Umbrella Academy Season 2 (spoilers)

[Psyren]

I didn't see a thread for this and the prior thread is past threshold so I figured I'd start one.

Dallas was phenomenal. Everybody got growth. Klaus is precious. Diego is less of a jerk. Five is somehow even more of a badass and ditched the creepy mannequin romance thing. Vanya {spoiler} and it was awesome. Ben {spoiler} and it was even more awesome. Allison got to grow beyond her power defining her. Luther was... okay, he's still annoying, but less so.

New characters were on point for me, with the exception of the weakest addition (the Swedish Triplets). More worldbuilding with the Commission. Great revelations about dear old dad, Reginald Hargreeves. And one hell of a cliffhanger to cap it off.

I had an absolute blast watching it and can't wait for S3. Between this and The Boys, I have a lot of hope for the darker non-Marvel superhero properties to continue to impress.

I avoided spoilers in this opening post for hover protection purposes but I'm more than happy to discuss plot turns in subsequent posts. What did folks think?

[Tyndmyr]

I frigging loved it. It felt like the creators really got to cut loose more than in S1, since so much of the character introduction is already done, resulting in a more active plot. Don't get me wrong, I loved S1, but S2 is a blast, and I'm seriously looking forward to another one.

Spoiler

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I appreciate that Diego's control of bullets provides at least a partial explanation for why people are so rarely hit by insane barrages of gunfire. It makes sense that so long as he's aware of it, he can at least partially attempt to avert them.

I also really liked the callbacks to earlier things I was wondering if they remembered. Five being AT Jfk's parade was one, and the fire extinguisher was a nice touch as well. That's super satisfying. Same for bringing in other children.

I enjoyed that they just dropped in a goldfish in a suit and didn't even bother explaining why. He's just a part of the wierd, crazy world, and he doesn't really need a background, but he's fun.

Got some theories about next season. The bit in S1 with the odd thing of Doc Hargreeves and the spaceships is now fairly explained, but the little light motes he's got in a jar there are basically the same as the one's Vanya's interacting with. So, that now gives us a mechanism for the initiating event....but it doesn't explain how that happened. And it probably isn't solely his doing, since he only got seven of a whole bunch of random people, which doesn't fit his love for orderly plans. So, there's SOMETHING going on there.

Also, the whole "dark side of the moon" project gives some interesting backstory to Luthor being stationed there. I bet there's a reason.

[Psyren]

Yeah, the Stormtrooper Aim felt even more ridiculous this season until I remembered who was involved in the vast majority of the bullet hell scenes, then it became closer to Fridge Brilliance.

Clearly the other kids in the 43 (whoever they are) achieved some degree of control on their own, so running into them will be interesting.

Yeah, the Commission certainly had some unexplained weirdness for fun going on. It reminded me of the Men In Black (in a good way.)

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I do expect we'll find out more about what the hell is going on on the moon in S3.

I'm sad Cha-Cha didn't come back, but I imagine Mary J. Blige wouldn't be the cheapest hire around.

Now that the Commission has been more or less dealt with, rival supers made a lot of sense as the new foil.

[Psyren]

Is this show really interesting? I watched 2 episodes yesterday after reading this topic, but so far I can’t say that I have an interest in further viewing.

It's a gritty superhero deconstruction - much like The Boys and Watchmen satirize the Justice League, the Umbrella Academy is aimed squarely at the original X-Men. Rich enigmatic benefactor adopts and raises a number of metahuman children as a surrogate family while also constantly training them to constantly put themselves in dangerous situations - but it really plays up the psychological trauma that would likely result from that kind of upbringing, along with a hard look at the type of person that might consider training up what are effectively child soldiers to be reasonable. It also borrows a bit from Heroes with an impending catastrophe driving the plot.

Not much to say - if you like superhero properties (the ones I mentioned in particular) then you'll like it, but if not you might not.

[Pex]

I just started season 1, two episodes in so I need to catch up. For now I'll say I'm bored. It's only my interest in the genre that's keeping me around. I'm not hating anything, but the pacing is very slow. I should have seen what was on the surveillance tape about Father, not have to wait until next episode if then. I still have no idea who's trying to kill Five or why.

[Psyren]

The folks who missed S1 surprise me, it was pretty big news when it debuted.

In any event, if you like the genre at all I do recommend the show, though S2 is stronger overall as the family has worked through a bunch of their more annoying bugaboos by then.

[Pex]

Third episode, same formula: talk, talk, talk, talk that takes forever for anyone to say anything then a shoot out. Is every episode going to be like this? I'm liking the characters at least. Klaus hasn't gotten on my nerves yet, but he's close. I can at least understand why he is the way he is. He sees dead people and never had a Bruce Willis to help him.

[tyckspoon]

Third episode, same formula: talk, talk, talk, talk that takes forever for anyone to say anything then a shoot out. Is every episode going to be like this? I'm liking the characters at least. Klaus hasn't gotten on my nerves yet, but he's close. I can at least understand why he is the way he is. He sees dead people and never had a Bruce Willis to help him.

hmm. Not.. really, but also yes? Much of the story is essentially a soap-opera family drama, which is interrupted by people trying to kill the main characters to force them to break out of their argument cycles and do something until they get to a safe place where they can resume arguing about whose fault it is that somebody is trying to kill them, or they get a chance to try to hide from the drama until it comes looking for them again. It doesn't feel like a drag to me, but then I like pretty much all the characters and don't mind watching them spend most of the runtime bouncing off each other - I can definitely see where you could feel otherwise, especially as The Swedes have basically no personality or reason to feel engaged when they show up; they could be replaced with automated drones or attack dogs and play the same role.

Spoiler: a little further discussion that touches on episodes you haven't seen in very minor fashion

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I will say that if my memory is correct you're coming to the end of the catch-up episodes, where the family spends a lot of their time getting each other caught up on what's been happening while they were all separated. More of the talk scenes going forward from there should be about 'what do we do next and how do we plan for doing it', which should at least be more engaging exposition. You'll probably get tired of Diego complaining that they have to save Kennedy tho, he never really lets that go.

[Psyren]

He's watching S1 so I think it's Hazel and Cha-Cha rather than the Swedes. But... that only baffles me more as I absolutely adore Hazel and Cha-Cha.

[tyckspoon]

He's watching S1 so I think it's Hazel and Cha-Cha rather than the Swedes. But... that only baffles me more as I absolutely adore Hazel and Cha-Cha.

Ooh. Yeah I was assuming Season 2. Yeah, I'm with you there, I think Hazel and Cha-Cha's sub plot is probably the best part of Season 1. The basic structure holds, still, but the Hazel/Cha-Cha violence interludes are wayyyyy more entertaining than the similar setpieces in Season 2.

Edit: But then Episode 3 has just barely begun to introduce them as more than 'two random goons shoot up the Academy', so there's quite a lot to go there.

[Psyren]

Maybe I just have a higher tolerance for slow boil mysteries after stuff like Heroes, Sense8, and the OA

[Pex]

If the same thing is happening in season 2 that doesn't sound promising. I'm not giving up yet since I still care, but I want some plot development already.

[Psyren]

Without spoiling, Season 2 is much faster paced.

[Jamin]

I loved it

Spoiler: Things I liked

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The USSR was not the bad guy
The characters all feel like they are changing
The use of the 1960's as a setting

Spoiler: Things I liked less

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The Swedes

[Soepvork]

Spoiler: Things I liked less

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The Swedes

But without them we would not have had a

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Swedish cover of Adele's Hello

!

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I enjoyed the swedes. They were not a repeat of Hazel and Cha-cha, which is a danger a lot of these kinds of shows can fall into (heck, I gave up on Heroes for not sticking to actually killing Sylar, and trying to do a repeat performance). And I like the examination of how easily the cliche "no-questions-asked assassins" could trivially be subverted by anyone with a minimum of knowledge of their operations.

The little touches of humanity where also quite nice, in the same inhuman kind of way of Hazel's "don't you wish we could kill who we wanted for a change".

Grey Wolf

[Psyren]

I liked that they didn't just retread H&CC either, but it seems that instead of doing that we got... not much of anything. Who were they outside of being Commission trigger-men and the Handler's dupes? What did they accomplish in the season before the very end, besides executing "Öga for Öga" on a tertiary character? Did they want anything for themselves? Did they even get more than three lines of dialogue? Oops, out of time, 2/3 of them are dead.

Hazel & Cha-Cha meanwhile had professional and personal motivations, internal conflict, and divergent character arcs. Hazel's subplot directly led into kicking off the main plot of this season. It feels like a step backward in terms of depth, but at least the show used the time well - developing the main cast.

[Grey_Wolf_c]

I liked that they didn't just retread H&CC either, but it seems that instead of doing that we got... not much of anything. Who were they outside of being Commission trigger-men and the Handler's dupes? What did they accomplish in the season before the very end, besides executing "Öga for Öga" on a tertiary character? Did they want anything for themselves? Did they even get more than three lines of dialogue? Oops, out of time, 2/3 of them are dead.

Hazel & Cha-Cha meanwhile had professional and personal motivations, internal conflict, and divergent character arcs. Hazel's subplot directly led into kicking off the main plot of this season. It feels like a step backward in terms of depth, but at least the show used the time well - developing the main cast.

But they aren't personal-motivation kind of characters. That's the point. They are amoral assassins: walking guns, and like any gun without agency, they are used by multiple hands for multiple purposes. The Hazel & Cha-cha of this season was Handler & whats-her-name. The Comission-with-a-consciense of the season was the "resistance" guy-and-gal. They are neither of those, and therefore I neither expect nor require character development (and yet, we did get some). If nothing else, it reflects the kind of person five had to pretend to be until the grassy knoll, but IMnpHO, it actually tells you a lot about both the commission and the Handler.

Grey Wolf

[Psyren]

But they aren't personal-motivation kind of characters. That's the point. They are amoral assassins: walking guns, and like any gun without agency, they are used by multiple hands for multiple purposes. The Hazel & Cha-cha of this season was Handler & whats-her-name. The Comission-with-a-consciense of the season was the "resistance" guy-and-gal. They are neither of those, and therefore I neither expect nor require character development (and yet, we did get some). If nothing else, it reflects the kind of person five had to pretend to be until the grassy knoll, but IMnpHO, it actually tells you a lot about both the commission and the Handler.

Grey Wolf

Eh, if they don't have characters why even make them human? Might as well be true automatons/robots, or more fishbowl-head-people at that point. Just my two copper.

[Pex]

As I'm watching Season 1 I do find it interesting in a good way the characters don't know things we the audience know because we get to see everything. Because they don't know things they come to the wrong conclusions of what various events mean or even who did it. As I noticed this I thought I would be frustrated since we get very little plot development, but I'm intrigued how everyone is, in RPG terms, playing in character and not metagaming information.

This happens a lot in sit-coms so that the misunderstanding leads to the (allegedly) funny interactions. Here it's played straight and not even meant to cause conflict just for the sake of having conflict. No one knows everything, including the bad guys, so we can get an understanding of their perspectives. That is clever writing.

A couple of episodes later . . .

Finally some plot development, and I know what's happening.

Theory: Harold's death upsets Vanya enough she destroys the world. Five's boss played him. By giving the order to protect Harold Five thinks he must be killed. They kill him and Vanya explodes the world as it was meant to happen. Five figures this out at the last moment and stops Luther, who took out the eye, from taking out the eye killing Harold. Sparing Harold calms Vanya. The world does not explode stopping the Apocalypse.

But then we get the year 2020, so we still lose.

Finished Season 1.
My theory was . . . off.

[Sloanzilla]

This is my favorite show in years.

[Tyndmyr]

Eh, if they don't have characters why even make them human? Might as well be true automatons/robots, or more fishbowl-head-people at that point. Just my two copper.

They start out being quite literal steriotypes, but it's quite important to the plot that they get a little character development. Im attempting to avoid spoilers here, but robots would not have served well for this purpose, as familial ties, emotion and deception play a role.

You can think of it as, I suppose, an examination of the human flaws of the trope they represent. To some extent, all of UA is this. None of the plot would really exist without exploring the human side of dealing with the craziness of their world. It's what seperates them from something like X-men, in that human trauma, grief, distrust and so on become the central focus.

Finished Season 1.
My theory was . . . off.

Wasn't a bad guess, honestly. Not perfectly on the mark, but you've got some thematic lineup there in a few parts. I look forward to reading your reactions to S2!

[Grey_Wolf_c]

Wasn't a bad guess, honestly.

Oh, that reminds me: this has got to be one of the very few examples, if not the only one, of a time-travel "jump back to fix history" that is doomed to fail because the time traveller doesn't jump back far enough. The reality is that Vanya was a ticking bomb, and to solve that, you'd have needed to jump back far enough to stop Hargreaves from putting her on suppressants for 20+ years. Otherwise, by hook or by crook, they were still going to end up where they did.

I've seen this concept played around as a though experiment with the usual suspects (classically, the explanation is that you can't stop WWII by doing anything to any political figure of the time, because the war became inevitable the moment WWI's peace treaty was signed, so you'd need to stop that war, which would require you to stop the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, which would require...), but never actually incorporated into a completed story.

Pratchett, of course, puts it best:

"shoot the dictator and prevent the war ? But the dictator is merely the tip of the whole festering boil of social pus from which dictators emerge;shoot one, and ther'll be another one along in a minute. Shoot him too? why not shoot everyone and invade Poland? In fifty years', thirty years', ten years' time the world will be very nearly back on its old course. History always has a great weight of inertia.”"

Grey Wolf

[tyckspoon]

Oh, that reminds me: this has got to be one of the very few examples, if not the only one, of a time-travel "jump back to fix history" that is doomed to fail because the time traveller doesn't jump back far enough. The reality is that Vanya was a ticking bomb, and to solve that, you'd have needed to jump back far enough to stop Hargreaves from putting her on suppressants for 20+ years. Otherwise, by hook or by crook, they were still going to end up where they did.

WWI's peace treaty was signed, so you'd need to stop that war, which would require you to stop the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, which would require...), but never actually incorporated into a completed story.

Vanya needs her family, and the rest of the family needs enough time to understand that Vanya is just as screwed up (if not more so) as the rest of them, and they all need enough time and personal epiphanies to forgive each other for all of their transgressions against each other and be a support system for each other.. stopping Vanya from doing something that causes life to be scoured from the surface of the planet is kind of just incidental to that, really.

You could probably do something with modifying the terms of the WW1 peace treaty (make the victorious nations not try to rip reparations out of the hide of an already economically battered Germany?) but while that is a potentially fascinating discussion it is also extremely outside bounds here.

[JeenLeen]

Vanya needs her family, and the rest of the family needs enough time to understand that Vanya is just as screwed up (if not more so) as the rest of them, and they all need enough time and personal epiphanies to forgive each other for all of their transgressions against each other and be a support system for each other.. stopping Vanya from doing something that causes life to be scoured from the surface of the planet is kind of just incidental to that, really.

In Season 1, there's that one episode where a lot of the family resolves (to at least a good degree, or well, at least becomes honest about) a lot of their issues, including Vanya finding out her boyfriend is bad in a way that likely doesn't set her off. It seems like that Day That Never Was would have potentially saved the world, but then Five changed what happened.

(Going off memory here, so I might be wrong, but it seemed like Klaus, Vanya, and Luther & Allison were all way better off before Five undid that day. Can't say for sure it would have set Vanya up to not break when she found out the truth, but seemed a lot more likely.)

[Xondoure]

They start out being quite literal steriotypes, but it's quite important to the plot that they get a little character development. Im attempting to avoid spoilers here, but robots would not have served well for this purpose, as familial ties, emotion and deception play a role.

You can think of it as, I suppose, an examination of the human flaws of the trope they represent. To some extent, all of UA is this. None of the plot would really exist without exploring the human side of dealing with the craziness of their world. It's what seperates them from something like X-men, in that human trauma, grief, distrust and so on become the central focus.

I agree with your whole point here until you got to X-men. While I quite enjoy Umbrella Academy as a deconstruction of Xavier's Academy for Gifted Youngsters; human trauma, grief and distrust are absolutely what drives X-men forward as a collection of stories. If anything, UA works because the reference material is ripe with soap opera drama to begin with. (In fact, Marvel rose to prominence largely because they took the existing but flat world of super heroes, and added in all the soap opera tropes from their experience with Romance comics.)

[Grey_Wolf_c]

In Season 1, there's that one episode where a lot of the family resolves (to at least a good degree, or well, at least becomes honest about) a lot of their issues, including Vanya finding out her boyfriend is bad in a way that likely doesn't set her off. It seems like that Day That Never Was would have potentially saved the world, but then Five changed what happened.

(Going off memory here, so I might be wrong, but it seemed like Klaus, Vanya, and Luther & Allison were all way better off before Five undid that day. Can't say for sure it would have set Vanya up to not break when she found out the truth, but seemed a lot more likely.)

I understood it that day to be part of the original timeline - the one that ends up with Luther in a pile of rubble with an eye in his fingers.

Grey Wolf

[JeenLeen]

I understood it that day to be part of the original timeline - the one that ends up with Luther in a pile of rubble with an eye in his fingers.

Grey Wolf

I thought some of the stuff of that day wouldn't've have happened if Five hadn't intervened... he had already showed up for some time and altered the timeline at least some... but I definitely could be wrong. As I said, working off memory and haven't rewatched it.

[Sloanzilla]

What I really really like about this show is that it is capable of showing us a decade without rubbing our noses in it. I love Stranger Things, but there's such a "OMG WE ARE IN THE 80s CANT YOU TELL ISNT THAT COOL?" vibe that it gets old after a time.

[Tyndmyr]

I agree with your whole point here until you got to X-men. While I quite enjoy Umbrella Academy as a deconstruction of Xavier's Academy for Gifted Youngsters; human trauma, grief and distrust are absolutely what drives X-men forward as a collection of stories. If anything, UA works because the reference material is ripe with soap opera drama to begin with. (In fact, Marvel rose to prominence largely because they took the existing but flat world of super heroes, and added in all the soap opera tropes from their experience with Romance comics.)

I would agree that Marvel generally has more fleshed out people than say, DC, which aims more for the iconic. However, compared to UA, it's no contest. A lot of X-men is pretty straightforward analogies for the times. Non mutants accepting mutants is a huge theme, with many parallels to how society at large tends to treat minorities.

That isn't how UA does it. We're mostly looking at a smaller scale than that, with personal, individual trama driving the plot, rather than a reaction to a widespread problem.