The Umbrella Academy S4E1: The Unbearable Tragedy of Getting What You Want
I don’t understand why this is, but it’s the good-but-not-great shows that keep me tuning in. Yeah, yeah, another masterfully written and subtly acted episode of Succession, I’ve seen it before. But a show with ups and downs? Where one episode is the dumbest thing you’ve ever seen and the next one knocks you on your ass with how good it is? Or better yet, every episode is both of those things? Hook it straight into my veins.
Enter The Umbrella Academy. Gleefully stomping all over the fine line between clever and stupid, the show — based on the comic by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá — concerns the Hargreeves family: seven super-powered adoptive siblings with a callous father, a kindly robot mother, and a talking ape butler as their only reliable parental figure. In season 1, they reconvene after their father’s death and learn it’s up to them to save the world… from themselves. In every subsequent season, they end up in a different timeline, with that version of the world also in need of saving, usually because of something they did. As Homer Simpson said of alcohol, the Hargreeves are both the solution to, and cause of, all of life’s problems.
The same can be said for the writers’ cleverness. The show often favors style over substance (they went to the Tarantino-inspired “retro pop song over ultra-violent fight” well far too often in the first season), and yet the substance — sibling rivalry, and the lingering effects of bad parenting — are so universally relatable that no matter how loopy the plot gets, the sibling interrelationships keep things grounded.
Funny enough, the strongest characters are either the loopiest or the most grounded. Elliot Page, the ringer in the cast, plays Viktor, (who was told as a child he had no powers, because his power was too dangerous to use), and carries much of the series’ emotional weight; Aidan Gallagher, the show’s breakout star, plays Five, who can travel through space and time, and as a result, ended up as a cranky 55-year-old man in a 15-year-old’s body, and manages to make the show’s most ridiculous-on-paper character the most relatable. (Ritu Arya is also a standout as manic non-sibling Lila, who can copy other people’s powers and was raised by a time-traveling spy organization.)
Rounding out the cast is sweet-natured lunkhead Luther (super strength), insecure hothead Diego (moves things with his mind, mostly knives), self-centered Allison (hypnotizes people to do her bidding), spacy recovering addict Klaus (can see and talk to the dead), and Ben (makes tentacles sprout from his body), who died in the original timeline and is back as a different, more dickish version of the Ben the others grew up with. And while the powers are worth mentioning, they matter less this season, because in his new timeline, the siblings don’t have them. We ended last season with their father destroying the universe, and rebuilding a new one in which he’s a powerful mogul, and his children no longer have a place in the world.
So now it’s six years later, and before we catch up with the powerless Hargreeves, we meet Jean and Gene, an extremely Midwestern couple played by real-life couple Megan Mullaly and Nick Offerman, because every season needs an aggressively quirky villain duo. They’re introduced hustling a couple guys in a euchre tournament, but they’re quickly pulled away by a man selling them some odd pop culture artifacts — ones from alternate timelines, including a re-elect Kennedy button, and two different VHS copies of the same Tom Holland romcom — one version starting Allison Hargreeves (who, in the Season 1 timeline, had used her powers to turn herself into a movie star).
So there’s some kind of Mandela effect happening in Season 4’s universe, but while the name Hargreeves means something to Jean and Gene, the Hargreeves siblings have, for once, had little to no effect on the world. Viktor owns a bar in Alaska, and is again distant from the family. In a nice fake-out, former astronaut Luther is once again in a spacesuit… which he peels off on stage at a mostly-empty strip club. Along similar lines, Allison is still walking the red carpet… in a detergent commercial. (Although, in resetting the universe, she did ensure her daughter and husband were once again alive and in her life).
Ben is just getting out of jail for crypto fraud. Klaus is a crossing guard, living in Allison’s basement, and has become incredibly neurotic (he’s really the only one whose personality has changed). Diego is driving a delivery van — extremely badly, as without his super-powered aim, he ends up throwing packages onto lawns and through windows. And Lila is getting ready for a birthday party for the oldest of her and Diego’s three kids. (She told him she was pregnant at the end of last season, but she’s a pathological liar who loves messing with Diego’s head, so we’re a bit surprised that she actually did have a kid, and that she and Diego have been married for six years without murdering each other.)
We’re also introduced to The Keepers, a support group for people suffering from that Mandela effect, who outright believe they’re in the wrong timeline, including “false” memories of events only the Hargreeves know actually happened. They have groups all over the country, and their membership includes Five, although that’s also a fake-out. He’s just there as part of his job with the CIA.
So that’s a lot of table-setting, but one thing Umbrella Academy has always done well is get through exposition quickly with a light tone, so we’ve still got time to get into the meat of the episode. Which includes more about the Keepers, a kidnapping, someone who knows what the Umbrella Academy is, despite it not having existed in this timeline, and how Jean and Gene factor into it all. But it’s mostly the Hargreeves just the way we like ‘em — depressed, bickering, and trying not to screw everything up. Because Umbrella is at its best when it understands that it isn’t a Marvel show, it’s Arrested Development with action scenes. There’s a lot of fast-moving plot, but it’s only there to bounce the characters off of each other in different combinations.
So while that fast-moving plot has veered all over the road between good and bad, it’s that sibling mixture of resentment and affection that’s been consistently great throughout, and it’s very much in evidence in the first episode back. By all accounts we’re in for a bumpy ride over the next five episodes. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
Stray thoughts:
• Speaking of Arrested Development, David Cross shows up as the kidnapper, and while he only gets two brief scenes, he’s always a welcome presence.
• Netflix cut this season down from the usual ten episodes to six, so we’re already in the final stretch. Reports from critics who have screened the whole season say there are pacing issues from truncating the story, which traditionally is one issue the show didn’t have before. We’ll see how much trouble that causes as we go episode-by-epsiode.
• On that note, Netflix dropped the whole season today, as is Netflix’s wont, but we’ll post one review a week or thereabouts.
• That is one great episode title.
