At the end of Legion’s first season, scientist Oliver Bird (Jemaine Clement) and the phantasmagorical Lenny Busker (Aubrey Plaza) were seen driving away from supermutant David Haller (Dan Stevens) and the rest of the Legion gang in search of “someplace warm.” And the opening script page from the X-Men show’s season 2 premiere initially suggests they’ve succeeded in that quest. But all isn’t what it appears.

“Lenny and Oliver are being used by this character, Amahl Farouk,” says executive producer Noah Hawley. “He wears their faces from time to time. It’s his way of hiding himself. I had this thought of, ‘What does Freddy Krueger do during the day?’ I thought it was interesting, the idea of the downtime of these characters. They’re not being used and so what is reality like for them? They’re being placated, that they’re in some place beautiful that may not actually be a physical space, it may be a mental space, like an astral plane. They have everything they need, they’re by the pool, it’s beautiful, but at a certain point, there’s part of them that realizes that they’re just trapped in this reality they don’t have any control over.”