Review: Umbrella Academy Season 2
by Ian Carlos Crawford
I’ve recently rewatched the first four Fox X-Men movies. The second one holds up with some flaws and the first one still feels charming as one of the first big team superhero movies — and that’s the end of nice things I can say about the four films. The X-Men have always been a metaphor for queerness, the X-Men have always been a chosen family, the X-Men have badass women on their side — the movies, however, hit on exactly none of that.
Umbrella Academy, however, is some X-Men excellence. It’s exactly the superhero team we need, especially in 2020. Now, I’m going to be honest — I also really loved Season 1, but not nearly as much as I loved Season 2. I’m also going to say how on brand it is for me to love an angsty, queer superhero team written by my beloved My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way. I may have forgotten most of Season 1 aside from “Oops, Vanya went evil and caused the apocalypse so they decided to travel back in time at the last beat of the season” and “they did a cute dance to Tiffany’s ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ in their house” but it didn’t matter!
And, I mean, this season had a lot of references to thing I’d forgotten about from the previous season. Did I remember the guy was who saved Five in the beginning was Mary J Blige’s partner? Nope! Did I remember Kate Walsh’s character had been shot in the head? Nope! Did I remember Robert Sheehan’s Klaus had a brief time travel romance with a man who died while they both served in the Vietnam War? Sure didn’t!
Which is a credit to this show — the plot is a mess but the character work, dialogue, soundtrack, and everything else are all A+. The characters are so perfectly themselves and enjoyable to watch that I don’t care if I can’t follow their time travel rules or who is betraying who.
Just the opening beat of this season alone was one of the best openings to any superhero series. X-Men: Days of Future WHO? We find our heroes exactly where we left them, but we find out the time jump didn’t go perfectly. They’ve all been scattered throughout time, arriving at the same place in Texas but years apart. Maxine Nightingale’s “Right Back Where We Started From” plays as we see each hero enter the season separately in a montage that sets the entire tone for the season. It also tells us what the season arcs will be for Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman), Five (Aidan Gallagher), Vanya (Ellen Page), and Diego (David Castañeda) right there at the top. The montage ends once we get to Five’s arrival. He’s the last one to fall out of the portal and arrives as another apocalypse is happening, a literal war has broken out, and we get another really great music moment. Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” plays as we see Vanya going full Doctor Manhattan and the rest of our favorite dysfunctional siblings enter the fray. Each one of them showcases their powers a really cool sequence before getting blown to bits by an atom bomb.
I rewatched that opening approximately 86 times before I actually finished the season. I kept going back to it because I was so blown away by it (I promise I didn’t intend that to be a pun but I said what I said).
Allison and Vanya get the best storylines of the season but I loved every storyline. This season Vanya fell in love with a closeted 60s housewife named Sissy (Marin Ireland) in a really compelling way. Sissy accidentally hit Vanya with her car when she arrived, causing Vanya to lose her memory and become the caretaker to Sissy’s son. Allison falls in love with a man who is part of a local activist group fighting against racism. They are at the head of one of the most relevant and emotional moments of the season — a sit in at the local “whites only” diner, where Allison ends up having to use her powers against the police so they’ll stop beating her husband.
The thing about this show is that these characters all work well together but also they work well when completely separated. The entire gang doesn’t get back together until Act 3. Act 3 is also when we get a ton more time travel shenanigans that either work or don’t, depending on how long you spend trying to think about them. If Five gave his younger/older self the correct formula to travel, shouldn’t Five stop existing as an elderly child? Don’t think about it too hard!
The other things this show does well is Vanya. She is a queer Doctor Manhattan, she has “the capacity to be a huge bomb” — she’s got the Dark Phoenix storyline going on only she gets control of her powers and helps the gang. She’s not a woman who can’t control her powers and ends up dead — she learns to control her powers and even uses them to help in the final fight. She’s also saved by Ben (Justin H. Min), our beloved already dead Umbrella Academy member, in one of the other most emotional moments of the show. The gang is on their way to save her but all the other siblings are knocked back by Vanya’s powers and only spirit world Ben can walk through all her powers exploding. He sits with her and basically tells her he sees her and her feelings are valid — something no one had ever said to her. He then asks her to hug him as he goes and if you didn’t cry then don’t talk to me.
The show falls into the realm of other really wonderful, messy modern genre shows like The Magicians or Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. If you’re willing to accept the stakes don’t always line up and the plot might be hard to follow, you’ll absolutely love it.
About the Author:
Ian Carlos Crawford grew up in southern New Jersey and, like most people from NJ, he graduated from Rutgers University. He then graduated from New School with an MFA in nonfiction writing. His writing has appeared on sites like Geeks Out, BuzzFeed, NewNowNext, and other random corners of the internet. He currently co-hosts a podcast about his favorite thing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, called Slayerfest 98 and is shopping around his fiction manuscript. Follow him on Twitter @ianxcarlos!
