Chances are, if you’re watching Umbrella Academy Season 2, then you’ve finished Season 1 and you already know what you’re in for. Netflix’s surreal family drama slash sci-fi superhero action thriller planted its flag in the ground last year with a charming and fresh 10-episode debut that took the comic book source material by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba and made it into something totally new. It was exciting and weird and populated with characters that felt just familiar enough to love at first sight. Now, they’re all returning for a new adventure–or, well, a sort-of new adventure.
The set up for Season 2 will sound familiar. In a slap-dash attempt to avoid the apocalypse, the dysfunctional Hargreeves family–seven adopted super-powered siblings–wound up time traveling back to the 1960s. This may have mitigated the problem of the world ending back in the modern era–or at least put that problem on hold for the time being–but naturally, hopping back to the past just caused more issues than it solved. Specifically, their meddling set off a chain of events that led to a new, completely different apocalypse that they now have to try and avoid.
On the surface, it may seem like an easy way to repeat everything about Season 1 with a period piece setting–but thankfully, Umbrella Academy deftly maneuvers around falling into any sort of routine by actually allowing its characters to grow and change. The situation may be a familiar one, but the Hargreeves siblings are no longer the people they were back when they tried to save the world the first time. It wouldn’t be totally accurate to say that Umbrella Academy is ever “grounded”–one of the lesser antagonists this season is a sentient goldfish who smokes cigarettes by sucking up smoke-filled air bubbles in his tank–but the characters themselves feel authentic and flawed (maybe even a little too flawed at times–but we’ll get to that in a second).
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