I will admit, ashamed as I am, that I have not yet finished watching the first season of FX’s “Legion.” While the series pilot was truly one of the best episodes of television to air this year, subsequent episodes disappointed in their stricter adherence to traditional superhero show conventions. I bailed on the show fairly early.
I’ve been assured that in later episodes the show returns to the experimental short-film aesthetic of the pilot, and I have been planning to catch myself up on the series at some point down the line. And now, with a bunch of exciting “Legion” news arriving from the show’s Comic-Con panel, there’s even more incentive to catch up prior to the premiere of season 2.
For one thing, “Wonder Woman” breakout Saïd Taghmaoui has been cast as “Shadow King,” a character I know nothing about — though with a name like “Shadow King” it seems fair to assume he’ll be a villain of some sort. Taghmaoui was a comic relief side character in “Wonder Woman,” and I’m excited to see what he can do with a beefier role here.
In another, somewhat contradictory bit of news, it seems as though creator Noah Hawley is open to the idea of bringing Patrick Stewart into the show’s world as Professor X, a character Stewart has been playing on the big screen for nearly a decade. Well, to be more precise, he’s open to bringing the character into the show, and star Dan Stevens wants Patrick Stewart in the role.
“I like to call [Stewart] pops. I was on [‘The Late Late Show‘] with him and he said he was up for it,” the actor said at Comic Con.
Given that Hawley and FX have been fairly clear that “Legion” exists independently of the X-Men Cinematic Universe, the — extremely unlikely — introduction of Stewart as Xavier would be existentially confounding. Would it necessarily mean FX backtracking and interweaving “Legion” into the larger X-Men universe, or could Stewart possibly be playing an entirely different version of the Professor, disconnected from the X-Men films? That doesn’t make very much sense at all.
Hey, I have an idea, studios: why not let individual shows and films exist on their own accord, live or die on their own merits and failures, and stop confusing us all with your complex cinematic and televisual universe conundrums? Can’t “Legion” just be its own thing? [via Uproxx]
