Legion Series Creator Talks About Show's Connection With Time and X-Men Franchise

While Chapter 7 of Legion had Dan Stevens' David find himself temporarily freed from the terrors of the shadow king, the last few seconds of the episode had Aubrey Plaza's Lenny aka Amahl Farouk finding a crack in the prison of David's mind as Summerland gets besieged by Division 3.

Now, as the visually stunning mutant television series draws closer to its season finale, series creator and executive producer Noah Hawley speaks up about Legion's link to the X-Men universe and the series' non-linear style in an interview with CBR.

On the series' relationship with time, Hawley explains:

"This is a show that makes the script coordinators crazy, because they're always trying to track the linear dates, and the evolution of it, and it's certainly not that literal. I think time is a tool as a storyteller, and the more grounded we are in the timeline the more linear the story feels, and the less grounded we are the more harder it is, kind of … It creates a kind of state of mind, I think, and I found after the pilot, in those next episodes — two, three, four — that I wanted to start each hour with this sort of montage feel, where what we call the present is a little bit hard to define, Episode Four being the most egregious, where it seems clear that David had been unconscious for a while, because we kept seeing Syd wake up, and there was a little bit of repetition in the images, but there was a sense that time was passing, and it was hard to locate the present until about five minutes into the show, when we finally settled into our first scene."

Hawley also discusses David's connection with the X-Men franchise.

"Certainly David's origin story is the same as it was in the comics. But, that said, we know even from the movies these last couple of years that the timeline has changed, and that the X-Men have always told stories in sort of alternate universes. So, there's certainly many universes in which Professor X could be David's father. You know, I don't really feel like I've sort of limited myself to present-day America, for example, or I've now lost that ability to sort of make this world its own world, just because we now know who David's father is. I think it's hard to know, going forward — I certainly don't have it all worked out yet as to what the second season will entail, but I think what viewers responded to about the show was its inventiveness and its sense of emotional grounding, if not literal grounding. I want to continue to deliver something unexpected, and something where the possibilities, if not infinite, are certainly playful."

Like its non-linear timeline and its unconventional cinematography, Hawley seems to be pointing at a different method of connecting David to Professor X. While the series creator doesn't give away how the two could be, the idea of infinite possibilities sound very experimental. Let's see how things play out this week as FX air's Legion's season one finale tonight at 10 ET/PT on FX.

Read: Legion Showrunner Explains Why Series Won't "Look To The Comics" For Season 2's Stories