FX’s delightfully bonkers X-Men spin-off series Legion is coming back for eight more episodes starting this June. This third season will also be the ambitious show’s last, as revealed by the cast and crew at the Television Critics Association winter press tour on Monday. SyFy reports creator and showrunner Noah Hawley said, “It felt like three acts of a story and a natural place to end it.” He went on to hint at where the last eight episodes may go, saying that David Haller (Dan Stevens) has a fragile ego and “can’t see himself as a bad person. He has to see himself as a good person or his mind will fracture even more.”
Speaking of David’s fractured mind, we’re finally going to see the X-Men character hinted at when David was having a conversation with his own subconscious, a subconscious which took David’s physical form but spoke with a different accent because Legion gonna Legion. That X-Men character is Professor X, who was David’s biological father in the comics. The official Twitter for the show announced that both of David’s biological parents have been cast. (Show us all the mutants.)
Professor X will be played by Harry Lloyd, who you probably recognize as Viserys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. David’s mother, Gabrielle Haller, will be portrayed by Stephanie Corneliussen (who played Joanna Wellick on Mr. Robot).
In the comics, Gabrielle was a Holocaust survivor who was trapped in a catatonic state until her doctor asked Professor X to use his powers to help her. She recovered and had an affair with the Professor, parting on good terms without telling him she was pregnant. On Legion, David’s origin story has already been changed; his father — an unnamed and faceless character using a wheelchair — gave him to an adoptive family to protect him from the Shadow King (well, that didn’t work). FX’s casting announcement finally confirmed Professor X is the father.
They’ll have to cover a lot of ground to wrap up this story in only eight episodes, but the show has managed to fit a lot into every episode. And this may not really be the end. At TCA, executive producer Jeph Loeb said, “These characters, part of the Marvel library and some created by Noah, they will live on. I see it as the end of a graphic novel, but if Noah came back to tell more and the cast is available, I would hope FX would say yes.”