#this is the second time where I give some a dumpy accidentally

[alittlebirb]

Some irreverent chaos from the MCC 24 Green Geckos!

Gem saying Oli is too loud and him replying "you can turn me down to zero if you don't want to hear my ~funny bits~!"

TapL saying he didn't vod review Turtle Run and everyone demanding he watch it RIGHT NOW, OPEN IT UP RIGHT NOW

I also need to mention this is the first time I've watched Oli and his sound effects+music is the best thing I've ever heard

"Do we know left from right? That's important to know before we start doing call outs. If you need a reminder just keep an L by the side of your screen." -Gem

Oli and Gem getting excited over saiko posting their fanart for the event

"They really know how to make me look like an anime protag!" -Oli

"Are we doing a cage stream? We will be doing two cage streams! But for this I've been freed from my cage!" -Oli

5up saying he's getting "bored" of SOT and he needs to "spice it up"

THEY'RE GOING TO BE DOING A ROTATING SANDKEEPER???

Oli freaking out over his sound and Gem shutting him down that she "does NOT want to hear about his tech problems right now."

"If you eat a burger, it slows you down." -TapL

"You are the mother duck, we are the ducklings. Go forth." -Gem to 5up in MD

TapL immediately following that up with a series of obnoxious quacking noises

Oli just flying through an empty map after he died, until he finally figures out how to teleport to mid

The disaster of that fight with Yellow, compounded with the fact that Oli turned his narrator on during the fight. That deadpan robotic voice describing their losing fight while Oli frantically tries to turn it off was a work of art.

Everyone just marveling over how cool MD is while watching the last fight

Oli's FAT DUMPY breaking the elevator

"This is it, after all the pvp teams are like, YES!, their mental high note, here is where we crush their mental." -5up, employing psychological warfare in SOM (Sands Of Mart)

The unhabitable conditions of the block rooms, with pillagers and skeletons breaking their concentration every 2 seconds

Oli and Gem occasionally fighting like bickering siblings

Oli accidentally dropping a "fucked up" in Gem's presence and immediately covering it up with "messed up"

Gem giving the brutal review that "our coms are rougher than I thought it'd be, not gonna lie."

"That remix helped nothing and hurt everything." -Gem

TapL spilling a "dollop" of water on his keyboard

"I've had a big scream!" -Oli

"I need to get my energy out in a stabby game, where I can punch and kick and flail!" -Oli

The chat calling them "the green anxiety's"

Half of the team getting frozen during the vote and demanding a recount

Oli beefing with Joel in the chat over the wait for 5up to rejoin

Oli giving Sapnap permission to pee, and TapL truthing that he didn't wash his hands

5up going through the most stressful experience in his life attempting to reconnect to MCC with the weight of 40 people's expectations on his shoulders

Gem calling TapL "our little green boy" as he flies in RSR

"I got a kill on Sparklez, so that's good. Gotta keep the old man down-" -Oli

TapL calling the way Illumina hit Purpled off the edge and won second round "sexy"

Oli coming in and interrupting 5up's pep talk, and Gem shushing him

TapL digging a hole in mid during SB, getting ferreted out by Pink, and then proceeding to slaughter 3/4 Pensioners

Oli asking if they can take Hamnah and Jojo, and Gem just responding with the most affronted "no."

TapL and Gem winning the second round!

"We've got our spirits awfully down for a team that's in 5th!" -Gem

TapL talking about how, when he was rushing to find a Turtle Run vod, he instead found results on a place called Turtle Run in Illinois

Gem being very rudely awakened about the amount of lava present in the BB map

Oli getting lost about how to get down to middle even though that was what 5up's pre-game pep talk was all about 😭

TapL whaling on Captain Sparklez and screaming "I'M SORRY. I STILL WATCH YOUR VIDEOS!"

"I got shot by The Gay." -TapL after getting killed by Scott

"Not THE GAY!" -Oli

"We don't follow rules 5up, we aren't even listening to our own words!" -Gem

TapL producing an AI generated sentence as an example of Things He Would Say In SOT

Oli eloping with Martyn in HITW during the Mega Chicken Vote, making them the only two HITW enjoyers in the dome!

TapL planning to speedrun AR and putting together a hype playlist (which sadly does not include the Jellyfish Jam from Spongebob SquarePants)

Just the wildly different vibes between each stream, with Gem and 5up being very chill, Oli blasting the loudest hype music available, and TapL listening to the MCC Update video on accident

Both TapL and 5up once again freezing??? 5up straight up crashing????

"They should just give us stimulus coins, for the oopsie." -TapL

TapL predicting his win the second time around and dubbing it TurtleGate

Oli narrating his AR journey and consistently improving the whole way through!

Everyone on Green finishing in a row, aside from 5up who finished a single place apart from them

The absolute travesty that was HITW getting chosen over GR. Who decided this. One of you is going to pay for this. 👁👁

TapL saying he's reaching for the moon this HITW round because it was Techno's philosophy, and getting first place!

"How are you feeling?" -TapL

"HOT." -Oli

Gem and 5up asking Oli if he knows what the colored walls mean in SOT, and the dead silence when he says no (as a funny lil joke, just a silly jest)

"No risky things!" -5up

"Oh no, I did risky things!" -Oli

"...I need to be unlocked." -Oli

5up getting locked in at the end, and Oli declaring "that's showbiz, baby!"

TapL putting on videos of cats to relax

"The reddit predicted us 9th...and I guess they were right!" -Gem

"The reddit can read me like a book." -Oli

TapL putting on the Benny Hill theme during DB

This MCC was a straight up fever dream.

Green Geckos finished MCC 24 in 9th place!

[h0ldthiscat]

How To Talk To Your Son

Read it here or on AO3. 

2016. Look in his eyes for the first time in nearly fifteen years. He doesn’t look the way you thought he would. More like Mulder than you anticipated, which is startling. He also looks a little like the dumpy woman fluttering about the porch, still in disbelief that a government helicopter just landed on her front lawn. He looks like her in way that old married couples are indistinguishable from each other, in the way that dogs start to look like their owners. Or is it the owners who start to look like the dogs?

“William?” you ask, even though you know.

“Yeah?” His voice hasn’t dropped yet.

“I’m Agent Scully, I’m going to need you to come with us.”

He looks to the woman on the porch, her colorless brown hair coming loose from its braid. “What is this about?” he asks.

“There’s not much time to explain,” you say, “but there’s a man in this helicopter who’s very sick and we think you might have a certain… element in your genetic makeup that can help him.”

His blue eyes flash--at least those are yours--as he tries to process. Then he says, “Okay.” Just like that, he believes you, and finally you think you understand how Mulder feels, after all these years.

2015. “Just think about it,” Walter says, and you do. You really do.

You have forgotten what it would be like to come home not smelling faintly of antiseptic and bile every day. You and Mulder are friendly. It wouldn’t be terrible to work with him again.

2014. Don’t think about him as much as you used to. Recall less and less the way his tiny fingers seemed curved in a perpetual half-fist, ready to close around anything that came into his path.

You can’t remember anymore whose father you named him after. Yours, Mulder’s, or your son’s own. Well, you could hardly name him Fox. I mean, really.

2013. Do not answer the phone when Mulder calls. Talk to your mother every day, like some sad woman in a book you read once. Silently assess the measure of her. She’s survived everything you have, but she had to watch it happen to her daughter. It’s worse, somehow, to see your suffering through your mother’s eyes. Guiltily, remember how long you waited to tell her about the cancer.

“I thought it would just go away,” you say one night on the phone in your new apartment, your mother an arm’s length away in Bethesda. “That if I didn’t tell you it wouldn’t be real.” Don’t tell her how you pictured it shriveling up like a grape and becoming a raisin and one day sneezing it out into a tissue, curling your lip at the dark mass in your mucus, and then tossing it into the trash.

“Dana, dear, you’re a doctor. You know that’s not how it works.”

She is the only person who calls you Dana anymore. You asked everyone at work to call you by your last name years ago. Tell them you’re used to it. They comply, except for one intern who calls you “Doctor D.” For some reason, it doesn’t bother you.

Huff: “I know that’s not how it works, Mom.”

She suggests, not for the first time, that you get a cat. You try to laugh it off even though the thought grips you with a cold hand and makes your stomach roil. To get a cat would be admitting defeat and you are not there yet. Quickly think of a reason you have to go and wish her good night with a smile in your voice.

Answer the phone without looking two minutes later when it rings again, assuming it’s her. Start to apologize for your quick sign off. Realize it’s Mulder. Grip the phone with both hands like you used to when a phone was big enough to hold with two hands. Listen to each other breathing for a while.

Say his name, Mulder, like an invocation. When you worked together you learned that many demons can be summoned by the mere utterance of their name at a certain time of day under specific conditions. Allegedly. Feel as if you are summoning him now. Say it’s nice to hear his voice, because it is.

Meet up for coffee two days later and enjoy yourself.

2012. Leave. Take his picture, nothing else.

2011. Feel as if the world is coming to an end when the internet connection goes out one night at the house. Mulder hems and haws, fiddling with the router. He’s emerged from his study. He can’t hole up and scour the deep web without an internet connection, of course.

Say: “It’ll probably be back in an hour or so. You know reception is spotty up here.”

Lounge on the couch with a book for the first time in ages. Notice the swell of your breasts beneath your tanktop and feel incredibly sexual all of a sudden. Stand and take off all your clothes, chilly in the breeze from the open window. Feel like a different person, the kind of woman with a name like Jacquelyn or Isobel with an o. Go to the front room, where the router is. Pose behind him in the doorway and say something ridiculous like, “Why don’t you quit working on that and come to work on me.”

He looks up and says, “Come on, Scully, quit messing around and help me with this.”

Wipe your eyes with the backs of your hands and put your clothes back on. Announce you are going back to the hospital, there is something you forgot to do and it’s got to get done before morning.

Stay there for three or four days until you spill coffee on both your extra sets of scrubs and can’t justify going out to buy new ones. Say you’re sorry and almost mean it when Mulder clutches you and says he was so worried.

Then why didn’t you call me? Don’t say that.

2010. Go to a support group for parents who no longer have children. That’s how they word it, a carefully constructed aphorism because no one wants to say they’re dead. No one wants to talk about tiny faces caked in pallid makeup, every indentation on their lips outlined, little boys buried in their boy scout uniforms, girls in their first communion dresses.

You and Mulder worked a case once--somewhere in the midwest--where a series of graves were upturned and their clothes stolen. Men, women, and children thrown haphazardly back into their padded box-beds in various states of decomposition. Local law enforcement had found a ripped piece of a communion veil on a tree. You touched it without gloves on because you needed to know what it felt like. Soft, impossibly soft, more precious than the top of his head with his swirl of dark hair like his father’s.

Dana, would you like to share today, the group leader asks. You say no thank you and get yourself another cup of coffee. You are jittery on the drive home. When you pull up in the driveway, all the lights are turned out. In the living room, pick up a pillow and scream into it until it feels like your throat bleeds.

2008. After the snowiest winter you can remember (although your memory’s not so good these days), go somewhere warm. Bermuda. Puerto Rico. Belize. Hawaii. The week before, stand in dressing rooms at the mall and tilt your head at your reflection in the mirror. Is that you? Is that what you look like? She’s not so bad, you suppose. Turn profile and admire the curve of your ass. Push your breasts together, then apart.

Decide you have aged well. Buy a long, flowing coverup. “Forget” to pack it.

2006. You begin to write him letters, advice for primary school and how to talk to kids who seem mean. How to do taxes and establish a line of credit. The lyrics to a Dionne Warwick song. You never send them. They live in a box in the guest room. You paint it a bearable sort of green and during a fight you accidentally refer to it as “William’s room.” Mulder just sort of stares at you, stunned.

2005. Buy a house. Pay in cash. Pick out furniture at Pottery Barn and Pier One. Think that things are finally looking up. Knock on wood. Lay between sheets you finally own again and think blissfully, I could get used to this.

You do not.

2004. Toast miserably to nothing on election night.

“Four more years,” Mulder intones sarcastically.

Snap at him, “What do you have to be miserable about? You can’t even vote.”

2003. On his second birthday, stare at a stain on the hotel wall while Mulder takes you from behind, his hands like vice grips on your waist. Let him finish quickly and sloppily kiss your shoulder and then go to the bathroom to clean up. Think about finishing yourself off. Slide your hand between your legs and realize you don’t feel like you used to. For years you were the only one who knew yourself, but it’s different now.

2001. Split in two with the weight of him, the size. When Monica wipes the sweat from your brow and tells you you’re doing great, you’re doing wonderfully, Dana, joke: he has broad shoulders like his father. Do not scream where the hell is Mulder, even though you want to. Breathe the way you’ve been taught, the way they do in movies and the way you did on a yoga mat in that studio above an Indian restaurant on K Street, imagining this moment in a hospital bed and not some shantytown near the thirty-third parallel.

Wonder why John has that terrible accent if he was born here, where they drawl their r’s and their e’s sound like i’s. Try to scream. The pain is a bubble in your throat and you want to bite something, want to push your shoulders back and together until your arms snap off and you dissolve into stardust. But you don’t, and neither does he, all eight pounds nine ounces of him, wailing into the darkness in late spring.

He is perfect.

2000. Feel him growing inside of you. He is the size of banana, your obstetrician tells you. Hate how people always liken fetuses to fruit. Why not little animals or the shipping boxes at the post office? Your baby would fit in a standard large overnight envelope, the kind with the accordion sides. You’ll take it? Lovely. And how will you be paying today?

1997. Nod somberly at the diagnosis and wonder how to tell your mother that you won’t be giving her any grandchildren.

[foolgobi65]

finn, the last son of krypton

so theres this photo set for a superman au where finn is clark and rey is lois and i cant stop thinking about it so heres kind of a bare bones (still too fucking long) way of how it could work out. this is like ... part one.. because its too fucking long and strange and its 3:30 am 

first, since its got aliens and i needed a way to give luke the ~legend~ status he’s got in canon, i figured he could have telekinesis 

maybe there’s a mutation, and some humans develop powers. anakin skywalker is turned by senator palpatine, who seizes power in a coup, turns public opinion against mutants and uses darth vader to purge anyone with powers

there is no empire, really. there is a State of Emergency, and certain aspects of the constitution are rewritten. term limits, are taken out. 

luke and leia are born and split apart. bail organa is a senator from washington maybe, raises leia who can feel people’s emotional state (useful, for when she becomes a spy and later general of the underground resistance. until luke tells her, she thinks its just intuition) 

luke is a fighter pilot, whose big victory is when he gets in a (smuggled) plane and shoots down a nuclear bomb right before it hits san francisco

they say he saved a million lives that day, and so he can’t understand how he could have failed ben. how all that power couldnt save his students when he most needed it. 

han solo is still a smuggler, but since there never really is a war, he just ends up aiding the shadowy rebellion. 

leia runs for congress, then for senate, taking her father’s old seat. sometimes, she misses the rebellion 

she declines to run for reelection when the first order starts making some noise. she is appointed director of the cia. 

which brings us to the first order! people who are still afraid of mutants and what their freedom might mean, an extremist organization driven underground that is seeking to make its ugly return

there’s an underground bunker full of scientists trying to figure out how to self induce the mutations, in order to create an army of complacent, superpowered warriors to protect them and attack their enemies. 

so, now that that’s out of the way, imagine a universe where the last son of krypton doesn’t crash in smallville, where he isn’t taken in by the kents. 

where maybe he crashes outside that first order bunker, and two scientists come out and find a spaceship, and a child inside

they look at each other and once theyve gone past their first thought (aliens!!) they wonder at his genetic code

the first order runs tests, but they don’t see evidence of the normal superpower mutations. in fact, the alien child seems to be fairly weak compared to normal human children of the same age

(always knew we were strongest, they mutter, smirking.) 

the first two scientists, who happen to be married and like the look of the baby’s face decide to keep it (him). to raise him, because they didn’t think they could ever have children of their own

it’s all fun and games until he turns 10

at age 10, the boy who was once kal-el begins to develop powers beyond imagine. 

one day he can see through bodies, trees, buildings. another, he can hear the bees buzzing in a field five miles away. he tears the car door off its hinges

his previously “loving” parents, freak the fuck out. 

immediately, he’s taken to the underground bunker that before he had only known of as his parents’ workplace. he is tied up and tested on

he is more powerful than any mutant, and he has been allowed to grow up as an individual for too long to be controlled.

they try their best anyways. 

his parents tell him he’s disgusting, that he’s terrifying, that he’s a monster. they tell him he is unworthy of love. 

at some point they realize that he needs the sun, and so they take it away. he spends the rest of his time with the first order inside the bunker where they test him, torture him, break him. 

he grows to be afraid of what he can do, believe that he is too powerful to exist. that he should be dead, but continues to breathe only due to the benevolence of the first order

(they’re trying to crack his genetics again, and use the information in the spaceship he arrived in. they can’t understand kryptonian, so its slow going.) 

years later, commander poe dameron, intelligence operative and get away driver extraordinaire sneaks into the bunker trying to figure out what they’re doing, is captured but somehow escapes with the person the first order brands as FN-2187 (only people get to have names) 

anyways they escape in a dumpy ass truck, and when poe asks his new buddy what his name is, he replies “i dont know” 

he carefully doesnt think about how his parents once called him clark. he doesn’t get to be clark 

“imma call you finn, then” finn smiles. 

eventually, they stop at a safe spot and poe asks finn if he’ll come with him. finn, who doesn’t know anything except that he is a weapon, doomed to destroy all good things, says no

(poe is the first good thing he’s known since Before) 

he runs. 

finn has a 5th grade education, but Before, he used to be sickly and spent a lot of time in the library. he walks into one and begins to read. 

for a few months, this is all he does -- somehow the powers have affected his cognition so he can read and understand more and better than anyone in the world. he befriends the local librarian, who thinks he dropped out of school young and wants to help get him back on track

she shows him the nearest homeless shelter, which is where he sleeps. she brings him two meals a day that they eat together as she helps him learn math and science and history and literature 

behind his back, she informs someone about this genius, troubled boy she knows, and when someone comes to the library and tells finn that he’s special, he runs again

this time, he decides to run to mexico, because he wants to learn more. he works and lives and learns, and without knowing or understanding he grows strong. one day, he makes a mistake and misjudges his strength, revealing himself. he runs again

over time finn begins to learn control, mainly because he’s so afraid. he travels from place to place and realizes how Good people are, how dangerous he could be to them. he falls in love for the first time, with humanity. he lives in the anxiety that one day he might accidentally become the monster the first order insisted he was. 

eventually, he gains enough control that he realizes he could use his abilities to help, even though he knows he shouldn’t. even if he didn’t hurt anyone, finn knows that they would only react in disgust, anyways. 

he whispers this to himself everyday, that he can’t he shouldn’t he wont, but in the end, he does. he helps, and then he runs (again and again) 

at some point, he learns to fly. it becomes the only one of his powers that he enjoys, that isn’t touched by the fear.

(its FLYING) 

but at the same time, he learns -- he lives, and smiles and loves but most importantly, he listens. finn’s got a way about him that make people want to open up, and so they do. people tell him their stories while he sits on their stoops, and he begins to write them down because he wants to remember. he keeps a journal. 

one of these stories is so fantastic that he sends his write up to a local newspaper, just so someone can please interview indira she’s so freaking amazing and he wants everyone to know!

instead, they ask finn if he’ll just do it himself. finn begins freelance reporting, talking to people in the places he runs to and sending write ups to the local english language paper. he falls in love a second time, now with his chosen profession. 

someone, somewhere tells finn to find home. that he needs to stop running and set up roots. they tell him to find a big city with lots of people he can write about and stay. to try, at least. 

finn, skeptical, agrees, but only because yakov glared really hard and said he wanted weekly postcards and expected them from the same location for at least 6 months. 

finn doesnt know why this was effective, only that it was. yakov’s 15 grandchildren do. 

so finn decides to maybe stop running, and figures metropolis is as good as any place to try. he sends his portfolio to the daily planet because that was one of the newspapers he used to read in that library After. its one of the papers he’s kept up with over all these years.  

on his first day he bumps into daily planet star reporter rey, a known crusader for justice and one time winner of the pulitzer prize. 

she’s partnered with him for his first story and doesn’t like it until they clear their first scrape. it’s only when she decides to trust him that she smiles

and when she smiles, finn feels something weird, a type of warmth even greater than that first moment he soaked in the sun’s rays. 

this, he realizes later, is the beginning of how he falls in love a third time. 

at the time, its the moment he decides to stay. 

[geekade]

Legion of Spoilers - Chapter 2

“Well, we know where we’re going, but we don’t know where we’ve been….”

“We find your powers, we see your triggers. But what matters most: We make you whole.”

Accompanied by a voiceover that suggests this may already be a memory, David and his rescue team arrive at the impossibly lovely institute Dr. Bird runs to teach people like him and Syd to understand and master their powers. Noah Hawley has hinted that Legion takes place in an alternate universe, and Summerland appears to be this world’s School for Gifted Children, with Dr. Bird as its Professor X. By way of introduction she explains to David that humanity has begun to evolve, and that the government maintains “divisions” dedicated to tracking and studying people with superhuman abilities. Her people rescued him from Division Three. Bird goes on to explain that David’s “symptoms” are evidence not of mental illness but of telepathy and possibly telekinesis. She teaches him how to “turn down the volume” on the thoughts he’s been hearing all his life and promises that tomorrow the “memory work” will begin.

“Memory work” turns out to consist of revisiting actual memories in a plexiglass shed equipped with a kind of analog telepathic LAN table. David is accompanied by Dr. Bird and Ptonomy as the latter shepherds them through a series of memories that can’t seem to go long before turning odd, sinister, or outright frightening. The series continues to tease out the events that preceded David’s institutionalization and begins to expand on his childhood. David and Amy (and an adorably dumpy beagle) shared what appears to have been a happy rural youth, and his memories of her and their mother seem untainted. But a strangeness permeates recollections of his father, whose face is hidden in shadow. And whether he is reading a bedtime story about a matricidal boy or driving them out for some late-night stargazing, young David seems to regard his father with rather more awe – or fear – than anything resembling the ease he shows with Amy or his mother.

Legion’s characteristic quick cuts also give us glimpses of David’s life shortly before Clockworks, which in this episode alternated between counterproductive sessions with the ill-fated Dr. Poole and attempts to self-medicate. With Poole, as with Kissinger and Bird, David is uneasy and evasive, ducking questions with halting, clumsy deflections which may or may not include actual time jumps. He’s much more at ease with Lenny, whose friendship predated their concurrent hospitalizations. In this episode’s flashback she greets David after one of his appointments astride a stolen stove. They wheel it to The Greek (Eddie Jemison), and Lenny convinces him to accept the stove in exchange for a vial of blue liquid. A creepy amphibian humidifier transforms this liquid into the Vapor. As Lenny settles into her high, muttering “Red leather, yellow leather,” David looks over and sees her briefly replaced (possessed? transformed?) by the Devil with Yellow Eyes.

This time viewers move through David’s memories with Ptonomy and Dr. Bird, whose experience of them is as disjointed and disorienting as ours. Flummoxed by the tangle of his past, Dr. Bird arranges for David to undergo a neural scan to map his memories. The scan – an alt-universe MRI apparently assembled with spare parts from the Fallout universe – instead reveals a large amygdala and a pattern of neural activity that doesn’t correlate with typical memory recall. This activity culminates in a spike that sends Cary Loudermilk scurrying from the control room, leaving David trapped in the machine while the Devil with Yellow Eyes comes close enough to touch him. In his panic David teleports the entire machine out into the yard.

The neural activity spike Cary witnessed was David non-corporeally projecting himself to the source of the voice he’d heard calling him. It belonged to Amy, who was spelling his name for a recalcitrant administrator doggedly denying he’d ever been a patient at Clockworks. Amy seems to hear David call her name, but he’s powerless to intervene as The Eye finds her. Syd talks David out of his intended one-man rescue mission, promising that they’ll be better equipped to help once David has a grasp of his powers. That’s no comfort to Amy, who ends this episode in a grimy, decrepit room facing The Eye and an aquarium-like box filled with inky, eel-like slitherers.

Legion’s second chapter is preoccupied with wholeness. It’s a core tenet of Summerland, where Dr. Bird promises to make David whole by reconnecting him with the power everyone else wrote off as a dangerous delusion. By assimilating the events and emotions that accompanied its appearance, Bird believes all her charges can master their powers. (It remains to be seen, however, whether this mastery itself is Summerland’s ultimate goal; Ptonomy alludes to David’s possible value in the war but does not elaborate.) Ptonomy is trying to assemble David’s memories into something recognizably linear and coherent. Amy is tracking him down to make their family whole again. And Syd and David continue to build a romance out of the few intimacies possible when physical contact is out of the question.

David resists the call to wholeness, constrained by fear and circumstance. He lacks the resources and ability to confront The Eye and save Amy, and his power is just as likely to accidentally injure her as it is to take out Division Three. He has bifurcated his consciousness to avoid the Devil with Yellow Eyes: No matter how many times Ptonomy replays David’s time-jump memory glitches, there’s a greater-than-zero chance no single timeline exists to be reassembled. And however positive and well-intentioned it may be, Dr. Bird’s insistence that David has experienced no delusions, only unacknowledged manifestations of his powers, contains a terrifying implication: If Dr. Bird is right, the Devil with Yellow Eyes is real. David can no longer write off the apparition as a mere hallucination, and even Syd finds it difficult to speak of the creature she glimpsed while her consciousness was in David’s body. Fortunately, this does nothing to impede their nascent romance, whose incompleteness may be its security. Pieces are manageable, but anything still in one piece is just moments away from being shattered.

QUOTES

·       “The human race is beginning to evolve.”

·       “Why is it blue?” “It’s always blue.”

·       “How do I know they won’t kill her?” “Because she’s bait.”

ODDS & ENDS

·       David is munching on a Twizzler when he emerges from Dr. Poole’s office, the same candy he stole from Lenny last episode to flirt with Syd. In spite of this possible evidence to the contrary, I refuse to believe Lenny is just in his head.

·       Lenny proposes a heist on Dr. Poole’s office, perhaps foreshadowing the unfortunate event referenced by Dr. Kissinger?

·       When David and Lenny do the Vapor, there’s a birdcage in the living room. In later scenes the bird and the cage are missing.

·       In rather disappointing news, The World's Angriest Boy in the World is not a real book. Thepassage we hear is a great (if chilling) riff on how warped and violent children's stories can be.

·       “Snik-snak” is equal parts Wolverine and Vorpal Sword and my new favorite onomatopoeia.

·       Both Cary Loudermilk’s computer and daughter share the name Kerry. (Paging Indiana Jones.)

·       Thanks to his astronomer dad, David can casually name-check Andromeda, Cassiopeia, Boötes, Canis Major, Lupus, and Telescopia, and they talk to him.

·       I’ll start calling them mutants when the show does.

·       The lyrics sung over the opening scene are from The Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere,” whose video shares a certain aesthetic sensibility with Legion. Surreal animations, nested images, and time jumps play over a man who never stops running. David Byrne described the song as “a resigned, even joyful look at doom.”

FAN THEORIES, or WHAT THE HELL I THINK IS GOING ON

·       I was wrong about Syd being unreal and I may be wrong about Lenny being real. Whoops.

·       I’m much less confident this week about the significance of colors, although I continue to believe they indicate something, even if that turns out to be nothing more than Hawley adopting the comic book convention of a single outfit and/or signature shades.

·       Nevertheless, this week’s Colorwatch: That weird bird in David's vapor flashback was colored almost identically to the Clockworks orderlies’ uniforms. In both past and present tense Amy is wearing pastels, suggesting a childlike innocence or vulnerability. Summerland is dominated by fresh green, white light, and pale wood, with the exception of the sleeping quarters and lab. Dr. Bird dresses in neutral tones of cream, ivory, and beige. David's father's pickup is red and white, the same vivid red that recurred throughout the previous episode. As David ages through childhood, his clothes progress from primary colors to mostly yellow, perhaps alluding to the Devil’s imminent appearance. The stove Lenny steals is orange, a shade similar to the scarf Syd always wears. Lenny wears olive green, red, and black, and settles into her Vapor high muttering “Red leather, yellow leather.” Finally, while Chapter 1 dealt primarily in solids and the occasional stripe, Chapter 2 has introduced more complex patterns and textures, as the plot thickens and David begins to grapple with the complexity of his situation.