it’s cheating to try and talk to her at this point. That means that Syd is the one who is actually in control of this the whole time. The Monk has nothing to do with it.

Cut back to Division Three and we can see that’s the truth because Cary and Kerry have now both woken up and reunited. Clark comes running down a hall, stopping for a moment to tell them that the monk is dead and everyone is awake now, except for David and Syd.

The clue isn’t quite enough to get David all the way there, though. His next guess is that Syd is afraid that he’ll stop loving her if she shows him everything about her life, to which David reassures her isn’t true.

Still wrong.

On the sixth time, he finally gets it. This time, he sees something new altogether. One night, when Syd was a teenager again, she walked into the living room to find her mother passed out on the couch. After realizing that her mother’s boyfriend in the shower, she gets an idea.

Yup, you guessed it, she touches her mother and the two switch bodies. She then enters the show and, for the first time in her life, experiences what it’s like to touch another person in this way. Weird, yes, but actually quite beautiful at the same time.

Until the moment we all were dreading happens. Syd and her mother switch back, and Syd’s mom comes busting in to find her boyfriend in the shower with a 15-year-old girl. The boyfriend obviously can’t explain any of this, so he’s dragged away by the police.

Click. Suddenly it makes sense. Syd doesn’t want a pity party for all the trials she’s gone through — she wants to embrace them. Everything that Syd has done has made her stronger. While David loves Syd, Syd isn’t dumb enough to think that’s going to save them from whatever plague is on the way. Instead, they’re the ones who are going to have to save love. How poetic.

The two return to the real world, to find Division Three in yet another lockdown. Oddly enough this is also when the FX presents Legion logo appears, as the episode then ends with one final reveal: Lenny’s back and being dragged through D3 by a bunch of security guards.

And, if Lenny’s back, that means Farouk might have found a way out too.

Tune in to Legion next week on FX to find out what happens next, and check out our other Legion recaps by clicking here.