Legion Season 3: Can David Be Redeemed?

This article contains some spoilers for Legion season 3.

As Legion‘s third and final season gets underway this week on FX, star Dan Stevens has been pondering whether his character David, objectively one of the (if not the most) powerful mutants in the world of Marvel, can find redemption by the time the series comes to an end.

When the show began in season 1, the audience mainly felt pity for the mentally ill David as he was captured in a clueless state and had been used by various people and mutants who we had assumed were villains, but season 2 revealed that all was not as it seemed, and that David was set to bring about the end of the world as his character wandered down a dark path.

In a new interview with Collider, Stevens sat down to chat about where David’s at when we join his weird and deadly crusade in season 3, and what could lie ahead as he plays with time travel in his search for answers, power and control.

“Whether I think he can be redeemed or should be, is not really for me to say,” said Stevens. “He wants to. He wants to see if he can undo this unholy mess, partly that he’s created, and partly that was created for him in his makeup. And so, we introduce this element of time travel with, can David go back and change the past? Can he change some of these awful things that he’s done? That’s one way of attacking the problem. And then, Syd confronts him with this very sophisticated element of, ‘Yeah, you can go back and change all of these things, but does that really change who you are, as a person?’ That, to me, is a really interesting way of tackling that problem.”

Stevens goes on to explain that season 2 set the theme for the conclusion of Legion creator Noah Hawley’s arc for the series, and that the final season will ultimately seek to find a balance for David between how he’s been treated and how he’s treated others. Lest we forget about what he did to his loving, trusting girlfriend in the final episodes of the second season:

“It was definitely a very dark turn, and a lot of this season is about dealing with that dark turn. How does he reconcile that? How does he come to terms with that? He wants to believe he’s a good person, he wants to try to fix things and he wants to make things right, and yet he’s done horrible things. Some of that, he can attribute to possession, but it’s not that. He’s made some really, really bad choices. So, can somebody who’s done these bad things still be loved? Are they still worthy of love? How is he gonna fix this uniquely weird state that he’s in?”

Stevens certainly isn’t letting David off the hook for his past actions, adding “If people are angry at David, they should be.”