The Umbrella Academy - Netflix

Yesss.

Nobody powered their way through the new season yet? I’m two episodes in and it’s exactly what I wanted from a season 2 so far.

Soundtrack is great.

The old amnesia setup is boring and lazy.

Way to start us off with a badass Avengers style hero character intro fight then the group spends the rest of the season not using their powers as much as possible. LAME.

How many times can people be confronted with the imminent apocalypse then proclaim they don’t care before reluctantly regrouping? It would make a decent binge-watch drinking game.

The Swedes suck compared to Hazel and Cha Cha.

In the first season, we saw that Hargreaves is an alien. There was that scene of him attending to his dying wife on their alien world. In this season he takes off his human mask. But wait! In his season one alien scene he and his wife looked like humans. Were they wearing their masks while on their homeworld? Why?

The Jack Ruby thing went nowhere.

Hey, Ben got a pretty good scene at least!

It felt like a majority of the season was filmed in one square block of the Universal Studios fake city area.

I watched the first ep last night and will probably take my time to enjoy it, 1-2 episodes max per night.

I’ve binged 7 episodes thus far and without spoilers, it starts very strong, then some issues with pacing and plotting develop. I’m planning to finish it in the hopes that it picks back up to the level of the early season.

So, much like season 1, then.

I’ll be starting season 2 today. Looking forward to it. Season 1 was fun, if about 2-3 episodes too long. Quite a bit of cuttable material in my opinion, but even with the bloat I still enjoyed it. Expect similar from S2.

On the whole I think it was better than season one with some caveats for instance the Swedes just aren’t even close to as good as Cha Chan and Hazel.

My hopes were high for this season based on the strong ending of season 1 and the strong beginning of this season but the season overall didn’t live up to my hopes. I feel the character development was inadequate and the plotting and pacing highly inconsistent. Based on my increased expectations, it was a disappointment. Sigh.

Nerd complaints:
Luther, is he bulletproof or not? First episode we see him take an RPG to the back, no problem. Final episodes, he gets gunned down by an Uzi. And the entire plot seems to not make sense. They jumped into the past to avert the future apocalypse by being nicer to Vanya, correct? But they changed nothing other than throwing a different #5 through the portal. How does #5 being in an old body stop the Vanyaclypse? Maybe wiping out the council in the past helps, I dunno.

They used back to the future rules for time travel or something, I don’t think they really make sense.

Vanya is always the bomb and she left. Unfortunately they left an autistic kid with Vanya powers behind.

PS your spoiler is broken it doesn’t span past paragraphs

You need a space between “Nerd complaints:” and “[spoiler]”

I’m done with season 2 now, and I largely enjoyed it. Certainly some bits I could have done without, but overall it was fun. Don’t think too hard, it’s less fun if you spend your energy finding the (many) holes in plot and characterization. As a “go with the flow” fun ride, it works fine.

Sorry, first time using it here.

Its all good. Just letting you know how to fix it.

I really did not like the way they dealt with time travel in season 2.

I mean there’s a whole shadowy organization designed to keep the timeline in check, of which Five was a part, but they treat the past with such reckless abandon I don’t understand why they can’t figure out why the apocalypse follows them.

Why are they shocked that their dad is still alive when they time travel back to 2019, after having told him everything about his future? And for that matter, how are they all still alive and/or not locked up for still being on the FBI’s most wanted list for murdering JFK?

It seems like the writers were confronted with a decision about how to treat time travel: like Back to the Future where it’s all connected and any change to the past could have dire consequence for the time traveler him/herself, or like Terminator where time travel spins off a new dimension. But instead of choosing one, they just said “fuck it” and decided that there weren’t any rules at all.

I think even Hot Tub Time Machine did it better.

So yeah, that was confusing and annoying.

Certainly messy, but it seems pretty clear now that they are spawning a new timeline every time, in which case I can’t see them ever getting “home.”

Yes, exactly. They’ll likely never get to their home timeline.

But I did like how they avoided taking the obvious path with Vanya. For a while it looked as though she would cause the apocalypse again, but then…

DIego

I am bailing halfway through this second season. Some of the laziest writing I’ve had the displeasure of subjecting myself to, and I’m not even counting the (incredibly stupid) timey wimey bits.

No, just your garden variety complete failure to have consistent characters who remember shit past scene breaks, plot threads that pay off, or expectations subverted. Bleh.

Has anyone read the graphics novels to comment on the similarities and differences of Season 2? It was a definite step down from season 1, but entertaining enough for me to be in for Season 3.

There is very little resemblance. Even less than in season 1.