WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Legion, “Chapter 13,” which premiered Tuesday on FX.
The arrival of Lenny Busker, in the flesh, to Division 3 in last week's episode of Legion probably shouldn't have been that much of a surprise, given that she was previously seen pleading with Amahl Farouk to be released from her astral prison. However, it certainly should have been accompanied by a feeling of dread, not because she might be the Shadow King or else doing his bidding, as most everyone fears, but because Lenny Busker is dead, her body accidentally merged with a wall in Clockworks Psychiatric Hospital some 12 episodes earlier.
Oh, sure., she's appeared regularly throughout the past season and a half, but only as a manifestation of the Shadow King. But in this week's episode, Lenny (Aubrey Plaza) is real, and held in a disorienting interrogation room at Division 3 headquarters, where she's interviewed, first by Clark Debussy (Hamish Linklater), then by Ptonomy Wallace (Jeremie Harris) and, finally, to her relief, by David Haller (Dan Stevens). Real, but not quite right.
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At Clark's prompting, Lenny acknowledges she was a consciousness without physical form, but she's not a living, bleeding body, yet she doesn't quite know how. Farouk didn't simply release her out of the kindness of his heart, and she didn't simply materialize out of thin air. No. But the truth reveals itself over the course of her interrogations, intermingled as they are with scenes of Farouk (Navid Negahban) and Oliver (Jemaine Clement) searching for the body. Or, rather, a body.
We're led to believe, through Lenny's increasingly panicked warnings and Farouk's own actions, that he's found the location of his body, separated from his psyche so many years go by David's father (Charles Xavier), and then hidden by the Silent Monk. It's another body, and through a flashback we learn the real reason why Oliver and Lenny danced, sang and killed their way into Division 3 in "Chapter 10": to steal a piece of suitably retro technology required for something ... nefarious ... that requires Oliver to dig up a corpse buried in the desert, under Farouk's watchful eye.
But whose body is it? Clark suggests that Lenny's isn't her own, at least not entirely. That becomes even more clear first during her exchange with Ptonomy, when she changes her eye color from brown to blue, and then during her conversation with David, in which there's a flash of recognition and of memory, not of his old friend, but of someone closer.
You see, Oliver and the Shadow King aren't prowling the desert, digging up a corpse and following a delightfully kitschy submarine-shaped doughnut truck, in search of Farouk's body. The corpse they excavate isn't Lenny's, and the person they they're searching for is David's sister Amy (Katie Aselton). Last seen, briefly, in the Season 1 finale, Amy may have seemed forgotten by Legion, but that would be so very much unlike such an intricately woven series. There are no dangling threads here, just players occasionally moved off the board, and then returned to meet a tragic end.
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That's what happens to Amy, who's been in whatever passes for witness protection with Division 3. Living in the middle of nowhere, on a Superfund cleanup site guarded by Division 3 guards, she arranges flowers, has recurring dreams of Admiral Fukyama and the Vermillion, and waits for her husband to come home in his Dead Sea Donuts truck. Only this night he doesn't bring home leftover doughnuts, but instead an unmistakable feeling of dread. The kind that's accompanied by Oliver/Farouk, who uses the stolen tech to somehow, painfully, transform Amy into a vessel of sorts for Lenny's consciousness.
The simultaneous realization by David and Lenny of how she emerged from a hole and the desert, and whose body she used to do it, is heartbreaking. However, it then becomes something worse when juxtaposed with the image of Farouk's grinning face peering through the beaded curtain of Amy's house as he watches her screaming through the transformation into Lenny.
It turns out Lenny didn't bring a warning to David; she is the warning.
Airing Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET/PT on FX, Legion stars Dan Stevens, Rachel Keller, Jean Smart, Bill Irwin, Amber Midthunder, Jeremie Harris, Aubrey Plaza, Jemaine Clement, Hamish Linklater and Navid Negahban.