‘Legion’ remains a visual whiplash in Season 2

THERE are shows you watch, and there are shows you have on. I have an entire stable of series — including everything from ABC’s “The Good Doctor” and “Designated Survivor” to CBS’ “SEAL Team” and from the Season 2 premiere.

Geneticist Cary Loudermilk (Bill Irwin) is wearing a protective suit while trying to reach David. He’s physically present, but, Cary notes, “It’s possible that his mind is locked in the astral plane.” In a control booth, something with a head resembling a wicker basket from Pottery Barn communicates telepathically with identical women with Auto-Tuned voices who look like Sonny Bono disguised as a 1970s magician. When Cary removes his helmet and refuses to put it back on, a security force made up of helmeted children rushes in threatening to shoot him. That’s when Kerry Loudermilk (Amber Midthunder), the young woman who shares Cary’s body, emerges from inside him ready for a fight.

Later, the theme song from “The Banana Splits” plays an integral role.

TV’s most aggressively stylized series is a visual whiplash in which relatively anything can happen. “Legion” is a startling mindscrew that often resembles something Cirque du Soleil might have teamed with M.C. Escher to stage at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The result is like being repeatedly dropped midway into someone else’s fever dream.

David proves to be one of the best audience surrogates on TV, because he rarely has a clue what’s happening and what is or isn’t real.

In Season 1, he was close friends with fellow mental patient Lenny (Aubrey Plaza), until it was revealed that she was merely a vessel for an ancient being named Amahl Farouk who had haunted David since he was a child. At season’s end, Farouk escaped from Lenny and leaped into the body of scientist Oliver (Jemaine Clement, “Flight of the Conchords”). So when David encounters them both in the new season, he’s understandably confused as to what the person who looks like Lenny, and is laughing while licking an oversized lollipop and riding a carousel, really is.

“Does it matter?” Oliver asks. “Bodies and minds, humanity. Nobody has ever asked a puma its opinion or a stalk of asparagus how it feels. My associate is who she needs to be at this moment.”

Those two moments aren’t even as strange as “Legion” gets.

At one point in the first two episodes, something happens that makes even David take a step back and say, “Whoa!”

You’ll surely be saying the same thing long before that.

Matthias Clamer FX Dan Stevens returns Tuesday as David Haller in the X-Men spinoff “Legion.”