Legion recap: 'Chapter 11' 

Dan Stevens, Aubrey Plaza, Jemaine Clement, Jean Smart, Rachel Keller

As it turns out, security guard at a facility dedicated to hunting nigh-omnipotent murderers who can kill people by thinking about them is not the safest of career choices. How many unexploded, non-farm animal, mentally sound soldiers could Division 3 have left? More to the point, can Division 3 still exist with Fukuyama having been hijacked and tampered with? This week’s

 revolves around a devastating attack on Division 3 for the second time in as many episodes, although this time, the assailant is the Mi-Go monk instead of Farouk, and the damage left behind is more mental than physical. The episode revolves around the attack, rather than starting with it or building to it, because nothing in

 corporeal, astral, temporal or otherwise — can ever be linear. Hallways in Division 3 are curved, minds are labyrinths, and time skips from past to future to fill in exposition and resolution at once.

The theme for this week’s part of the story, as introduced in one of this season’s narrator asides, is “contagion.” Beginning with real world examples like the nocebo effect (the opposite of the placebo effect, in which the mind convinces the body that a harmless substance is harmful) the Dancing Plague of 1518 and the Tanganyika Laughing Epidemicm and moving on to a hypothetical demonstration of group of teenage cheerleaders developing a shared tick, the narrator establishes that mental stressors can manifest as physical ailments.

“If the idea of illness can become illness,” the narrator asks as a segue into the episode proper, “what else about our society is actually a disorder?”

The episode then shifts to a wordless flashback of Farouk’s defeat and separation from his body. Following an unglamorous psychic duel with David’s father, reflected in his shades as the chalk animation from season 1, Farouk plops face first into his extravagant plate of couscous. His body is sealed in an ovular, white coffin and entrusted to an order of monks, who bury him under their remote monastery only to hear him start bumping in the night soon after. The monks’ nightmares are just beginning, and so too, it seems, are Ptonomy’s.

In the present timeline, one of those slimy demon chicken delusions crawls into Ptonomy’s ear while he sleeps and causes him to wake up in a part of the D3 compound he doesn’t seem to recognize. Before much can come of that, though, Fukuyama, who has been watching on security monitors, turns his attention to Cary, who is teaching Kerry how to eat and use the bathroom, so she can become a stronger, more independent woman.

Meanwhile, the monk who had been in with the teeth-chattering infected wakes up and disappears, much to the dismay of Clark and the rest of D3 management. It’s intriguing to see, in this episode, the return of the light horror elements that defined much of

’s first season. In the absence of the haunting Devil with Yellow Eyes, the sense of dread that accompanied the sense of confusion in the show’s early episodes never quite materialized in season 2, until this week. The first indication that the monk has escaped is a bloody handprint on the window of the infected room. That discovery leads Fukuyama’s androids to place the facility on lockdown. Before David goes to hunt the monk himself, he decides to go to Farouk for answers.