Series Season 2: Stop Burying the Lede
If you are going to watch this show, please do yourself a favour and construct your own recap, as Netflix's own doesn't really do enough to remind you who half the people you are seeing are. Far too often was I thinking, "wait, who the fuck is this guy again?", and having to check. Perhaps its a sign of the times, but the first season came out just a year ago, and feels like it was from a different age.
So our story picks up with our dysfunctional family of superheroes, hopping through time to avoid the apocalypse. They find themselves scattered through time (though not place), landing on different dates in the same cosy town. Unfortunately, the apocalypse has also moved backwards in time, and the family have only a few days to get together and figure out how to avert it.
I wasn't very charitable with the first season, and unfortunately, the second season makes a lot of the same mistakes. In fact we are largely seeing the same story again, but with a crisp 60s aesthetic. It all boils down to six childish adults and one literal man-child trying to get over themselves long enough to sit in a room together and figure out a solution. But before we can even get to the stop-the-World-ending part of the plot, the series makes us spend a good six or seven episodes dwelling on the seven hero's attempts to rebuild themselves in an era that has little in the way of swinging, but plenty of prejudice and paranoia instead. Unfortunately I still find these guys a little too tedious. I want to give some credit to Aidan Gallagher as Number Five; a child actor being asked to convincingly act like a condescending, sixty year old man who still looks like a thirteen year old, but that aside I wasn't able to warm up to any of these characters, and I was silently begging the show to stop spinning its wheels and get on with it.
So once again, we are presented with lots of fun ideas - my favourite of these being a new character who has a goldfish bowl for a head - but not enough time is afforded to explore these wacky features. I think I preferred this season slightly more than the last, and I attribute some of that to the The 60s setting, which allows for colourful locations and an exceptional soundtrack of licensed, theme appropriate music. I would say that if you liked the first season, you will probably like this one too, seeing as how it's much the same thing. But this is also the case for those that struggled the first time around.
Series (S1, spoiler-free) Strangely compelling, if frustratingly plotted.
Having not read the source comic, I don't know if Umbrella Academy is a good adaptation. What I do know is that — despite having pacing problems similar to that of other Netflix shows — it's exceedingly bingeable. Although each episode is an hour long and could probably stand to be 10-15 minutes shorter, they're always set up in a way that leaves you wanting more. The Hargreeves family's poor communication skills and general dysfunction accounts for much of the padding. However, that's the series' whole hook — if they actually liked, trusted, and worked well with each other, they could probably stop the apocalypse in two episodes, so if you can handle an Idiot Ball or four, it shouldn't be too bad. That said, the worldbuilding is rather interesting, and the season ends in a way that makes me curious for what may come next.
The series' strongest points are its characters and visual style. Despite all their flaws (and there are many), there's something to like about all the Hargreeves siblings, and their actors portray them very charmingly. They all get focus and character arcs, although admittedly some are handled better than others. For me, the standouts are Five (who nails the balance between "My family sucks" and "I'm glad to be back with them" extremely well), Klaus (Robert Sheehan at his campiest), and Vanya (whom you can't help but feel sorry for even as her circumstances worsen).
On the latter, the series visually strikes a good middle ground between the softness of Wes Anderson and the dark whimsy of Tim Burton. The set design incorporates anachronistic technology and costuming very well, and the soundtrack is a lot of fun.
All in all, I enjoyed this show despite all its flaws and pitfalls.
Series A Phoenix, Rising from the Asses.
An eccentric millionaire adopts and trains up a team of superpowered children, with the help of his chimpanzee butler and 50s themed robot housewife. Unfortunately his tutelage has left them utterly unprepared to behave as ordinary, functioning human beings, and by the time The Umbrella Academy starts, our child superheroes have grown into a disparate group of maladjusted loonie adults who hate each other. Interested? Well sadly, Academy is a show crammed with interesting ideas, but all of these are squandered in an overly ponderous, overly melodramatic, and generally over-made story.
So if you've been around TV Tropes long enough you will have read about the Idiot Plot. Academy depends on seven idiot heroes, two idiot villains, and a whole bunch of other idiots, all to drive the story. Specifically, the main arc follows number 5, the most interesting of the super powered children (he's a time and space jumping 58-year-old trapped in a boy's body), who is on a quest to stop the apocalypse happening in a week's time. Unfortunately he's really bad at communicating this. And unfortunately everyone else is too stupid to really pay proper attention anyway.
The rest of the team consist of a woman who can command anyone to do anything (but barely uses this power), a man with the upper torso of a gorilla (who looks utterly ridiculous), a druggie who can speak with the dead (who is by far the most obnoxious), a squid boy (who is a ghost), and a guy who throws knives really well (who never listens to anyone), and Ellen Paige (who mopes about a lot). The show managed to make me hate all these characters, and at no point did I ever relate to them or sympathise with their circumstances. Which is a problem when asked to sit through 10 hours of television.
Without going too much into spoilers, the result of all these idiots intercommunicating with one another is that they end up trapped in what is basically a retread of the plot from The X-men III, or maybe that one episode of Darkplace where Liz goes berserk and starts throwing screwdrivers at people. At least in Darkplace they joke about the implicit sexism of these sorts of stories, whereas Academy plays it straight that really powerful women are just going to get over-emotional and blow up the world.
Before playing the tenth and final episode, I really hesitated about whether I wanted to finish the series, and tip another 47 minutes of my time down the drain. Well, I sat through it so hopefully you won't have to. Skip this!
Series Season 3: What if Heroes, But Too Much?
Season 3 of Umbrella Academy repeats all the same sins of the previous two, but somehow manages to be even more frustrating. This season, like the last two, starts with a big exciting opening that introduces some wacky concepts and compelling questions. It does a fantastic job of driving you on to watch the rest of the season. But what you quickly discover is that all the coolest stuff was frontloaded, and you are doomed to hours of slow, boring television of characters sitting around, struggling just as hard as you are to pass the time.
There are brief, excellent moments within this season. I love the whole idea of there being a second Academy of superpowered heroes, who all have their shit together far better than our motley crew miserable loser ex-superhero protagonists. When they kidnap Spaceboy, he's elated at the prospect of getting to hang around with real superheroes and doesn't want to go home. Meanwhile, the rest of our main characters are so self-absorbed and incompetent, they fail to notice their "leader" being kidnapped for days. I also like seeing Diego wrestling with the discovery that he is a father, him proving to somehow be an even worse father figure than his own dad (who, as a reminder, tortured and experimented on his own children). Finally, I love how the show handles Elliot Page's real life transition within the show, in which his superpowered family immediately accepts Vanya has become Victor. If only the rest of the show was capable of such brevity.
Sadly, all the best bits of the show are delicious morsels, buried in a barrel of wallpaper paste. There are so many boring, tedious parts of this show where characters are not developing, or pushing the plot forward, or doing anything really. Most of the show is stuck watching these characters hang around the same hotel lobby. My knowledge of the comics is that this setting is the "Hotel Oblivion", which is a place where a colourful rogue's gallery of villains were being imprisoned. No such luck here, that would be too exciting and budget straining, so instead the location acts as a waiting room for when the plot eventually starts. Your brain checks out, but you can never leave.