#mr.robot takes full advantage of this blindspot its possible legion does too

[2003daredevil]

Ok so tonight I wanna talk about pre-canon David. I am in just about EVERYTHING I am into I fixate a lot on pre-canon and Legion raises more questions than most.

Specifically a lot of the early episodes in season 1 deal with the Summerland team trying to get an idea of who David is and solve the mystery of his corrupted memories around the Dr.Poole incident. Division 3 end up derailing this investigation along with the discovery of the Shadow King's presence. As soon as they find Farouk, they stop looking into it, but they never really find out what happened.

Ultimately two versions of what happened are put together.

In one, the one David remembers, he started seeing Dr.Poole and initially things were going well. Then he met Lenny, got into drugs, and robbed him in a moment of moral weakness.

The other one more supported by the evidence they find is that yes David started seeing Dr.Poole and things were going well before he got into the blue vapors with Benny after which he stopped being so easy to work with. But the idea of robbing him, if there even was one, was not what made him break in. During a discussion after Poole asked "What do the stars say?" He answered something which revealed something important. After that, Poole noticed David began to act differently. He increased their sessions and started being open and curious again. Then David broke in to Poole's office to destroy the incriminating tapes and beat Dr.Poole so badly they had to put him into a medically induced coma.

Given we never hear of David going to jail, I'm guessing Poole either didn't want to press charges when he woke up out of sympathy for his patient OR David's parents paid him off (the idea that the Hallers have a significant amount of money is reoccuring to me but more on that in another post) OR David "persuaded" him to forget about the whole thing.

The Summerland team probably assume that what David said revealed the presence of the Shadow King who then took control, covered his tracks, and made sure Poole wouldn't be involved with David anymore. This tracks with Lenny being there over Benny in the memory as well as the way we know Shadow!David to act as in his scene with Amy, calm and seemingly easygoing compared with the way David usually is.

But what if Ptonomy's initial assessment is right? "The guy's a bomb". The third option for this story is that Farouk didn't play a role at all in this, nor did drugs. David revealed something he was hiding (and David hides a lot, including his alters) and went back to destroy the evidence and injured Dr.Poole for getting in his way and then editing his own memory to absolve himself.

Which brings us to another concept; the David we meet in episode 1 is not who he was pre-canon. This is evidenced by the alters telling him that the idea that he is "a good person (who) deserve(s) love" is a delusion born the moment he saw Syd. He wanted to be with her and so he tried to become the kind of person who could have what he wanted to have with her. Not the kind of person who would beat the shit out of his therapist. But maybe he was. After all, even without the Shadow King, David is plenty capable of that kind of rage and violence. In the pilot alone he stabbed Clark with a pen and lit him on fire, very much on purpose. Ptonomy tried to warn Syd that she really didn't know David very well, and from his track record maybe hes not the safest person to be around. I'm not sure if I believe that David really did all that without Farouk's influence but I do believe that he's capable of it and I wish Noah Hawley had brought that back up again later especially in season 3. I kinda wish we were able to find out ultimately what the stars said.