Legion capped off its inaugural season as not just the most fascinating and bombastic Marvel series on TV, but as a series that didn’t ever really feel like a Marvel or superhero series at all. The show’s unique take on the mutant powers of David Haller (Dan Stevens) through the lens of mental illness was an incredible visual journey that was always entirely unpredictable. Before the finale, we got a chance to speak on a conference call with Noah Hawley and Dan Stevens about this first season, the finale, some of those X-Men connections, Season 2, and more. As Stevens said regarding the finale, “I hope some of the questions have been answered, but certainly not all of them!” No, they definitely have not all been answered — but below are a few more clues about this season as well as what’s to come:

David’s Mental State

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Image via FX

While most of Legion had viewers off-balance with what was even reality, or what the timeline was, things seemed to calm down into more of a linear narrative in the finale. It’s no coincidence, of course, that that is where David starts to feel more in control of his surroundings. “Everything exists for a reason, and that reason is to help you understand David better and to see the world through his eyes,” Hawley said. “The season was constructed so that in the beginning, as David didn’t really know what anything meant, we were seeing objectively a lot of imagery divorced from any information, just glimpses of something monstrous, so the more he learns the more we learn, and in the end now that he’s clear on what’s going on we are as well.”

However, things aren’t as clear for David as they may seem. Stevens commented that, “There are still many, many elements — if you know the comics, there are hundreds of elements we haven’t explored at this stage with David’s mental makeup — where he feels like he has a grip of things, when actually, he has a grip on one or two things, and the rest are up in the air, and there’s a lot flying around up there […] He’s not on as concrete ground at the end of the season as he might seem.”

Hawley added that, while “[David] should go to a retreat for a year and be one with nature and eat three meals and day and take walks in the woods and learn how to be a person, he’s not going to have that luxury because he’s off to the next crisis. And that is going to keep the pressure on him in a way. That stress on someone who is disjointed that can be very destructive.” He further explained,

“There’s this blur between the power and the psychology. [David] was institutionalized for six years, but he had the condition for over a decade where he heard things he couldn’t identify and saw things other people couldn’t see, and had these moments where it appeared that things moved around and the world was a very scary place. And he formed his identity and his psychology based on that, so it’s going to be very odd for him now to have more clarity and to be alone in his own mind, and to have some power to keep those voices out and to keep those visions out, and he’s suddenly isolated in a way that seems healthy but may have unintended consequences.”

The Shadow King

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Legion, rather unexpectedly, ended up feeling like a horror series, especially where The Shadow King was concerned. Hawley told us that the actor who plays The Shadow King, Quinton Boisclair, was actually just someone they found at a comic book store who happened to be 6’8,” and was (as Hawley describes him) very skinny. So they made that bizarre suit for him that is large in some places and thin in others. “It was a conversation I had with our production designer Michael Wiley, and he told me he was obsessed with this reality show My 600 lb Life, which I hadn’t seen, but I did respond to the idea that whatever was inside David had to be feeding on him all the time, and as a result it was something engorged or tick-like about it, so it was reaching this very corpulent state.”

Hawley went on to explain that after reading some of Sigmund Freud’s writing, he became interested in the idea of the uncanny, and that what scares us the most is something normal behaving in an abnormal way (for example, a house being a haunted house). The Shadow King’s true form, then, plays on these ideas — he’s huge in some places but skinny in others. He’s grotesque, but he has kind eyes. These sort of things leave us off-balance, and are scary while also being weirdly familiar.

Aubrey Plaza, who plays one of the Shadow King's forms in Lenny, was aware of who she was from the start of the season. Stevens, however, was not, saying that only around Episode 5 did he became fully aware of who she was and what her power and influence were as that continued to grow. But before that, as the cast and crew speculated and read background to try and figure it out, “Aubrey did seem delighted to be possession of that secret," he joked.

In the finale, we saw the Shadow King released from David and newly attached to Jemaine Clement’s Oliver. Hawley explained that, “I think the season was always designed to be about the enemy within, at the end of which the enemy is now a literal enemy without. And certainly that’s unfortunate for Jemaine that he’s stuck with this thing inside of him, but it does make him rather critical to our story. I’ve spoken to Jemaine, and he’s excited to come back, so I think we’ll see a lot of him going forward, which makes me very happy!”

As for the decision to not defeat the Shadow King at the end of this season, Hawley said,

“I like this idea of having to face our demons, and the idea that in the first season that was an internal struggle for David. Now we’re taking something that has so much power over him emotionally and psychologically, and we’re making it an exterior agent. And there’s going to be something very complicated about going to war with himself. It’s been with him since he was a baby, it’s like a phantom limb now, it’s part of him. So that’s going to complicate emotionally, morally, and personally this fight, which is always more interesting. We created a villain for David that is worthy of creating a whole story around. It makes for a potential showdown that we’re really invested in as an audience as opposed to doing a villain-of-the-year approach. I don’t know how long that story will sustain, or the permutations of it, but I think it’s a fascinating setup to follow.”

X-Men Connections

The last few episodes of this season of Legion addressed its X-Men connections head-on, something the series (probably smartly) shied away from at the start. Hawley confirmed that there will be more going forward, “without literally reenacting issues of the comic book or storylines from the comic book. I don’t think you’ll see the show suddenly look to the comics for storylines, but you may see ideas or character or images that are familiar to you.”

As for that Equinox reference: “I wish I could tell you … if you stuck around for the scene after the credits maybe you had a sense of it. But yeah, I don’t think I want to give anything away.”

Still, it’s been established now that David’s father is most likely Professor X, in some part of the X-Men universe, so what does that mean going forward? Hawley told us that,

“I think any person who learns they were adopted is going to have his questions and want to speak out to those parents, to his birth parents, I think that’s a very natural story. Where we left things off at the end of Season 1, that can’t be his first priority, but it’s about coming to understand what he is and his purpose on this world. I think that’s definitely something that we’re going to approach. It’s a creative conversation, but it’s also certainly a corporate conversation on some level, in terms of the movie studio and their relationship to the X-Men, and characters they want in the movies and want to protect. And were we to want to have Professor X on the show as Patrick Stewart or James McAvoy, or one of those actors that’s a conversation with the actor and the studio. I haven’t really dived into that quandary yet.”

Some viewers will note that it seems like Dan Stevens is doing a Patrick Stewart impression (not fully when he’s playing his rational British mind, but in one particular turn of phrase after discussing the battle his father had with Amahl Farouk), but Stevens says it wasn’t intentional. “I wouldn’t go as far as to say specifically it’s a Patrick Stewart impression,” he told us. “It made us laugh, the idea that David’s rational self might be British, and I think David sort of thinks it’s funny that his dad might be British, so it’s a bit of a playful thing going on there.”

As for that mysterious post-credits scene (which, if you tuned out before you saw it, definitely go back and watch!), Hawley said, “There’s a proud tradition of that that Marvel uses on the feature side, and it’s the beginning of another thought. So I wanted to give people the end song and the feeling of watching the credits, and to let them absorb the complete story they just watched, and then tease what Chapter 2 is going to be.” Speaking of …

Season 2

Image via FX

Unlike some of our other favorite shows (ahem, Atlanta, Westworld, Game of Thrones …) Noah Hawley said that the plan for Legion is to return around the same time in 2018, but with 10 episodes that will start to explore the stories of some of the other characters more. The production is also moving from Vancouver to Los Angeles. “There’s a degree to where the show needs to continue to evolve,” Hawley revealed. “And I’m going to try and look at southern California in a way that we haven’t looked at before, to try and find a way to tell stories that are urban and rural and in the astral plane as it were, and continue to look like nothing else.”

Season 1’s theme was very much that of a long psychological thriller, but Hawley (who also is in charge of the FX series Fargo) hasn’t pinpointed what that will look like going forward: “I don’t have it in my head to say out loud to you in this moment. But I do tend to think that that’s important, that even though the show isn’t an anthology like Fargo, each season has a self-contained-ness to it, an identity to it. But I think it’s a little too early to talk about what that identity might be.”

Hawley also said that while he knows the story he wants to tell overall with the series, he doesn’t yet know how many seasons that will take. “I think there were things about the first season that would unfold faster than they did, and things that I thought would take longer that I dealt with more quickly. I think by the end of the second year I’ll have a better sense of how many more years there are to go than I do right now.”

As for whether Legion will be more grounded in Season 2 now that David is free from the Shadow King, Stevens admitted that, “I don’t think anything is ever quite concrete in the world of Legion, but i’m very intrigued to see what’s coming up!”

And Hawley promised that, as always: “I want to continue to deliver something unexpected.”