



“There is a maze in the desert, carved from sand and rock,” a narrator tells us early in the season two premiere of FX’s Legion, “full of twists and dead ends. Picture it. A puzzle you walk. And at the end of this maze is a prize just waiting to be discovered. All you have to do is find your way through.”

A moment later, though, the narrator suggests that the maze, and the desert, exist only in your mind, and that nothing of value can be gained from exploring it — only madness.

In its first season, the psychedelic superhero drama — Fargo‘s Noah Hawley (very) loosely adapting the story of minor X-Men character David Haller (Dan Stevens), a mentally ill man who’s also perhaps the world’s most powerful mutant — was a visual and sonic marvel, constructing sequence after sequence that looked, sounded, and felt, like nothing else on television. One character lived inside a giant ice cube on the astral plane, where he wore leisure suits and recited beat poetry. A powerful telepath appeared to dance through the mind and memories of a victim to the tune of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good,” her movements transformed into a blur of trippy colors and wipes. And the season’s creative peak — among the best, and strangest (even counting Twin Peaks: The Return), four-odd minutes on television last year — saw our heroes’ final combat with the monstrous Shadow King transformed into a silent ’20s horror movie scored to “Bolero”:

It was every bit the addictive puzzle promised by the narrator in the season two premiere, which airs Tuesday. But making it to the end of the season one maze delivered not a prize, but a realization that all the flashy presentation and excellent performances had obscured the fact, that David, his body-swapping girlfriend Syd (Rachel Keller), and the rest of the group were fairly thin characters who didn’t hold up well to close examination. When things were weird, it was easy to ignore, but the relatively straightforward season one finale laid bare how much that first year had been a triumph of style over substance.

Of course, Hawley only had eight hours to play with then, where the new season has 10 (of which I’ve seen the first four), and a lot of world-building to do in his very obscure corner of the Marvel TV universe. The better parts of Fargo deftly blend Hawley’s flair for telling stories in unusual ways with a knack for generating memorable and complicated characters, and I came into the new batch wondering if perhaps the new level of the maze would take us deeper into what makes David, Syd, mismatched twins Cary (Bill Irwin) and Kerry (Amber Midthunder), imperious Melanie (Jean Smart), and “memory artist” Ptonomy (Jeremie Harris) tick. And there is a bit more of an effort at that, but for the most part, the series seems to run on the same operating principle as before: if you’re wondering about the hidden meaning of a particular choice, tell yourself, “I don’t know. Somebody just thought this would look cool.”

Again and again, I’ve had to repeat that mantra while watching a new season that’s weirder and more vivid than before. Why do our heroes now report to a mysterious and mute general who wears a wicker basket on his head? Why does the general in turn communicate through a group of robots who look like catsuited women sporting Dorothy Hamill’s hair and Doug Henning’s mustache?

I don’t know. Somebody thought just it would look cool.

And they were right.

My prejudices with TV drama tend toward characterization first and foremost, and then plot, technical execution, and mood jockeying for second place depending on how well they’re done. But my investment almost always begins and ends with the characters: if I don’t care about, or even understand, the people on the show, everything else is usually just noise.