The Umbrella Academy
OK, fair warning. I'm going to talk about this one a lot and I'm going to talk like you've already seen it.
Heads up: THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD!
My daughter Randie and I plowed through the 10 episodes of Season 2 of The Umbrella Academy trying to stay ahead of spoilers as well as getting it done before Randie's new semester at college got underway.
In many ways, Season 2 is Season 1 Redux. Once more, Five (again!) has seen the future (again!) as Earth is destroyed (again!) in an apocalypse (again!) Getting the rest of the Hargreeves siblings on one page on what to do about this apocalypse is difficult (again!) but made more so as the Hargreeves siblings are not in the same place.
OK, they are all in Dallas, TX but each arrived at different points in time in the early 1960's and have more of less moved on with their lives.
Diego is stuck in a mental asylum after stalking Lee Harvey Oswald to prevent the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He's also stuck in that asylum with a young woman named Lila who is charming, off kilter and is (of course) more than she seems. Lila is the best new addition to the narrative for season 2, fluctuating madly from mad cap delight to deadly, ferocious intensity. Her emotional instability can be attributed to her being raised as the Handler's daughter. (Side note: Ritu Arya who plays Lila was in the Doctor Who episode, "Fugitive of the Judoon".) I guessed the secret she has powers and what they were. I love it when I get to do that.
Allison has married a civil rights activist named Raymond. Allison and Raymond are leading a movement to stage sit ins to protest racial segregation in advance of Kennedy's trip to Dallas. Allison, Raymond and their fellow activists are running into some high level racist shit. The verbal and physical abuses heaped upon these activists is disturbing and hard to watch. Raymond's world view takes a hit when he finds out his wife has super powers, has some white folks for family and she's from the future where there was a black President.
Klaus has started a cult. Well, I am not entirely sure that's a completely accurate statement. I think it's more like Klaus meets people, says some typically wacked out Klaus shit referencing pop tunes from the 1990's and a cult sort of spontaneously forms around him. Klaus alternates between thinking it's cool he has a cult and actively seeking to escape it. Ben by the way is still a ghost and still haunting Klaus.
Vanya has amnesia. She's living with a married couple, Sissy and Carl Cooper, and works as a nanny of their son Harlan who is on the non verbal autism spectrum. Vanya has a strong connection to Harlan and is a positive influence on him. But this is not the only connection that Vanya is forging in this family. Her and Sissy get real close. How close? Sissy kisses Vanya! Whoa! The reaction from Randie and I startled our dog Rosie to send her bounding across the living room as if she were a flying dog.
Luther is in a club working as a bodyguard for club owner Jack Ruby and fighting in Jack's underground boxing ring. He is nagged by the insecurities stemming from what he learned in Season 1; Sir Reginald Hargreeves labeling Luther as "Number One" was not an indicator of superior rank but of how low he regarded Luther. And he feels guilt for how he mishandled the situation when Vonya's powers manifested, betraying his sister and endangering the world. Luther's self-view has devolved from being a leader to a being a slab of meat good only for punching and being punched. So throwing punches around Jack Ruby's smoke filled illicit boxing matches seems appropriate penance for the hell Luther has found himself cast into.
Five makes contact with Luther first and Luther ain't on board with Five's latest "the apocalypse is coming" shit.
A frustration for Season 2 of the Umbrella Academy is how long it takes to actually get the Umbrella Academy together in one room.
Hazel from the Time Commission makes a return to give Five some vital intel and then gets killed for his trouble. The killers are three creepy white haired pale dudes known as the Swedes, brutal assassins for the Commission. The Swedes are not as engaging as Hazel and Cha-Cha were in season 1. They are eerily dispassionate about their work until the Swedes start getting picked off one by one.
The Handler, shot in the head at the end of season 1, is in fact not dead. It turns out she has a metal plate in her head. The Handler is off her rocker most of the time, playing different marionette strings like she's some kind of Machiavellian mastermind but more often than not, she seems to be stirring up chaos for the purpose of stirring up chaos.
OK, another echo from season 1: the apocalypse is season 2 is AND is not Vanya's fault. This time,a torture crazy FBI agent with a hard on for busting commies straps Vanya to an electric chair and keeps shocking her until she confesses she's a Russian spy. Under stress, Vanya's full power is unleashed and sets in motions the apocalypse Five witnessed.
Thankfully, a timely intervention by a key member of the Umbrella Academy tamps down Vanya's power surge and the time line proceeds without an apocalypse on November 25, 1963. That key member is the dead one, Ben. His efforts to bring Vanya into control breaks down his spectral self and he finally fades away into the afterlife.
Stopping the apocalypse on November 25, 1963 does not end the season. Harlan has absorbed some of Vanya's powers and those powers are unleashed and unchecked. The Umbrella Academy returns to the Cooper family farm house which is when and where the Handler unleashes an army of every Commission agent ever. Vanya zaps every damn one of them down but this is where Lila reveals her true power. She can replicate the power of any person she is confronting. Vanya gets Harlan under control, Diego tries to talk sense into Lila and the Handler shoots everyone dead and then is murdered by the last surviving Swede assassin.
The end. Everyone is dead. Except the Swede.
And apparently also except Five who is able to reverse time enough to before the Handler entered the scene. No one is shot dead. Well except for the the Handler who is murdered by the last surviving Swede assassin.
Eventually, the Umbrella Academy gets back to 2019 to find that the apocalypse on the calendar for 2019 is now not a thing.
But everything is not right with the world.
Nothing is what the Umbrella Academy expects or remembers.
I've waited a year and a half for season 2 and THIS is where you leave me?!?!
Man, I hate this show!
I can't express how much I hate this show!!!
To save time, I'm going to just reprint my rant from my post on Wednesday, March 20, 2019.
- I hate Netflix!
- I hate whoever the fuck invented Netflix!
- I hate whoever the fuck invented streaming!!!
- I hate Gerard Way for writing the damn comic book that spawned the damned TV show!
- I hate the band members of My Chemical Romance who failed to convince Gerard that he should focus solely on music and forget that silly idea of writing comic books!!!
- I hate Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson who in 1934 thought it would be a good idea to put a bunch of comic strips into a magazine, creating the medium we know of today as the comic book and leading to Gerard Way nearly 70 years later to write a comic book called the Umbrella Academy!!!
- I hate the cave people who developed sequential art for their cave walls as a story telling device which laid the foundations for story telling in comic strips, comic books, movies and TV shows!!!
- Man I HATE Umbrella Academy!
_________________________________________
Next week, I will post on the end of Star Girl season 1 and the end of the 2nd Alienist series.
Coming up after that, I will offer some thoughts on the new Star Trek animated series, Lower Decks.
That's all for now. Until next time, stay safe, remember to be good to one another and keep it down, would ya, I'm trying to watch some TV here.
No comments:
Post a Comment