FX’s Marvel television series Legion is coming to an end. The network recently announced that the upcoming season three, which will premiere in June, will also be the show’s final one.
According to FX CEO John Landgraf, who broke the news at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour, creator Noah Hawley envisioned Legion as a three-season story arc and will move forward with that plan.
Howley confirmed Landgraf’s word in a follow-up talk with reporters. “I think endings are what give stories meaning,” said Howley. “I always thought about this as a complete story, and it felt like three acts of a story.”
“What the show is following is this cycle of mental illness,” the 52-year-old filmmaker added. “We met David [Dan Stevens] who had been at his lowest point and tried to kill himself, then he meets Syd [Rachel Keller], and he gets balanced out. He’s on his meds. He gets out and everything’s going great for a while, and he thinks maybe I don’t need these meds. He goes off meds the and spirals down, which is where we find him now,” Hawley said. “The question now is can he get back to some kind of good place, or is he gone for good? Once we tell that story it feels like we’d be going back to the beginning of the cycle.”
However, the end of the series doesn’t mean that its characters won’t be back at some point in the future. Marvel Television head Jeph Loeb told Deadline that if Howley decides to tell another Legion story in the future, he will have that opportunity.
“From Marvel’s point of view, Noah told us the end of the story when he told us the beginning of the story,” said Loeb. “These characters, some of which are part of the Marvel library, will live on. I think of it as if this is the end of this graphic novel. If Noah came back to us in a day or a year, we hope that FX would want to tell the next story.”
Legion premiered in 2017, focusing on Marvel Comics character David Haller/Legion, who is a mutant diagnosed with schizophrenia. The series also stars Aubrey Plaza, Bill Irwin, and Jeremie Harris among others. Although the series saw a continuous dip in ratings, it remained well received by the critics throughout its first two seasons.
