Last year The Umbrella Academy exploded from their comic book pages into vivid three-dimensional life. We begin in a world that seems similar to our own, but quickly realise that the resemblance is only surface deep.
On October 1st, 1989, forty-three infants are mysteriously born to women who didn’t start the day pregnant. This strange event spurs an eccentric billionaire, Sir Reginald Hargreeves, to try and adopt as many of them as he can. He ends up with seven. Since they all have unique powers, he raises them to be crime-fighting superheroes. We quickly flash forward to each of the siblings as adults. At least, the ones who are alive. Of the seven, we now have five, and they’re only coming together after the death of their father. There’s tension in this reunion, some between the siblings, a lot towards their dad, but that all comes to a crashing halt when their sibling Number Five comes back from a sixteen-year disappearance, warning the family that there’s an apocalypse coming and only they can stop it.
As they try to figure out how to actually accomplish this, long buried family secrets threaten to destroy the family, and in turn, the world. The biggest secret is that Vanya, the only ordinary sibling of the bunch, isn’t as ordinary as any of them believed. Deemed too powerful as a child, Sir Reginald had Alison whisper a rumor for Vanya to forget her power and then putting her on emotional suppressants to keep her power hidden.
Obviously, this all ends up going terribly wrong when Vanya discovers not just her powers, but her family’s role in suppressing them, and she brings on the apocalypse by breaking off a chunk of the moon. Oops. Having failed to prevent the end of the world, the siblings choose to avoid it and Five transports them to a different time right as the moon chunks hit Earth.
And we’ve been waiting to see where they ended up and what hijinks these flawed but powerful siblings get up to next ever since. Luckily, Netflix has given us teasers and trailers, building our anticipation.
As we learned in season one, time travel has consequences. Even though the siblings arrived in Dallas in the 1960’s, they’ve arrived in different times, spread out over three years. When Five finally arrives, he has to corral his brothers and sisters all into one place, where he lets them know they have ten days to prevent a different apocalypse. It’s always the end of the world with this family, but frankly, watching them fumble through their own dysfunctional flaws with the fate of the world in the balance is part of this show’s inherent charm.
Since they landed in various years, the siblings all had to go about figuring out how to survive. We get snippets of the lives they’ve managed to create: Klaus is leading a cult, because of course he is; Allison seems to have fallen into being a housewife, though she also looks to be fighting Jim Crow segregation; Luther is champ of an underground fight circuit; and Diego is in a mental asylum. The only two we aren’t clear on is Vanya and Ben. They’re there, but what they’ve been doing isn’t quite as clear in the previews we’ve been given. These storylines promise much deeper character development into each of the siblings, along with how they interact in a time vastly different from the modern time they just left.
We’re dying to know how Vanya is handling not only having newly rediscovered powers, but coping with the fact that she actually ended the world. Adding to that emotional complexity, her story line seems to be tied with one of the new characters that Netflix teased. Sissy is a no-nonsense Texas mom who married too young and for all the wrong reasons. Is her friendship with Vanya something more, perhaps? Fingers crossed we get that intriguing subplot.
It also seems Diego has picked up an interesting sidekick. Or, perhaps more likely, he’s her new sidekick because from what we’ve seen of Lila, she is going to give Diego a serious run for his morally grey money. Mischievous, sarcastic, and devious with a serious unpredictable streak, Lila promises to be a fun new character. We’re interested in seeing how she pushes Diego, both for the good and the bad, motivating him to find new purpose and maybe, dare we hope, a second chance at love?
The third new character we’ve been teased is Raymond. He’s a bit of a mystery, described only as a loyal husband and dedicated leader. Since we see him with Allison, it stands to reason that perhaps he’s the husband to her housewife role and the leader that has her sitting at the lunch-counter. It’s going to be interesting, especially after The Day That Wasn’t (episode six), to see the tension between a married Allison and a pining Luther. It’s also the exact escalation of drama and tension we really want to see. Things can never be easy between Allison and Luther, so this complicated mess of emotional turmoil will provide some deep character progression for them both. Or lead to even messier feelings, either way, we’re here for it.
New characters aside, there are a lot of little breadcrumbs flashed in the season two trailer that have us screaming in anticipation. How could anyone miss a goldfish swimming in place of a head and not wonder what nefarious deeds that guy has planned? He was referenced as having to do with The Commission and given that they’re responsible for time-travelling assassins and are generally pro-apocalypse in season one, I think it’s safe to name this fish a villain.
We also know Hazel is back since he’s the one warning Five about the new apocalyptic threat, which means he probably hasn’t made up with Commission. It wasn’t clear whether Hazel ended up dying at the end of season one since we saw what looked like destruction and devastation surround him and Agnes. But as he also had that magic time-travelling briefcase, anything is possible, including that somehow Cha-Cha made it out before the end of the world. If so, we can only cross all our fingers and toes that she makes an explosive reappearance with nothing but revenge on her mind. Even if we don’t see more Cha-Cha, The Commission is still very determined to see the world end, and has commissioned a new trio of Swedish time-travelling assassins to stop the Hargreeves siblings from interfering.
Another fun breadcrumb is watching a younger Sir Reginald being introduced to his kids by his kids. We now know why he was so eager to adopt the infants at the beginning of season one. We love it when new episodes give us answers in unexpected ways and glimpses into details we didn’t even know we wanted. Like seeing a baby Pogo meeting Sir Reginald and walking off into the mist.
Finally, we get to Ben. Mostly a ghost in season one, it seems the more Klaus uses his powers, the more corporeal Ben gets and while he still seems to be invisible to the siblings, we see him slamming car doors and physically fighting with Klaus in the middle of a street. The speculation on whether Ben was ever really dead at all feels like more of an option with these little details. Or that perhaps Klaus can somehow bring him back, as the ghost of Sir Reginald cryptically told Klaus last season that he hadn’t even touched the extent of his powers. Perhaps this is why Ben has always stayed close to Klaus, and even how he managed to time travel with the siblings.
July 31st is so near, which is when all ten hour-long episodes will be available to stream. We’ll be binging the new season, revelling in all the extraordinary weird that is The Umbrella Academy. In the meantime, we’ll be re-watching season one, trying to find all the Easter eggs and preparing for our second run with the end of the world.
