The Umbrella Academy - Netflix

Absolutely, shows like this are very subjective. UA definitely got off on tangents but the reason I found that more palatable than Jessica Jones, was that the characters in those side stories were interesting. I felt the ones in JJ simply did stupid things to drag the show out.

A solid series with a fun ending but like 95% of all Netflix series it would have benefited by being 8 episodes instead of 10.

Agreed. Just finished watching it. Was mad it ended where it did and now have to wait who knows how long to see more. I thought this show was fantastic.

New season coming July 31st.

I guess I know when I’m coming back to Netflix.

Awesome. Loved the series.

Turns out my local library has all three Umbrella Academy comic series available for e-reading, so I went through them over the last few days. Now having both read the comics and watched the Netflix series, I can definitely say I prefer the video. The comics are OK, but I’m not a big fan of the art style and the plots are pretty strange with a lot of weird tangents that never seem to really come together properly. The video version has its faults…mostly padding out the length for no apparent gain…but overall it’s a lot more coherent than the comics and I felt it did a better job of delving into the characters.

I didn’t even know there was a comic until I’d watched half the series. And to think I almost missed this amazing thing because I thought it was just some run-of-the-mill superhero knockoff thing. Instead I literally couldn’t go to bed until I’d seen “just one more episode” which turned into many hour accidental marathons.

I can’t help but feel that this is a not-entirely-uncommon phenomenon with comic book to TV/movie conversions. I read the Watchmen comic book and the end bit was so much better in the movie where they just axed the whole squid thingy and made Manhattan the “villain”.

(Maybe it’s because I’m not really a comic book person.)

That’s kind of the problem in a nutshell. The comic Watchmen was specifically written and illustrated as a good story in its own right and as a deconstruction of superhero comics. The insane megalomaniac plot at the end including a faux alien invasion is supposed to be exactly that because it hearkens back to all the crazy bullshit plans of characters like Lex Luthor, Magneto, or Dr. Doom. It doesn’t work in a movie, so they changed it but that is illustrative of the challenge in changing to a medium that the story wasn’t meant to criticize.

I would say that the Umbrella Academy comic is just randomly wacky, honestly. Monkeycheese level.

(And I still don’t think the ending of the Watchmen movie was a good change. I can accept that the original ending might have played poorly, though IMO HBO’s Watchmen demonstrates it could easily have worked, but that particular choice? No. But let’s not debate it, wrong thread and I’ve already heard plenty of arguments and my mind has not changed.)

https://youtu.be/Me0eoCwLj-A

I enjoyed the first season. I’ll catch this one.

I am there.

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.