FX

From its opening scenes, it’s clear Legion isn’t going to be your typical live-action X-Men story. Though it deals with the usual epic battle for the future of humanity, that’s just background stuff. The real focus of Legion, which debuted last night on FX, is one man’s struggle to become a hero while also coping with mental illness.

Filmed in a hazy alternate reality that looks like a mashup of the 1960s and the 2060s, the first episode begins with weird, stylized images of a kid growing up in suburbia. We flicker between slo-mo memories of riding bikes and jagged snippets of a present-day mental hospital where our hero David Haller (a delightfully twitchy Dan Stevens) has been living for six years. Gradually we realize that one of the most powerful mutants in history is strung out on psych meds, completely convinced that his almost limitless abilities are just a delusion.