SAVING WORLD — AGAIN
‘Umbrella’ gang is back
There are only two possibilities for the superpowered siblings of “The Umbrella Academy:” Keep finding the end of the world or have the end of the world keep finding them.
In the first season of the hit Netflix show, Vanya (Ellen Page), whose abilities had been stifled and hidden by her adoptive father, brought about the apocalypse when she finally unleashed her true potential, driven to the brink by family secrets.t
But the second season, out Friday, makes the likelihood that this misfit group of makeshift siblings, all born on the same days to mothers who were not pregnant, has caused a second apocalypse almost impossible.
Launched into the ether by Five at the end of the first season, to save them from the end of the world, the siblings open the new season scattered throughout 1960s Dallas. Each landed in a different area and time and started new lives. Vanya is a live-in nanny on a farm. Luther (Tom Hooper) is a paid fighter in a shady underground club. Diego is in a mental institution. Alison married and became a civil rights activist. Klaus started a cult. And Five tried to save the world.
“Five arrives at the culmination of the original timeline where the world ends in a nuclear doomsday, so it’s incredibly stressful. He’s dealing with a timeline crisis in two places: 2019 and the 1960s,” 16-yearold Gallagher told the Daily News. “His own existence could unravel and he could break the space-time continuum and kill everyone who ever lived in it.”
The question then becomes whether Five, a 58-year-old man trapped in the body of a teenager, is saving the world because it’s the right thing to do or because it’s all he knows how to do.
“He has a lot of responsibility, so much so that it hasn’t allowed him to think about anything else for all the decades of his life,” Gallagher explained. “He’s almost 60 and he’s never done anything else but save the world.”
As routine a plot as “preventing the apocalypse” has become, “Umbrella Academy” handles it so comically and so over-the-top that it barely matters.
The characters are parodies of themselves and parodies of superheroes, in a way that makes their powers a burden rather than a gift.
Diego, who spends the second season on a historyaltering mission to stop President John F. Kennedy from being assassinated, may be the most like a traditional hero, if not for his newly floppy hair and his gravity-bending knifethrowing skills. He also has daddy issues, like any good superhero.
“An opportunity presents itself for (Diego) to hopefully understand his father more,” actor David Castañeda, told The News.