Netflix’s comic book television show ‘The Umbrella Academy’ is back. Here’s a refresher on season one and what to expect from this eclectic team of wannabe superheroes in season two.
(Image: Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix) Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy, an adaptation of the Dark Horse comic book series from My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, really hit the sweet spot for genre fans. The show tells the tale of a family of seven children, all born at the exact same moment in different locations and adopted by a billionaire industrialist. They’re then trained to become a team of superheroes, but the results are disastrous. The show dispenses with the traditional tropes of world-shattering threats and nefarious villains, but it also doesn’t skimp on clever visual effects and dramatic set pieces. Season one proved to be a great success for Netflix, so it was only natural a second season would come around. After all, the showrunners have multiple series from which to pull ideas. So what can we expect from season two of The Umbrella Academy? Before you binge-watch season two—which hits Netflix today—let’s take a look at how we got here, and where we are going. What follows contains spoilers for the first season, so binge-watch that before you hit the next paragraph. SEE ALSO: Movies Anywhere Launches Co-Viewing ‘Watch Together’ ExperienceHow We Got Here The overarching plot of the first season of The Umbrella Academy centered around Vanya, the only one of the seven Hargreeves children who appeared to have no extranormal powers and was forbidden from joining the others on their exploits. That turned out to be untrue. Instead, she was perhaps the most potent of all, with the ability to turn sound waves into massive outbursts of destructive force. The world-ending apocalypse foreshadowed through the season turns out to be her fault, as her unleashed power destroys the moon, raining wreckage down on the planet and eradicating all life on Earth. Aidan Gallagher as Number Five(Courtesy of Netflix) With nowhere left to go, the Hargreeves kids use Number Five’s time-traveling abilities to leap back in time to try and prevent events from reaching this unpleasant conclusion. When they do, though, they find themselves dealing with even bigger problems, like an impending nuclear war. The first arc of the show grabbed elements from the first two comic book series, The Apocalypse Suite and Dallas. The main plotline with Vanya and the apocalypse came from the first, with the subplots involving Five and assassins Hazel and Cha-Cha from the second. But in the final act, the Netflix showrunners diverged significantly. In the comic, there’s no time jump, Klaus uses his telekinesis to stop meteors from destroying the planet, but the Eiffel Tower crashes into the Hargreeves mansion and the team is left even further splintered.
