WEB EXCLUSIVE

The universe works in all sorts of mysterious ways, so when 43 children are born to unimpregnated women on October 1st of 1989, an eccentric billionaire by the name of Sir Reginald Hargreeves goes on a journey to find and collect all these children and uncover the meaning behind this anomaly. He only gets 7 of them. Hargreaves soon discovers that each child born that day was gifted with extraordinary abilities, and begins to train these children into harnessing their powers, forming a superhero team called ‘The Umbrella Academy’ along the way. Flash forward to the year 2019 and the death of Hargreeves. With his passing, the remaining 5 children, now adults, are called back to their childhood home for the world’s most awkward family reunion. Together once again, they are forced to relive the tragedies of their adolescence, including the disappearance of their teleporting brother Five and the death of their other sibling, Ben. Not everything is as it seems though; shortly after their reunion, Five returns from a long journey around the timeline, now back in the body of his 13 year-old self, to warn his siblings of an incoming apocalypse set to occur in the next seven days.

After the events of season one, the gang is forced to face the apocalypse they were trying to halt, and are left to use Five’s powers to travel back in time before the end of the world. They’re successful in going back, but are separated throughout the early 1960s along the way. Five pops into 1963 in Dallas, Texas, witnessing a Soviet Union invasion sparked by the emergence of The Umbrella Academy who, this time indirectly, caused the apocalypse once again. Five meets with an old friend and goes back 10 days, now tasked in re-reunited his brothers and sisters in order to stop the approaching nuclear holocaust.

The Umbrella Academy, Season Two, continues the same comic-book fun and feel from the first season, going even further beyond with essentially the same plotline. Now trapped in the Sixties, the story is able to take on this new life in the past, exploring topics like civil rights, LGBTQ+ issues, and the growing toxicity of the “perfect american family”, and does so while still maintaining all of the mind-bending fun with time travel and the cryptic nature of the Hargreeves family. Season Two is able to keep the emotional core from Season One without dampening or weakening it. The superhuman siblings are allowed room to grow in new ways, giving them a life to live here in a time they don’t belong in. As for the mystery, it is amplified tenfold, exploring moon centric conspiracies, pinning the family against their estranged father, and revisiting plotlines introduced all the way back from the beginning of the show. The newly introduced characters fit wonderfully into the story, becoming as grounded and beloved as the main cast throughout the adventure, and the story — though similarly in a few ways to that of the first — feels fresh and invigorated with the colorful but grim energy of the 1960s. Without diving straight into spoiler territory, the finale is nothing but questions and more questions, leaving the Hargreeves siblings in a wildly new situation then their last two, stepping away from doomsdays and nuclear wars and turning towards a vastly different type of problem, now centered around their own nuclear family. The adventure has merely just begun, and wherever, or whenever, The Hargreeves siblings go, there is always some chaos coming along with them. For anyone in love with comic books and superheroes, however dark or vibrant they may be, this Netflix Original will be right up your alley.