We are legend: we finally discover why the protagonists have superpowers

Watching the first two episodes it seemed clear to everyone that We are legend simply wanted to tell the story of a group of interrupted teenagers grappling with a supernatural power in order to make the plot more enticing: nothing could be more wrong. After having seen the third and fourth episodes of the drama co-produced by Rai Fiction And Fabula Pictures it is, in fact, clear both why the children possess extraordinary abilities and why We are legend chose to start right from here: the powers are not a surplus to conquer the spectator, but an expedient through which the screenplay and direction try to make us understand the fragility that adolescence brings with it. Using a sort of Dantesque retaliation, we discover, in fact, that the powers have a reason to exist only for all those characters who demonstrate a particular discomfort or anxiety. Maximum (Emanuele Di Stefano), for example, his hands become incandescent when he gets angry because it is clear that he hides within himself the discomfort of a boy forced to confront with the death of a parent too soon, as if that grief was boiling inside the fibers of his body.

The same goes for Lin Mei (Giulia Lin), the Asian girl who has the power to change her appearance because she doesn’t accept or like herself as she is, convinced that the others – especially Sara (Beatrice Vendramin) are all more beautiful than her, but also for Andrew (Milo Roussel), the boy born with a heart malformation who has lived his life so much on the razor’s edge that he has the power to bring back to life those who didn’t make it. The discussion, however, also extends to two other protagonists of We are legendthat is to Jean (Nicolas Maupas), a boy who is unable to establish a dialogue with his father and who has the gift of never dying or harming himself, as if he had already absorbed all the pain of rejection upon himself, and to Greta (Sofya Gershevich), which manages to rewind time because she is forced to deal with the guilt of having happened to be at the wrong time when her older brother was about to be shot in the middle of a robbery.

We are legendIn short, it offers the viewer a much more accurate reading level than it seemed at first: we are not, in fact, talking about a fiction style** The Umbrella Academy **as someone wrote on X (how strange not to call it Twitter anymore), but about a story in which some teenagers are forced to deal with own inner demons finding themselves managing faculties much larger than them. In their midst, however, equally interesting characters swarm and fit into a much larger fabric: from Nicola (James George), a noble soul that fits into two narrative lines, to Viola (Margherita Aresti), sister of Marco (Giulio Pranno) and Massimo’s first love. There are many irons in the fire at this point, as is the desire to find out where We are legendwhich boasts the direction of Carmine Eliawill lead us: whether towards the acceptance of fragility or the desire to shuffle the cards and push ourselves beyond our limits.