10 TV Shows That Make You Question Your Own Reality
5. Legion
Legion is an FX series based within the X-Men chronology, and focuses on the titular mutant Legion / David Haller when his battles with his mutations are diagnosed as schizophrenia and sees him incarcerated within the walls of a psychiatric hospital. Feeding into the X-Men lore, the show is another example of the unreliable narrator trope, with David’s experiences and memories constantly being called into question as he relates to the mutants around him. Throughout the show, we only get given fragments of the background of David and the other leading characters’ histories and backstories, parceled into small portions that are drip-fed to the audience infrequently and in ways that can’t be totally trusted.
Moreover, the main villain feeds off the mind of David like a parasite, and throughout the early parts of the show, its influence is clear in distorting and poisoning memories that David and his mutant friends are trying to parse for critically important information. This means that everything we actively see on screen during the trippy voyages into David’s mind are constantly called into question, and memories are changed significantly with massive emotional resonance which leaves the audience piecing together what exactly the truth is throughout the series. If that sounds complicated enough, this is all before characters get imprisoned within the cosmic astral plane, lost in the labyrinthine depths of space and time!
The show itself is gloriously shot, with a brave and experimental texture that really makes this a must-see in-depth examination of mental illness and its effect on clarity of narrative. It is typical of an X-Men series to tackle such massive topics such as mental illness, isolation and alienation in such an effective way, and the manner in which it approaches its subject matter over its 3 seasons truly has its viewers considering the linearity of their own reality in a way they hadn’t before.