The more things change, the more they stay the same. The Hargreeves kids are still their same weird selves, but the world around them? Even more weirder than before. Welcome back to the world of the super dysfunctional superheroes of Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba’s The Umbrella Academy.
Doctor Who taught us over the years how wibbly wobbly time travel can be, so it’s no surprise that the group escaped one apocalypse and ended up splintered across 1960s Texas. Now the race is on for Five to reunite his siblings to save the world yet again, but will they want to? And what does JFK’s assassination have to do with all this?
Let’s roll that beautiful Frankel footage and take a look at the second episode of the second season. As always, spoilers within.
(This episode also comes with a trigger warning for police brutality against a Black man.)
1. Work to Live, Not Live to Work
Kate Walsh’s The Handler is back (and with a glorious wardrobe to boot) and back from the dead, surviving an assassination attempt by Hazel. (Not sure when that occurred in the timeline of the first season, but whatever.) Three months of recovery and rehabilitation later, she returns to The Commission to find out . . . she’s been demoted. Ouch. A collection of less than stellar performance reviews and Five slipping through the cracks doesn’t grant her any favors. She may have taken a bullet for her job, but they don’t care. (A lesson many of us have learned over the years!)
And wouldn’t you know it, she’s at Five’s old desk, just to rub salt in the wound. I hope he left her some paper clips and mints or something.
No doubt The Handler wants to exact revenge on Five, and no doubt she’s going to go rogue from The Commission to do it. But does she have the resources to do so?
Side note: if you ever thought you had a strange or frustrating boss – – at least they are not a robot body with a fishbowl for a head!
2. Forgiveness. Can You Imagine?
While each character has made some sort of life for themselves, they still have some tie to the old life. Allison almost uses her powers to defuse a situation at home when the cops come to arrest Raymond, but hesitates. Diego’s ramblings about the future are what left him in a mental hospital. Klaus’s knowledge of the future is the foundation of his cult. Luther, though, wants nothing to do with his old life. He remembers Five but wants no part of him, blaming the Umbrella Academy and Five for everything
But it’s a chance encounter that has him second guessing. A left-behind wallet in his bar turns out to belong to Carl, Sissy’s husband – – and he discovers Vanya as the driver bailing out a drunk Carl. In spite of his earlier earlier anger towards Five for bringing the dangerous Vanya into this situation, he finds room in his heart to forgive, realizing he was as much part of the problem of Vanya as anyone. Does this bring him back into the family?
(This is just one of many small moments slowly bringing the family back together. Klaus ends up befriending Allison’s husband Raymond in prison. And as Allison departs the police station, she takes note of tattoos on one prisoner’s hands, which have the same tattoos that Klaus has. Is another family reunion on the horizon?)
3. The Country Girl
Much like Luther, Vanya’s building her own life in the country, even if she has no clue what she gave up before. I continue to love the closeness Vanya and Sissy share and I’m rooting for them to end up together (wasn’t that moment with Sissy and Vanya’s hands unbelievably erotic or what?!) but I worry that one of them is setting themselves up for a fall. (Most likely Sissy, she seems genuinely enraptured by their amnesiac au pair.)
The flashbacks to Vanya’s violin playing self may be putting a premature end to this, and you can see a mix of concern and perhaps heartbreak on Sissy’s face as she runs off, presumably to find Luther, in the middle of the night.
Continued below4. Tight Buns for Breakfast
We don’t have Hazel and Cha Cha bickering over expense accounts in seedy hotels, but we have our Swedish assassins making breakfast in their tighty-whities and having straight faced knife fights in rented rooms. And the severed head of the landlady in the freezer.
I describe this show to friends as “Wes Anderson does superheroes” and this entire sequence is textbook Wes Anderson with a heavy sprinkling of Tarantino in its absurdity, quirkiness, and gratuitously graphic violence.
They definitely work for The Commission, though, as they receive documents via those famous pneumatic tubes. Today’s delivery is a picture of Vanya. Hmmm…..
5. Just Like Yogurt
Two episodes in, and the season is already setting up Diego for romance with his fellow asylum patient Lila through all sorts of sexual tension tropes, like the hug to evade capture that also conveniently features Diego’s fly down.
Diego, though, is the Hargreeves with heart. He mourned Eudora Patch fiercely and nearly took the fall for her murder. He was the closest with robot mom Grace, being the person to turn her off (end her life) when he saw her malfunctioning past the point of repair. And as he and Lila hide out in the darkroom of Five’s friend Elliott the TV salesman, they bond over their fears of what they saw and how it doesn’t make sense. Lila likens it to how yogurt knows to become milk. And Diego counters: “We don’t have to understand shit about it for it to be real.”
Assassin with a heart of gold. Which means something or someone is going to get in the way. That turns out at the moment to be . . . Papa Hargreeves, who’s back in 1963 and may or may not have something to do with the Kennedy assassination, based on Diego and Five’s viewing of the Frankel footage that Five found in his pocket. (Pour one out you JFK conspiracy theorists!) Whether it’s self-defense or the desire to silence, we leave our fractured family with one of their own bleeding out on the sidewalk.
Notes Found in Five’s Old Commission Desk (our Afterthoughts section)
– Klaus quotes TLC to one of his followers as life advice (don’t go chasing waterfalls) which is life advice I can get behind.
We’ll see you next Tuesday for “The Swedish Job” and let us know what you thought of the episode in the comments!
