There's a few reasons - actually more - to sink deep into this episode of Legion. Everything that's going on is taking place in a mental ward that doesn't exist; everything at this moment in time is frozen (think in a sense, oddly enough, like one of those scenes where Quicksilver sees everything moving so slowly in time he's able to stop things from going on in micro-milli-seconds as if it's regular speed), and it's at a point where a character may be shot from bullets by a machine gun. But this mental ward is all in the realm of 'Lenny', the terrifying, physically-slinky and mad-eyed Aubrey Plaza (easily her most intense performance by far and one I always can't get enough of), and at times she acts as the 'therapist' for our mutant heroes who are trapped in her/the "Parasites" realm.
While some characters try to figure out just what the hell is going on - there may be a door that leads somewhere, there's the 'other' plane where Jemaine Clement still is in the block of ice, etc - others, namely David, seem... oddly okay with the situation at present!
The direction and writing unfolds with the precise logic of a dream and a thriller, which means there's little logic to go by at times... which is just the way that I like to see things go down. But what's great is that it's both a slight return to the setting of the first episode, where David and Syd first met, while also having that "deva-ju but not" feeling as Syd also says; everything feels *off* and that's the feeling the filmmakers give to the episode. That is, of course, until things start to crack all around them and the episode's suspense intensifies further: at what point will Lenny finally drop all pretenses and do what she/It feels compelled to do on to David? While every scene with her is shockingly good, so are ones where another 'orderly' in this ward makes people take their pills and, at one point to David, practically vomits up... nothing at all.
Again, the filmmaking here is unsettling most of all because it's not as reliant as the trippy, stream of consciousness editing style. I loved that approach too, but here it makes more sense that everything seems normal in the cutting and shooting - too normal, as it turns out to be the case, with Syd only getting flashes of the past and her experiences with David as a fever dream-nightmare scape. This might be my favorite episode so far for how there's this restraint, relatively speaking, while at the same time keeping up that hyper-surreal tone, whether it's in the reactions David has to Syd when she tries to tell him he's schizophrenic and he has no memory of this, or when Cary and Kerry get into their own mis-adventures (to put it lightly).
I think the success of this show in general is in comparison to so many other works of television that may be good to great, but don't transcend material with the artistry available. This could be playing on an IMAX screen just as easily, if not more-so, than on a 32-inch HD TV: like practically all of this show, which dazzles more than nearly all recent comic book movies (including the other trippy ones Marvel puts out like Doctor Strange), it uses color, sound, montage, dialog and performance to innovate the medium and find a new way to tell a story, not just for the sake of making it 'trippy' for the hell of it.
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