Umbrella Academy Season Two Review

In the past week I’ve watched both seasons of Netflix’s Umbrella Academy and I have to say it was one of the most frustrating viewing experiences I’ve had this year. It’s really easy to write a rave of a series or to pan a season of TV. It’s much harder to write about a show like Umbrella Academy, which has so much going for it (incredible cast, fun central premise and interesting characters, sensational musical selection) yet fails to craft a cohesive narrative or really grasp how to effectively use several of its core characters (and, by extension, the actors playing them). At first I assumed it was “Netflix bloat,” where a Netflix series has about two too many episodes in a season and thus offers up a couple of filler episodes that don’t really mean much. But after getting through both seasons I think the problem is deeper than that, and that’s particularly troubling.

Let’s touch on the good before diving into why the show doesn’t work despite so many positives. First and foremost, what a soundtrack. It’s rare that a series can highlight key moments with popular music that adds to the moment and doesn’t feel hokey or strange, but showrunner Steve Blackman and music supervisor Jen Malone have absolutely crushed it with the song selections in season two (Maggie Phillips was equally stellar with her music supervision in season one). It’s easy to ignore the use of music within a series, as its often meant to simply be background noise to enhance the emotional resonance of a moment (even with the use of pop songs rather than orchestrations), but when a show manages to pair the perfect song choice with a moment time and again it really stands out. And Umbrella Academy manages to get the right song for the moment every single time. It takes beats that might fall flat or make one roll their eyes and lifts them – I’ve found myself chuckling over a moment (such as the drunk dance party to “Twisting the Night Away”) that would have played as trite or cloying without the perfect wink in musical selection. And the use of the Swedish version of “Hello” for the Viking funeral for the murdered Swede brother? Just perfection.

And then there’s the cast. Again, it’s rare to get a group of actors together that can play so effortlessly against each other. It’s a shame the writing rarely manages to use the cast and their characters to their full potential. Take Ellen Page. Season one saw Page playing a hurt and vulnerable Vanya for most of the eight episodes – a necessity of the arc, I know, but still disappointing – only allowing Page to really dig deep into the pain and power of the character in the season’s waning moments. Knowing how great Page can be, every Vanya scene leading up to the climax of the season felt as if we were just killing time, rehashing beats we had already covered, waiting for Vanya and Page to break free and soar. So, it was a joy that Page was able to explore new facets of Vanya in season two (and pairing her with the incredible Marin Ireland as Sissy for large chunks of the season helped a ton at finding the emotional depth of the character). Same with the brilliant Robert Sheehan’s Klaus. Sheehan is an actor I’ve loved for years (I was once assigned to watch Misfits, his previous series about teens with super powers, and found I just couldn’t continue watching once he left the series because he was so crucial to the show’s success), and Umbrella Academy has allowed him to balance his comedy and dramatic chops. Klaus has far more range than the other characters on the series because Sheehan has been given the chance to build a three-dimensional character, and that allows the audience to genuinely care about what happens to him. Something that cannot be said for a number of the show’s other characters.

Here’s the real problem: The show doesn’t have enough space and time to utilize its embarrassment of acting riches fully. In season one, most interesting and most developed character was arguably Hazel (played so well by Cameron Britten), which is all well and good if the series was meant to be about Cha-Cha and Hazel. But it wasn’t. We all love Five (Aidan Gallagher, who is a talent to watch out for as he grows up), but his character is defined in only the broadest of terms despite being the one of the characters we’ve spent the most time with over the course of the series (he’s hyper-focused on stopping any and all apocalypses that may occur, damn the other consequences to the emotional stability of those around him). A large cast can be a great thing, but the writing needs to be able to serve them all. Otherwise you end up with a character like Luther (Tom Hopper, doing his level best with next to nothing), who is positioned to be the Captain America of the group but has the character depth of a kiddie pool (for us to genuinely care about his drive to please his demanding father, we need to know more about him than his power and his undying crush on Allison).

And when you can’t adequately serve the characters you have in season one, why not remove the only one with depth (poor Hazel) and add new ones? I would watch a spin-off detailing Hazel and Cha-Cha’s adventures through space and time, just saying. I guess the good thing about messing with time travel (we’ll get to the basic issues with that in a minute) is that no character is ever really dead and gone, so I suppose our erstwhile hired killers might appear in season three, but their absence – and the absence of a real adversary for Five and the rest – was deeply felt in the second season. Much of the season was spent trying to get the gang back together and determine what event causes the apocalypse, which meant that the characters were chasing hypothetical actions and inactions (and dealing with the dull Swedes and the ineffective interference from The Handler, which was a tragic waste of Kate Walsh) and not actually doing anything. The occasional fight sequence aside, the characters spent most of season two talking about what to do and not actually doing all that much (when the characters weren’t siloed into their individual story arcs, that is, wherein things were a tad more interesting for the characters – aka Vanya – who were actually given a full arc to play out).

Season two’s main through arc was, ultimately, the same as season one’s: Prevent the apocalypse. But the road to the ultimate destination was far less clear from a narrative perspective, spending too long establishing the characters in their new setting, introducing characters with varied degrees of success (Sissy was a fully realized character, Yusuf Gatewood’s Ray was underdeveloped), and then dicking around for several episodes while trying to get the band back together. And then there was the time travel.

I get that the Umbrella Academy source material relies heavily on time travel and that means the series needs to utilize it as well. So, taking that as a necessary element of this particular tale, boy, did the series rely too heavily on time travel this season, often tying the story into knots as a result. Going back in time and needing to stop the apocalypse means something must be done to the timeline to prevent that outcome. But the amount of time spent warning against changing things (by Five, who seemed pretty keen on changing the timeline when it suited him, just not when his siblings wanted to) and then watching all the characters take steps to muddy the timeline became more of a joke than a threat to take seriously.

Sure, we see the fruits of their errors in the final moments of the season, wherein the timeline has been changed seemingly beyond recognition, but this is the central issue with time travel narratives: they are built upon a foundation of loose sand. Once you’ve changed the past and thus changed the future, the characters often get stuck in a time loop of needing to fix the past to set the future back on track. Now, I assume Umbrella Academy’s writing staff has enough sense not to have the characters spend season three attempting to reset the present and will just roll with the new “normal” the siblings have created, but it still means we will likely have some time spent attempting to divine just where things went “wrong” in 1963 to lead to this changed future. And that thought alone exhausts me. If the series were to simply cut its time travel losses and move on I think the show could streamline things from a story perspective (it’s still set to have far too many central characters for its narrative to support, but I guess the decision has been made that character development is less important than narrative fireworks, which is a major shame).

So, Umbrella Academy is a wholly frustrating series. It has the potential to be one of the best on television – managing to gather a spectacular cast and utilize some interesting characters – but it repeatedly squanders its potential with convoluted narratives and a refusal to take the time to develop its central cast of characters. I wish the writers were as excited about exploring what makes their characters tick as they were with creating time travel paradoxes and apocalyptic futures for them to prevent. But after two uneven seasons I think it’s clear that characters come second to the fireworks on Umbrella Academy. And that’s all well and good – but if we don’t care about the characters, why should we care if they make it through the end of the world?