‘Legion’: The Shadow King Comes Out of Hiding in Season 2

The new season of FX and Marvel Television’s mind-bending mutant series Legion is set to premiere in just a couple weeks, but fans still don’t know much about the show’s return.

But now Noah Hawley is opening up about classic X-Men foe the Shadow King’s impact on Legion Season 2, teasing how Amal Farouk has used characters like Lenny Busker and Oliver Bird in order to achieve his goals and manipulate David Haller.

“Lenny and Oliver are being used by this character, Amahl Farouk,” Hawley told EW. “He wears their faces from time to time. It’s his way of hiding himself. I had this thought of, ‘What does Freddy Krueger do during the day?’ I thought it was interesting, the idea of the downtime of these characters. They’re not being used and so what is reality like for them?”

The characters will have a new “reality,” which was teased in the season finale when they hop in a car and drive somewhere warm.

“They’re being placated, that they’re in some place beautiful that may not actually be a physical space, it may be a mental space, like an astral plane,” Hawley said. “They have everything they need, they’re by the pool, it’s beautiful, but at a certain point, there’s part of them that realizes that they’re just trapped in this reality they don’t have any control over.”

The inevitable confrontation between David and the Shadow King has been brewing for some time, but that won’t be the only problem the titular mutant will be dealing with when the series returns.

The newly released synopsis promises that new alliances will be forged with former enemies:

With David and Oliver missing and Farouk on the loose, the team forms an unlikely alliance with their former enemy ‘Clark’ (Hamish Linklater) and his well-funded government organization, Division III. Meanwhile, Amahl Farouk (Navid Negahban) is on a new path to attaining infinite and world-ending power.

Legion will jump forward in time after the first season finale, in which David was abducted by a mysterious orb and whisked away. But while a year has passed for everyone else, to David he’s only been gone less than a day.

“For David, it hasn’t been a year, so he’s getting his head around that, for a start. For everybody else, it’s been a year and a lot has happened in that year,” said star Dan Stevens in an interview with Collider. “David has had another strange experience. He thought his problems maybe were solved with the expulsion of the Shadow King, but actually, it’s not that simple. So, far less time has passed for David. When we find him, he’s coming to terms with a whole new bend on reality.”

We’ll see how David copes with his new normal when Legion returns to FX on April 3rd.