It’s like the apocalypse has hit Clockworks. Lights are popping, furniture is sparse, and there are zombie-like people raging all over the place. Kerry is scared, but the zombies are a mere distraction. What truly terrifies her is The Eye, who is following her calmly.
The potato man is in a room full of globes, and is holding Amy hostage. The demon reverts to Lenny, who wants to know about the day David came to live with them. Amy was four and it was late. For a long time she thought it was a dream. Lenny is impatient and starts screaming, “What did he do with it?!” Amy is terrified; she has no idea what Lenny means.
Oliver has brought Cary into his ice cube, assuring him that the parasites can’t find them in there. The parasite is feeding off of David’s powers, and Oliver knows who it is: Farook, the Shadow King. The problem is, how do they rescue their friends? David could break them out, but he has been locked up by Farook, and will soon disappear if they don’t free him. Then the Shadow King will become David. And of course, if they unfreeze their friends, they will be shot by Division 3. Cary remembers the halo he made for David. That should trap Farook. They just have to distract him long enough to change the makeup of the room.
Cary first goes to Sydney, still in David’s childhood bed. He motions for her to follow, and they lock themselves in a glass capsule, where Cary promises Farook can’t hear them. Sydney already knows what is going on, which surprises Cary – only for a moment. He gives her several pairs of glasses, made by Oliver, that will help them see what is real. Sydney leaves the tube and is in the post-apocalyptic hospital. She puts on the glasses and the zombies disappear. She moves through the hospital unmolested.
Cary and Oliver stop by the shooting scene to pick up Cary’s halo. They find Melanie there. She is upset that Oliver doesn’t remember who she is. She wanders off and discovers blood dripping – up. She follows the blood and finds Rudy in a closet, frozen in the position in which he was stabbed. She whispers to him.
Sydney finds Rudy, who is positioned like the drooling guy from the first episode, and puts the glasses on him. This doesn’t wake him from his reverie, but she continues on. They find Kerry, who has barricaded a door and is fighting with zombies that only she can see. Sydney approaches carefully and puts the glasses on her, and Kerry calms when she sees the zombies aren’t real. The fact that the barricaded door has kept The Eye away from her doesn’t hurt, either.
David is in his tiny mind coffin, screaming hysterically. He calms down, telling himself it is all in his mind, but that isn’t better, and he goes back to screaming. Another David is there. He promises that he is the rational side of David (proving his rationality with a British accent), created to help him find a way out before the monster takes over his body forever. He reminds David that if this is all in his mind, he can imagine anything he wants. Rational David tells regular David to imagine them in a classroom with blackboards. It works.
Rational David leads regular David in an exercise of, well, rationality. He points out that David knows everything the monster knows, and they start working through it. He is adopted. Lenny knew David’s biological dad, and Lenny is the monster, so the monster must be a mutant like David. The monster has probably been with David since he was a baby. Chalkboard animation helps tell the logical side of his story. His dad was probably a mutant, one with psychic abilities (Professor Charles Xavier). He must have fought the monster on the astral plane, with their minds. Dad won, but the monster didn’t die; it just kind of floated off. Dad goes home, David is born, and his parents decided David wasn’t safe there, so they gave him up for adoption. Somehow, the monster was watching and it found David. Like a haunted house, it possessed David. The possession made him sick and his powers didn’t help. The monster poisoned him, made him crazy, fed on him, which made it stronger. The monster found David so that one day it could get his revenge – or worse. Then Sydney came into his life and woke him up, and the monster realized it couldn’t hide anymore. “Melanie was wrong,” David realizes. “I was sick, but I’m not sick anymore.” David returns to his mind coffin, but he is calm and strong and breaks free. He’s not awake yet, but he is now roving the halls of the hospital freely. His version of the hospital is empty but not decimated, but he keeps walking through an infinite number of doors.
Cary and Melanie are still trying to move their frozen friends. Oliver steps in and starts conducting, creating a shield with words. Sydney, Rudy, and Kerry’s setting has turned into a silent movie, complete with dialogue cards. The Eye comes out of nowhere, tackling Kerry and knocking her glasses off. Sydney watches her fight the imaginary zombies and The Eye pops out of nowhere again. He is real and he punches Kerry. Sydney struggles to free her, but they get unexpected help from the monster, who takes the form of Lenny, looking like a strung-out Tim Burton. The Eye is nothing but a bother to her. She breaks him, folds him, crushes him like a soda can and flicks him away.
In the frozen “real world,” The Eye crumples before Melanie and Cary’s eyes.
Lenny tells Kerry and Sydney to prepare to die. She makes a finger gun and the girls’ heads tilt to the side like they have been shot, but then a window appears, showing Lenny the shield Oliver is building. She pops over to that scene, blasts Oliver back against the wall, breaking his shield. Then she returns to Sydney and Kerry.
In whatever mindspace he is in, David has finally found the Clockworks hallway that splits like a fork in the road. Summoning all his power, he blows the doors open, pulls the walls down. He is fully in control.
In the real world, the scene begins to unfreeze. But Oliver has disappeared and with it, his word shield. Cary has put the halo on David’s head, which releases Rudy from his trance. He is still in the hospital mindscape, but comes to and drags Lenny away from Kerry and Sydney. Everyone returns to where they were and the scene unfreezes. Division 3’s bullets continue toward their targets, but David has caught all the bullets harmlessly in his hand. With full control of his powers now, he raises his arms up and the room fills with purple light.
Our mutants are returned to the forests outside Summerland. Rudy is on a stretcher, and the group stops to take a rest. Cary warns David not to remove his halo and wants to take David straight to his lab. When he turns to Melanie for her advice, he finds she is gone. Melanie has sneaked off to Oliver’s room. She opens up his diver’s mask – and finds no one inside. She rushes from the room and back to Summerland.
In the lobby, she hears Oliver’s voice, and finds him upstairs, feeding breakfast to our exhausted mind warriors. He serves Melanie some food, and it is like he never left. Kerry isn’t eating, just staring out the window. Cary approaches and she admits that she is mad. “You left me. I needed you and you left me.”
David and Amy go to another room to speak privately. She is sorry that she didn’t tell him about his adoption. David calms her, but then Amy freaks out, realizing that her husband hasn’t heard from her in quite a while. David warns her that she can’t reach out to him because Division 3 is watching them. He tells her to get some rest, they will figure it out in the morning. David suddenly sees the monster, in the form of the illustration. It is just for a moment, but he is scared. His friends, having finished eating, all come looking for him, and David tells Cary he has to get this “thing” out of him. Cary, Sydney, and Ptonomy escort David through the woods to the lab while Melanie stays behind with Oliver. Suddenly Division 3 commandos surround everyone. There must be a hundred commandos. The interrogator from episode one is there, badly limping and covered with third degree burns. “We have much to talk about,” he tells David before instructing the commandos to kill the others.
In David’s mind, buried deep, the monster is buried in its own mind coffin. It is struggling – and it breaks through.
You can watch a preview for the season finale of FX‘s Legion below!
