What's the deal with Legion?

[flanl3]

No, really, what’s the deal with Legion?

I mean, when they first show up, Rimmer’s soft-light. If Legion’s really a sum of the four in both body and mind, shouldn’t his suit be phasing through a fourth of him, or he be missing a fourth of the things he touches, or just occasionally phase a little bit of the way through the floor then get stuck? These are important things to know.

Also, once everybody falls asleep, how come he’s ‘getting tired’ if people being unconscious just take them out of him? Shouldn’t he just stick around a while and just generally rock around with Lister if everybody else is going off to bed?

What’s more, when he’s switching Rimmer to hard-light, what’s making Legion turn him back on? Once Rimmer is off, it sure doesn’t seem like a priority of the rest of the crew for him to have physical form, or even get him turned back on. Surely they don’t want him back on more than they don’t want him back on. (Wow, what unfortunately redundant phrasing.)

These are all very important questions. There must be something more to Legion than the episode really tells us.

Topic

[Dave]

There’s clearly meant to be more to Legion than just the sum of the minds that make him up. There’s also an element of his own personality and self-interest in there – otherwise he wouldn’t want to keep the crew as prisoners when all four of them want to leave.

[(deleted)]

Do a bit of background Googling on Gestalt psychology, it’s all consistent with the ideas. The central concept in essence is ‘greater than the sum of its parts’ rather than a mathematical sum equation.

[(deleted)]

It ties in with the philosophical concept of God being a ‘best case scenario’ metaphor rather than a literal entity, which is also what Demons And Angels is about. Lots of episodes about moral relativity in IV-VI, I wonder what books they were reading…

[Dave]

Or, as it is sometimes alternatively translated, ‘other than the sum of its parts’.

Because I think more interesting than the angle of Legion simply being a combination of the four crewmates is the idea that there is something more there – that there is something of Legion that persists from incarnation to incarnation.

His knowledge and awareness of his own past, as well as his own nature, point to this.

But the show simplifies it when it comes to Kryten’s ultimate solution to escape (probably sensibly, as there’s only so far you can pursue a deep philosophical discussion of these ideas within half an hour).

[(deleted)]

I don’t buy Legion being an actual character with a backstory – surely he’s a metaphysical idea that only comes into physical existence when the crew arrive. Him evidently not wanting them to leave is because the crew are all so toxically co-dependent on each other. Think of it in terms of Better Than Life/Back To Reality – events are being constructed by the crew’s subconscious minds.

(Hadn’t thought about it before but there’s a fair bit of Confidence & Paranoia there too. Legion as a pitch would actually fit in the original series 1 concept!)

[Dave]

I quite like that explanation.

I also wonder how they would have had the crew deal with Legion if it had been a series 1 story (without Kryten).

[Ben Saunders]

Legion is a gestalt of minds, and apparently physical appearance, not a gestalt of whether or not you’re a soft-light hologram. Also, he clearly has hard-light tech, so he could probably just make himself hard-light if he wanted to.

[Ian Symes]

As you can see, the real deal with Legion is that he’s a gestalt entity. He’s in his early 40s, is unmarried, and currently resides in deep space. Thanks for writing.

[cwickham]

I think Lister gets stupider every year.

[Anonymous]

Kryten seems to be getting simpler every year. He was at his most independent and street-smart in Series VI but now feels very subservient and David Rossy. Robert Llewellyn plays him differently now and the dynamics of the newer scripts don’t help.

[Author]

Replies