The Absorbing Nightmare of "Legion"

Noah Hawley's "Legion," on FX, the latest Marvel production based on the X-Men, has an aesthetic that might be described as caustic whimsy. It's a sleek, stylized diorama of alarming imagery, as much about fear orange and misery avocado and rage yellow as it is about anything else. You don't actually have to understand much about the X-Men to enjoy watching it. This is good news, since the X-Men, a byzantine superhero mythology that launched, in 1963, as a comic-book series, has always intimidated me. I've got a layman's knowledge of the movies, and I enjoyed Marvel franchises like "Jessica Jones" and "Luke Cage," spinoffs from adjacent mythologies. On occasion, I've tried to absorb the Wikipedia page about the comic books, a document that makes the Talmud look like SparkNotes.