Skip to main content

The Umbrella Academy

 


I just finished watching the second season of The Umbrella Academy. For those who don’t know, The Umbrella Academy is based on a Comic book series by Gerard Way. In the story, dozens of women around the world suddenly give birth on the same day. This in itself would not be unusual except for the fact that none of them had not been pregnant up to the time of delivery. An eccentric millionaire travels the world to adopt as many of these children as he can, believing there to be something special about these children. He is able to adopt seven of the children and it turns out that each one has their own super power. This all happens in like the first fifteen minutes of the first episode, and things just get weirder from then on as we follow the now adult children as they come to terms with their own screwed up lives, which is mostly caused by their screwed up adoptive father.

I watched the first season with glee and looked forward to the second, which did not disappoint. I said this series is weird. There are wheels within wheels within wheels. Who is this father and what is he really trying to accomplish? There are assassins from the Time Commission try to make sure certain people are killed at the right point in history (or is it just on somebody’s whim?). There is a talking chimpanzee, a ghost, a robot mother, and a man living on the Moon. The seven superhero children are all pretty much dysfunctional human beings. They have all gone their separate ways, but they have to come back together to try to prevent the end of the world. It is violent and funny, with great music (seriously, the use of songs in this series is so well done, it is worth watching the show for the music alone). Oh, and Kate Walsh makes a delightful villain.

This show is not a likely pick for me. I am getting really tired of superhero movies and TV. I thought if I never saw another show about superheroes, I would be just fine. But then I started watching The Umbrella Academy. It is witty and unexpected, and as I say, weird. I like weird.  I was hooked at once.

Different layers of the show get peeled away as questions gradually become answered. One question that has yet to be answered is: just what was (or is) the father up to. I don’t know yet. But I am willing to watch a third season to find out.

 

(My science fiction novel Star Liner, is now available in paperback or as an e-book through Amazon and other online sources).

Link to Star Liner

Comments

  1. brightshadowskySeptember 27, 2020 at 4:40 PM

    I think my favorite bit is a teenage boy playing a jaded 58 year old man! ^_^ He's fantastic!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Trip Home

  My wife and I recently returned from a trip to New York to visit my son and his wife. What follows is an excerpt of my notes from that trip. Departure day. So we and the kids (adult kids) leave by 5:30 AM. These “kids” are night owls. They rarely wake before 10:00 if they don’t have to, so we appreciate the sacrifice. Daughter-in-Law (DIL) drove us the 30 minutes to the train station. Hugs and good-byes for her (we love DIL. DIL is an irresistible force). Son navigates us a route to the platform with fewer stairs than the way we came. We get a ticket and get on the train headed for the big city and Grand Central Station. I soon realize that this train is not an express train like the one we took coming out. Instead of taking a little over an hour like we did before, this one would take a little over an hour and a half. We stop at places with names like Cold Springs and Peekskill (on this trip we saw a lot of place names that ended in “kill” including Kaatskill, i.e. Catskill, and
2 comments
Read more

That 70's Decade

  Can a decade become a caricature? My teen years were in the 1970’s and none of us who lived through the 70’s thought our decade was going to be a figure of fun. When you are a part of it, you don’t realize what people are going to make fun of later. I think there are two reasons why people snicker when the 70’s are mentioned: clothing styles and Disco. Both things could be called extensions of trends that started in the 60’s. When the hippy styles of the 60’s became more formalized for the dance floor, the result was (in hindsight) rather bizarre. They did not seem bizarre at the time. People following present fashion trends never understand that they are wearing something that will be laughed at in ten years. Yes, I did have a pair of bell-bottom blue jeans (are they making a comeback?) The mere mention of the 1970’s conjures up someone in a ridiculous pose wearing a disco suit. We who lived through the 70’s just went about our normal life. There were quite a lot of things that ha
Post a Comment
Read more

Tyranny of the Masses

  I was listening to Benjamin Netanyahu on the radio. He was justifying his change in the law that removed power from the Israeli Supreme Court, saying that it was the will of the people. Majority rules. This made me think of “Tyranny of the masses,” a concept that notes: just because a majority of people are for something, that doesn’t make it right. I am sure you can think of historical examples where the people of a country supported a policy that was demonstrably wrong. When everything is completely governed by majority rule, the rights of the minority can be subverted by the majority. The framers of our American Constitution knew this, and tried to put in some checks and balances into our system of government. This was to guard against all forms of tyranny whether from a dictator, or from tyranny of the masses. One of those checks is that we have a representative government. The people themselves don’t pass laws, but instead elect representatives at the federal and local level t
Post a Comment
Read more