A guest character that just showed up as the protagonist is a nice example of the problem with the show.
I think Switch should have been the protagonist this season. I wouldn't object to her being a newly introduced character, since that gives her an outside perspective on everything. But she really hasn't been given much to do, except to be an oddly willing victim of David's exploitation.
They really lost the thread with trying to make David the antagonist pretty much out of nowhere. And they're not willing to commit to it so we get this state of just people doing dumb things back and forth and retcons.
Switch wouldn't have been much better, they already had a long list of characters they didn't do much with because of the filler each episode.
Xeddicus on
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
This season we have Syd: "This David hasn't done anything yet," and I'm wondering if we're supposed to reconcile this with the possibly/probably-deluded Syd of S2 who was going to kill David because he ended the world in one of many futures. Is that supposed to be her growing from S2 and admitting that maybe she shouldn't have tried to kill David, or is it just writing that wasn't intended to be compared?
Syd seems to be totally under the Shadow Kings/the bad writings thrall still. She's still totally against David because they're pushing him to take greater and greater risk to fix this shit. As you mentioned, she tried to kill him first thing right out and they're acting like that didn't happen and David is a monster.
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
I mean, David is absolutely written to be a monster this season.
But yeah, S2 was much more complex and I don't think we've addressed much of it in S3, which is a pity.
...and of course, as always, Kill Hitler.
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WhiteZinfandelYour insidesLet me show you themRegistered Userregular
When Sydney used the line about men fearing women's mockery and women fearing men's murder I kind of had to laugh, given that we'd seen Sydney kill David twice at that point, Kerry kill him once, and David kill zero people without provocation.
I also think he was characterized as villainous really early on. You let some of it slide because you assume it’s all the Shadow King, but it’s not. Farouk isn’t the guy who wanted to rescue his sister and gruesomely and gleefully killed all the guards to get her.
David’s arc has been subtle, and it’s incredibly tragic (Melanie and the crew do a number on him, telling him he’s not crazy, he doesn’t need help, etc.) but it’s been consistent, I’d say.
We don't know what was what until the Shadow King was out of him and then Division is far far worse. We don't even know what's what after with the way the show is written.
It just seems like they set up a self fulfilling prophecy and are now writing to fit it. David destroys the world so we need to kill him, he's destroys the world because we aligned with the Shadow King and are trying to kill him.
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
There are two distinct and legitimate readings to S2, and only one of them supports that though. I feel, given what we've seen in S3, that the rape being legitimate is what Hawley intended, yes, but either by trying to make David's fall more understandably tragic, or just not considering some of the consequences of his "you drugged me" metaphor, the result is more messy.
In the straightforward reading, David is the omega level villain who ends the world, and his removal of Sydney's memories of Farouk and future Syd is predatory, and the subsequent sex not informed or consensual.
But in the alternative reading, what we see is this:
David does not end the world in all futures. There is an episode explicitly dedicated to the different outcomes of his choices; grey, where he embraces Farouk and becomes a despot. Blue, where he never encounters Farouk and presumably lives happily. Green, where he takes meds and accidentally incinerates the cops in a panic, before living out the rest of his life with his sister, paralytic. And I think orange was the one where he doesn't seek help at all, instead ending up insane and homeless.
Which tells us the classic comics outcome is not a given, and even future Syd's warnings aren't a given, i.e. omega level villain David isn't a given.
Secondly, we have the crippled minotaur, which is repeatedly used as a signifier for Farouk's delusions spreading. Melanie, we see fairly on, succumbs to Farouk (as Oliver), but it's the scene where Melanie convinces Sydney that David must be killed where we notice the Minotaur in the background, indicating the delusion that Farouk has been pushing onto D3 spreading to Sydney. (as an aside, it's worth noting Ptonomy is also targeted, as someone with memory powers would cause a lot of trouble for Farouk)
So we have reasonable cause to believe that a) the disaster future isn't a certain outcome and b) Sydney is under Farouk's spell to believe it is. And Sydney tries to kill David based on future crime. Ignoring the actual effects of that from David's perspective, we then get the mental erasure.
Hawley chose to describe it as 'drugging,' but in this reading, the drugging isn't predatory, it's medicative. It fixes the delusion Farouk was using to crown himself king of D3*, and prevents him ultimately beating David again by using his allies against him. Metaphorically, it's more akin to having a mentally ill partner who only feels happy and sexually confident when they're on prescribed drugs than to date rape.
I was really hoping Hawley would resolve this dilemma, but I think he just didn't notice it or didn't care about it. David is shown giving over to other personalities at the end of S2, and is written as, at very best, an ends-justify-the-means type villain in S3, at worst, a total sociopath without any sense of self-awareness.
*again, was really hoping we'd see D3 address the fact they're led by Farouk, but no dice there. I was especially hoping for something from Clark here, given his understandable distrust of David in S1/S2. Instead he just gets airlocked...
So where S1 was fantastically spicy psychological horror, and S2 was high intrigue "what's real and what's not", S3 has not really had as much to say for me personally, even though it's been quite fun.
It's not medicative because she didn't consent to have her memories altered. She would have said no if she was asked. David had no right to do that "for her own good."
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
It's not medicative because she didn't consent to have her memories altered. She would have said no if she was asked. David had no right to do that "for her own good."
She probably would have, yes. She might also have tried to murder him again. If this were the real world, that'd fall under violent paranoid schizophrenic, who are the super rare cases that can be detained against their volition, on account of their delusions leading them to harm others.
Although obviously, the ideal case would have it determined in front of a panel of qualified people if she's delusional or not, rather than David's response being "why did the person I'm in love with disappear for two hours and then come back and try to murder me" mindwipe her.
...and of course, as always, Kill Hitler.
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WhiteZinfandelYour insidesLet me show you themRegistered Userregular
It's not medicative because she didn't consent to have her memories altered. She would have said no if she was asked. David had no right to do that "for her own good."
She would have said no because she was influenced by the Shadow King, though. Like the sex part, sure, IIRC she explicitly says no and that's rape. The mind altering... she literally tells David that she's the hero and he's the real villain (as opposed to the Shadow King) and tries to kill him with a gun. Seems a little unhinged and out of character to me.
David doesn't do anything that isn't heavily foreshadowed from the beginning. Even the rape is foreshadowed, because in the pilot, Syd is repeatedly telling David not to touch her, and yet he keeps touching and ultimately kissing her.
It's suggested that this is all Farouk, but we're gradually led to understand that David isn't just being controlled, David LIKES doing the shit he does. Even when he's acting on his own, he's laughing and smiling as he murders and assaults people.
He is ultimately driven by his belief that he is a good person and is owed nice things. And this is in no way a sudden revelation, it's baked into the foundation of the show.
Whatever the show's flaws, it has been painstaking in its portrayal of David as a sympathetic, but very disturbed and broken person. Whether he is beyond saving is an open question, but he's pretty much a monster at this point.
I love the central moral question of this season, incidentally: is it okay to do horrible things in pursuit of a goal if success means the horrible things never happened to begin with? I think the show would argue no, because you're taking away people's agency, just like David took away Syd's agency when he erased her memory to "fix" her. But it's the best kind of spec fic thought experiment, and I love this show for exploring it.
Other than the Syd thing, which as explained could be perfectly OK, he did nothing you can point to as evil (he doesn't kill innocent people even if he enjoys it). Even now he's being restrained until the last episode. If they want to paint him as a monster they failed utterly. It's all hinted at and implied and vague threats he's doing to be baaaddd and doesn't hold a candle to the Shadow King who is Division's new best buddy.
Given David's power, it's arguable he never needs to kill anyone. If you can teleport your enemy away, it's not like you need to teleport him into a wall. If you can turn your enemy's weapon into a fish, you don't need to make them explode.
Even if we ignore this, though, and even if we decide it's not strictly evil to enjoy murdering bad guys, it's still the case that actively ENJOYING killing people suggests that David is deeply disturbed. Which means his heel turn is not exactly abrupt and out of nowhere, as suggested. That David would be the big bad has been foreshadowed from day one.
You can certainly not like the direction the show took, but I don't think you can argue that it hasn't been set up well in advance.
All that aside, I don't think the show has painted SK as good or that Division 3 loves him. It's just that while SK is an evil bastard, David is just as powerful, wildly unstable, and prophesied to literally end the world. Enemy's enemy, and all that.
David is operating under various delusions. "Everything bad he has done before was SK's fault" "My followers/children consented once so I can force them to do whatever and still be a good guy" "I can fix things later with time travel so none of my evil actions count" "Things which hurt me aren't real"
It is ironic that he can bend reality with his powers yet cannot face it. Also I like Charles as the sudden protagonist who maybe comes out on top of SK more convincingly this time.
So what is really the nature of the Legion in David anyway? They seem capable enough that one can take over as the main conciousness, but they seem to want the "David" persona in charge. Harkening back to a scene in season 1, did the Legion elect the current "David" persona to be in control? Or is David the default? Sometimes they even seem to have knowledge that should be unavailable but maybe the Legion co-opted SK a bit while SK was in there too.
My recollection is that the first alternate David manifested when David was trapped and freaking out, and was just his rational side helping him work through his shit.
I interpreted Legion as just his mind becoming increasingly fractured by his mental illness, possibly exacerbated by all the time hopping. It doesn't seem to be as clean as the "each instance of David represents one power" thing from the comics.
It's not medicative because she didn't consent to have her memories altered. She would have said no if she was asked. David had no right to do that "for her own good."
She would have said no because she was influenced by the Shadow King, though. Like the sex part, sure, IIRC she explicitly says no and that's rape. The mind altering... she literally tells David that she's the hero and he's the real villain (as opposed to the Shadow King) and tries to kill him with a gun. Seems a little unhinged and out of character to me.
David has his own share of delusions. Even if Syd was brainwashed, he should still have involved the rest of the team in the decision of what to do with her. Instead he simply changed her brain however he thought was best, and then immediately had sex with her even though she was still clearly confused.
Plus as I recall Syd wasn't re-brainwashed into concluding David rapid her. She merely learned what happened.
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WhiteZinfandelYour insidesLet me show you themRegistered Userregular
It's not medicative because she didn't consent to have her memories altered. She would have said no if she was asked. David had no right to do that "for her own good."
She would have said no because she was influenced by the Shadow King, though. Like the sex part, sure, IIRC she explicitly says no and that's rape. The mind altering... she literally tells David that she's the hero and he's the real villain (as opposed to the Shadow King) and tries to kill him with a gun. Seems a little unhinged and out of character to me.
David has his own share of delusions. Even if Syd was brainwashed, he should still have involved the rest of the team in the decision of what to do with her. Instead he simply changed her brain however he thought was best, and then immediately had sex with her even though she was still clearly confused.
Plus as I recall Syd wasn't re-brainwashed into concluding David rapid her. She merely learned what happened.
Yes to the first part, but no to the second part.
During her postcoital sleep, the SK's inhibitor crown malfunctions and he sends a mouse to whisper in her ear. Then there's a sequence of cards saying
In the end, what is the sound of truth? Waves on a beach, the laugh of a child. Or perhaps there are competing truths. The truth of the mind, the truth of the heart. If all the apples are bruised, then it is the unbruised apple that is bad, the sane man who's crazy. For what is normal is that upon which nine wise men can agree, leaving the tenth to swing from a hangman's rope.
Which kind of suggests that in the subsequent trial, David is the one sane man.
WhiteZinfandel on
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
Plus as I recall Syd wasn't re-brainwashed into concluding David rapid her. She merely learned what happened.
Farouk restored her memories, which would presumably include restoring the probable delusion that David must be killed to save the world (hence D3 saying 'let us sedate you or we kill you' and then following through on that).
I’d like to respond to more of this after the finale (I don’t agree with you Bethryn but you make a good case), but I would point out that we’re aware of at least two futures where David has done a number on the entire world, and Farouk was dead in one of them.
Edit: And my current take on Season 2’s delusion is that it’s applicable to many things, with the big one being Syd and the audience’s belief that David is the hero of this story.
OneAngryPossum on
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
Yeah, just to be clear, I think S2 has like 3 or 4 really good readings to it, and the one above isn't one I think is the explicitly correct one at all. If the multiple futures ep hadn't been included, I think that would've pared it down to far fewer, but that episode is what enables a lot of the doubts.
Yeah, just to be clear, I think S2 has like 3 or 4 really good readings to it, and the one above isn't one I think is the explicitly correct one at all. If the multiple futures ep hadn't been included, I think that would've pared it down to far fewer, but that episode is what enables a lot of the doubts.
That was a damned incredible episode too, and probably the first moment I realized I really cared about these characters. Whatever David is supposed to be, his whole story is just relentlessly tragic.
I’d like to respond to more of this after the finale (I don’t agree with you Bethryn but you make a good case), but I would point out that we’re aware of at least two futures where David has done a number on the entire world, and Farouk was dead in one of them.
Edit: And my current take on Season 2’s delusion is that it’s applicable to many things, with the big one being Syd and the audience’s belief that David is the hero of this story.
This season presents the idea that David ends the world through his fucking with the timeline, which is plausible though not confirmed. I think it was the truth that in future Syd's timeline David is responsible for the apocalypse one way or another, that part wasn't a delusion. David is now extremely reckless in his desire to change the past, messing around with forces he doesn't understand, and he knows he's using up Switch in the process. I don't think his actions this season are justifiable at all.
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BethrynUnhappiness is MandatoryRegistered Userregular
Another way to put it is the question of how many timelines is he willing to end until he gets the right one? Is he going to destroy the universe every time something goes wrong and try and fix it? His view that nobody in this timeline matters so he can kill them then becomes "nobody matters until the timeline is the one I want" which is fairly obviously bonkers.
Another way to put it is the question of how many timelines is he willing to end until he gets the right one? Is he going to destroy the universe every time something goes wrong and try and fix it? His view that nobody in this timeline matters so he can kill them then becomes "nobody matters until the timeline is the one I want" which is fairly obviously bonkers.
Another way to put it is the question of how many timelines is he willing to end until he gets the right one? Is he going to destroy the universe every time something goes wrong and try and fix it? His view that nobody in this timeline matters so he can kill them then becomes "nobody matters until the timeline is the one I want" which is fairly obviously bonkers.
I’m still sitting on that ending, but I think it found a way to strike a hopeful tone in a real grim fashion. And it came down firm on the side of empathy in a way that I really appreciate - it’s appropriate for a story with this much emphasis on seeing things from so many perspectives.
Finale/previous season ending spoilers:
My wife pointed out that there’s a common element to each of the season finales - whatever our understanding of “good guys” vs “bad guys”, they wind up working together. Melanie’s school and Division 3, Division 3 and Farouk, and then basically everybody together, informed by a full understanding of where their conflict leads.
For a show that can be so consciously distancing, it’s got a lot of heart.
He didn't "learn the power of love", he learned perceptive. He gained what every sociopath lacks, knowledge of the realness of others. That includes their love but also their loss, pain, and suffering.
David doesn't do anything that isn't heavily foreshadowed from the beginning. Even the rape is foreshadowed, because in the pilot, Syd is repeatedly telling David not to touch her, and yet he keeps touching and ultimately kissing her.
It's suggested that this is all Farouk, but we're gradually led to understand that David isn't just being controlled, David LIKES doing the shit he does. Even when he's acting on his own, he's laughing and smiling as he murders and assaults people.
He is ultimately driven by his belief that he is a good person and is owed nice things. And this is in no way a sudden revelation, it's baked into the foundation of the show.
Whatever the show's flaws, it has been painstaking in its portrayal of David as a sympathetic, but very disturbed and broken person. Whether he is beyond saving is an open question, but he's pretty much a monster at this point.
I love the central moral question of this season, incidentally: is it okay to do horrible things in pursuit of a goal if success means the horrible things never happened to begin with? I think the show would argue no, because you're taking away people's agency, just like David took away Syd's agency when he erased her memory to "fix" her. But it's the best kind of spec fic thought experiment, and I love this show for exploring it.
I appreciate that David's final plan and also the compromise with Charles was always going to
wind up erasing present David. It sucks that everyone else has to do-over as well, but at least David knew he was going to fade away. Also that Charles basically takes the mantle of Professor X eas cool.
However I do not really like how Switch
goes 4th dimensional out of the blue and halts the time eaters destruction of the "world". I know they foreshadowed how important she was with the many time travel theory episode openers, but that felt too contrived...even for Legion.
After watching the finale, I'm more or less pleased. It was thematically satisfying and reached solid conclusions for all the mains,
... even if it undoes all of them through time travel shenanigans.
I think Switch was underdeveloped, though, even if I liked the broad strokes of her story. Also, the time eaters were fucking rad.
Ultimately, this is one of the most ambitious shows I've ever watched. It always swung for the fences, and managed to hit homers a shocking number of times. I'd probably put a couple episodes in my all time top ten list of episodes of television. (Probably the Many Lives of David one, definitely the Silent Film Lenny one.)
The problem with the ending (for me) is it totally ignores:
All the horrid shit The Shadow King did on the pretext of him being a better person now and that the bloodshed has to stop. It would have stopped just fine if David had killed the son of a bitch and we saw how much he changed when he murdered David's sister and just... I guess the writers forgot about all the evil shit Farouk got up to over that last 30 years to go along with his new "perspective". And what happened to David destroying the world? Everyone (or at least Ms. Shoot First Ask Questions Never) just went welp, he's a baby, guess his plan is fine now. And then it all worked out fine as David wanted minus the evil ass being alive so Division 3 was WRONG THE ENTIRE TIME. The guy with the mental problems, who they murdered a few times, saved everyone! Improved their lives! He's practically Jesus!
Unless we get something to show how this new timeline is fucked, but the implication was it would be super great.
What horrible things did Farouk do after getting his body back? Literally the only thing that comes to mind is what he did to the sister. He certainly acts sinister and deceptive but there's extremely little evil. He even states several times that he's just trying to help David and you're supposed to assume he's lying. The twist was that he never was.
David destroys the world because he's a mentally ill omega level mutant. The whole point is that if he has a better childhood he doesn't grow up to be the unstable danger he is.
edit:
Actually I think he's still inside Oliver when he does the thing with the sister and Lenny?
I admire this show for its ability to blend nuance with moral clarity. It never presents the terrible things people do as anything other than terrible, but it recognizes that every victimizer starts as a victim.
Posts
I think Switch should have been the protagonist this season. I wouldn't object to her being a newly introduced character, since that gives her an outside perspective on everything. But she really hasn't been given much to do, except to be an oddly willing victim of David's exploitation.
Switch wouldn't have been much better, they already had a long list of characters they didn't do much with because of the filler each episode.
But yeah, S2 was much more complex and I don't think we've addressed much of it in S3, which is a pity.
I also think he was characterized as villainous really early on. You let some of it slide because you assume it’s all the Shadow King, but it’s not. Farouk isn’t the guy who wanted to rescue his sister and gruesomely and gleefully killed all the guards to get her.
David’s arc has been subtle, and it’s incredibly tragic (Melanie and the crew do a number on him, telling him he’s not crazy, he doesn’t need help, etc.) but it’s been consistent, I’d say.
It just seems like they set up a self fulfilling prophecy and are now writing to fit it. David destroys the world so we need to kill him, he's destroys the world because we aligned with the Shadow King and are trying to kill him.
There are two distinct and legitimate readings to S2, and only one of them supports that though. I feel, given what we've seen in S3, that the rape being legitimate is what Hawley intended, yes, but either by trying to make David's fall more understandably tragic, or just not considering some of the consequences of his "you drugged me" metaphor, the result is more messy.
In the straightforward reading, David is the omega level villain who ends the world, and his removal of Sydney's memories of Farouk and future Syd is predatory, and the subsequent sex not informed or consensual.
But in the alternative reading, what we see is this:
David does not end the world in all futures. There is an episode explicitly dedicated to the different outcomes of his choices; grey, where he embraces Farouk and becomes a despot. Blue, where he never encounters Farouk and presumably lives happily. Green, where he takes meds and accidentally incinerates the cops in a panic, before living out the rest of his life with his sister, paralytic. And I think orange was the one where he doesn't seek help at all, instead ending up insane and homeless.
Which tells us the classic comics outcome is not a given, and even future Syd's warnings aren't a given, i.e. omega level villain David isn't a given.
Secondly, we have the crippled minotaur, which is repeatedly used as a signifier for Farouk's delusions spreading. Melanie, we see fairly on, succumbs to Farouk (as Oliver), but it's the scene where Melanie convinces Sydney that David must be killed where we notice the Minotaur in the background, indicating the delusion that Farouk has been pushing onto D3 spreading to Sydney. (as an aside, it's worth noting Ptonomy is also targeted, as someone with memory powers would cause a lot of trouble for Farouk)
So we have reasonable cause to believe that a) the disaster future isn't a certain outcome and b) Sydney is under Farouk's spell to believe it is. And Sydney tries to kill David based on future crime. Ignoring the actual effects of that from David's perspective, we then get the mental erasure.
Hawley chose to describe it as 'drugging,' but in this reading, the drugging isn't predatory, it's medicative. It fixes the delusion Farouk was using to crown himself king of D3*, and prevents him ultimately beating David again by using his allies against him. Metaphorically, it's more akin to having a mentally ill partner who only feels happy and sexually confident when they're on prescribed drugs than to date rape.
I was really hoping Hawley would resolve this dilemma, but I think he just didn't notice it or didn't care about it. David is shown giving over to other personalities at the end of S2, and is written as, at very best, an ends-justify-the-means type villain in S3, at worst, a total sociopath without any sense of self-awareness.
*again, was really hoping we'd see D3 address the fact they're led by Farouk, but no dice there. I was especially hoping for something from Clark here, given his understandable distrust of David in S1/S2. Instead he just gets airlocked...
So where S1 was fantastically spicy psychological horror, and S2 was high intrigue "what's real and what's not", S3 has not really had as much to say for me personally, even though it's been quite fun.
Although obviously, the ideal case would have it determined in front of a panel of qualified people if she's delusional or not, rather than David's response being "why did the person I'm in love with disappear for two hours and then come back and try to murder me" mindwipe her.
She would have said no because she was influenced by the Shadow King, though. Like the sex part, sure, IIRC she explicitly says no and that's rape. The mind altering... she literally tells David that she's the hero and he's the real villain (as opposed to the Shadow King) and tries to kill him with a gun. Seems a little unhinged and out of character to me.
It's suggested that this is all Farouk, but we're gradually led to understand that David isn't just being controlled, David LIKES doing the shit he does. Even when he's acting on his own, he's laughing and smiling as he murders and assaults people.
He is ultimately driven by his belief that he is a good person and is owed nice things. And this is in no way a sudden revelation, it's baked into the foundation of the show.
Whatever the show's flaws, it has been painstaking in its portrayal of David as a sympathetic, but very disturbed and broken person. Whether he is beyond saving is an open question, but he's pretty much a monster at this point.
I love the central moral question of this season, incidentally: is it okay to do horrible things in pursuit of a goal if success means the horrible things never happened to begin with? I think the show would argue no, because you're taking away people's agency, just like David took away Syd's agency when he erased her memory to "fix" her. But it's the best kind of spec fic thought experiment, and I love this show for exploring it.
So just kill them all, they deserve each other.
Even if we ignore this, though, and even if we decide it's not strictly evil to enjoy murdering bad guys, it's still the case that actively ENJOYING killing people suggests that David is deeply disturbed. Which means his heel turn is not exactly abrupt and out of nowhere, as suggested. That David would be the big bad has been foreshadowed from day one.
You can certainly not like the direction the show took, but I don't think you can argue that it hasn't been set up well in advance.
All that aside, I don't think the show has painted SK as good or that Division 3 loves him. It's just that while SK is an evil bastard, David is just as powerful, wildly unstable, and prophesied to literally end the world. Enemy's enemy, and all that.
It is ironic that he can bend reality with his powers yet cannot face it. Also I like Charles as the sudden protagonist who maybe comes out on top of SK more convincingly this time.
So what is really the nature of the Legion in David anyway? They seem capable enough that one can take over as the main conciousness, but they seem to want the "David" persona in charge. Harkening back to a scene in season 1, did the Legion elect the current "David" persona to be in control? Or is David the default? Sometimes they even seem to have knowledge that should be unavailable but maybe the Legion co-opted SK a bit while SK was in there too.
I interpreted Legion as just his mind becoming increasingly fractured by his mental illness, possibly exacerbated by all the time hopping. It doesn't seem to be as clean as the "each instance of David represents one power" thing from the comics.
David has his own share of delusions. Even if Syd was brainwashed, he should still have involved the rest of the team in the decision of what to do with her. Instead he simply changed her brain however he thought was best, and then immediately had sex with her even though she was still clearly confused.
Plus as I recall Syd wasn't re-brainwashed into concluding David rapid her. She merely learned what happened.
Yes to the first part, but no to the second part.
During her postcoital sleep, the SK's inhibitor crown malfunctions and he sends a mouse to whisper in her ear. Then there's a sequence of cards saying
Which kind of suggests that in the subsequent trial, David is the one sane man.
Edit: And my current take on Season 2’s delusion is that it’s applicable to many things, with the big one being Syd and the audience’s belief that David is the hero of this story.
That was a damned incredible episode too, and probably the first moment I realized I really cared about these characters. Whatever David is supposed to be, his whole story is just relentlessly tragic.
This season presents the idea that David ends the world through his fucking with the timeline, which is plausible though not confirmed. I think it was the truth that in future Syd's timeline David is responsible for the apocalypse one way or another, that part wasn't a delusion. David is now extremely reckless in his desire to change the past, messing around with forces he doesn't understand, and he knows he's using up Switch in the process. I don't think his actions this season are justifiable at all.
God.
save scumming is a viable strategy.
Helps to have full dental coverage, though.
Finale/previous season ending spoilers:
For a show that can be so consciously distancing, it’s got a lot of heart.
Barf.
Hawley is a genius at character development.
However I do not really like how Switch
I think Switch was underdeveloped, though, even if I liked the broad strokes of her story. Also, the time eaters were fucking rad.
Ultimately, this is one of the most ambitious shows I've ever watched. It always swung for the fences, and managed to hit homers a shocking number of times. I'd probably put a couple episodes in my all time top ten list of episodes of television. (Probably the Many Lives of David one, definitely the Silent Film Lenny one.)
Unless we get something to show how this new timeline is fucked, but the implication was it would be super great.
David destroys the world because he's a mentally ill omega level mutant. The whole point is that if he has a better childhood he doesn't grow up to be the unstable danger he is.
edit: