The Review: The Umbrella Academy

The Umbrella Academy 9/10

This review will be full of spoilers. Today I finished watching The Umbrella Academy on Netflix. Glad I checked this out before I canceled my subscription because this was a damned good show. I have heard of the comic book this is based off of but have never read it so I don't have anything to base this off of other than what I watched. I started watching this yesterday and was like “The trailer doesn't look good so I'll give it an episode or two.” By episode three I was hooked. There are ten episodes which was just enough and each is between 50-59 minutes long.

This starts off crazy as hell. This girl jumps into a swimming pool and in moments she is pregnant and about to give birth. It turns out that in 1989 a bunch of women suddenly had children. These kids have super powers and this dude goes on to raise and train them to be a superhero team to save the world. There are seven kids at the academy but only one of them seems to have no powers so she gets hardcore left out of everything. Missions, fun, and even photos. It is like her ass don't even exist. A scene shows the kids stopping a bank robbery using all their powers and the city congratulating them. They are not some secret organization. The world knows them and throws parades and they have comics and toys. They all have different personalities and as the series progressed thankfully they all grew in some way because I was starting to worry that no one would by the time this series wrapped up.

Tom Hopper as Luther Hargreeves/Number One/Spaceboy. This dude is just living his life chilling in space up on the moon when he finds out that his father has died. He is fucking huge. I kept wondering why he was so big and once I saw why I said “Oh...that makes sense. I think.” He is the leader of the team and most dedicated to his father's cause of being heroes. 

He wants to find out what happened to their father and believes that he was murdered. He spent four years on the moon sending data to his father and eventually finds out that it was all for nothing. His dad just gathered the information and stuck it in the floor. He had a crush on and continues to have one on Number Three. On a mission when he was alone that his father sent him on he gets super fucked up and they end up giving him the body of a monster. It is pretty much a massive, buff ass, hairy body. He keeps it covered up so no one can see it and when they do they damn near faint. I thought he was some kinda moon wolf at first and hoped he would fully turn into a monster but he didn't. He ends up at a rave getting drunk, high, and sexed for the first time and it is funny as hell. People thought he was a furrie. I liked that by the time this season wrapped up he began to calm his shit down a little bit and listen to his team.

David Castañeda as Diego Hargreeves/Number Two. I really liked this guy. He is good at throwing knives and a fighting expert. And when I say he is good at throwing knives I mean he can throw them and make the shits curve in the air. He spends his time as a vigilante as well as at a gym and the police have a love/hate relationship with him. He has had a relationship with a police lady and when she gets killed his loses his shit and wants revenge even though he knows that the world is ending in days. I'll get to that later. 

When he was younger he had a stuttering problem that his “mom” helped him with. Mom is actually a robot that takes care of the family and may have murdered their father. It comes back every once in a while when he is nervous or upset. As impulsive as he seems he is sometimes the most level headed and logical of the team. I liked him more as the series went on and liked his fighting scenes.

Emmy Raver-Lampman as Allison Hargreeves/Number Three/The Rumor. It took me a while to warm up to this character. I just kept thinking “If someone covers her mouth she has no powers.” Her power pretty much is she says “I heard a rumor...” and says some shit and you believe it. She is divorced and has a child that her husband has custody of. She is also an actress and admits that everything in her life comes from her using her powers on people. 

She and Number One had a thing for one another that was never acted upon. It is revealed that she was asked by her father to use her power on Number Seven telling her she is not special. She spends a lot of time trying to convince Number Seven that the guy she is into is a creep and something is wrong with him but is not believed. The shit ends up almost costing her her life when she has her throat slit and can not longer talk let alone her her power. Whenever I started to like her character more they would have her do something that set it back somehow. Even after her sister almost killed her she stills tries to reconcile. Please. One of my brothers owes me a few hundred dollars and I barely want to acknowledge he exists.

Robert Sheehan as Klaus Hargreeves/Number Four. By far my favorite character on the series. Well, not by far. But my favorite. Not quite sure how he can help on missions with his ability to talk to and conjure the dead. He is a drug addict and alcoholic but uses those things because when he is fucked up he doesn't see the dead and have them all up in his grill. He talks to Number Six played by Justin H. Min who was killed in a mission before this show starts. The only time that he sobers up is when he is captured and tortured which he enjoys. Not being sober but being tortured. 

Number Six tells him that he is not living up to his potential just as his father does in a later episode. At one point he ends up getting sucked through time and spends a year in Vietnam. In our world it seems like he was gone for a few minutes. He arrives on a bus shell shocked, with a new tattoo, and dog tags of a man he fell in love with. He makes attempts to be sober and it is a struggle. He is finally able to use the power of his dead brother and fuck these guys up using tentacle powers. I was glad because I was kind of confused as to who it was that used them to fight the bank robbers in the first episode. The chemistry between Klaus and Ben was awesome and I am glad that Ben got to do more as the season progressed.

Aidan Gallagher as The Boy/Number Five. Loved this crazy little bastard. He returns to the team after being gone for years and has not aged. He has the ability to teleport. One day after being upset with his father hindering his training he decides to keep pushing it. He ends up in the future and everything is destroyed. He is stuck there for about 30 years and develops a relationship with a mannequin he names Dolores. He tells his family that an apocalypse is coming and they have less than a week to stop it. 

He is constantly drinking coffee and acts like a middle aged man even though he looks 13. We get to see him in the future all alone until he is older and is met by a lady that runs a time jumping agency that changes the course of history through killing. She hires him and he is very good at his job. Like, the best assassin that there has ever been. He ends up not killing JFK and teleports to present day where his family find him while arguing after their father's funeral. Number Five is obviously affected by the things he has done and is slightly off because of it. He is willing to kill a lot of people to accomplish his goals which horrifies Number One who does not think that heroes should be killing. I have not seen anything that this actor has been in but I hope he starts popping up in things soon because this kid can act his ass off. Who knew you could make a child in school clothes and shorts a terrifying killer?

Ellen Page as Vanya Hargreeves/Number Seven. Through scenes and flashbacks we are shown that she has no powers and does not get to enjoy being a part of the team let alone the family. Everyone pretty much treats her like shit. Even as an adult she can't catch a break and when they all meet up years later after not talking to one another after the death of their father they treat her the same way. 

One day she meets up with this guy who encourages her to be herself and ends up stealing and hiding her medication. Turns out that the medication that she has been taking since she was little has been hiding her powers. In flashbacks and revelation by Mr. Pogo the talking chimp (don't ask me) we see that she had powers based on sound but that she could not control them for shit so she was hidden from the family for a while, medicated, and then a power was used to make her believe she was not special at all. The shit worked. Once she starts finding out how much people knew about her powers as a child and when she finds out that the guy she is dating is a dirtbag she flips her shit and straight up starts murdering people. She has a pretty cool power but I was not a big fan of Page in this role. Until she actually went nuts I was not that interested in her story or character. They wrote her as being uninteresting a little too well.

Mary J. Blige as Cha-Cha and Cameron Britton as Hazel. Fucking loved these two! At first I was worried that they would be these flat, steel eyed assassins looking for their target but these two were so damned good together I would love to see more of them. Cha-Cha loves her job jumping through time and killing people. Hazel is getting tired of it and questions how much longer he wants to do it and if this is what life is all about. 

One day he meets this lady named Agnes played by Sheila McCarthy that owns a bakery. I really liked the way their relationship developed. It was cute. Yeah. I said it. I liked Agnes and did not want anything bad to happen to her and eventually Hazel. That made me feel weird considering that Cha-Cha and Hazel are cold blooded killers. When they kidnap Klaus to get to Number Five he tells them about the people they have killed and how Hazel let someone escape which pisses Cha-Cha off. They get their misses through tubes that can appear in any location their agency deems fit. I thought that Hazel had powers at one point because he and Number One were brawling their asses off and Hazel walked away as well as being able to fight an armed Number Two. Blige as Cha-Cha fit perfectly and I have zero complaints about her performance even though when I saw she was in this I raised an eyebrow.

I seriously liked this show. I did not think I would and it turned out to be a show I had to stop watching last night and save some for today. Ten episodes were perfect. My only complaint really is the sound which seems to be a Netflix issue. I had to turn my captions on by episode three because while the talking would be low the shouts and gunfire would be loud as shit. I think if you like shows like Dead Like Me or Happy! that you would like this. The episodes did not feel long and I liked the music that was used. I would love to see another season of this for sure especially after the way the season ended. That was a great cliffhanger. Now I need to finish writing my review for some episodes of Castle Rock.

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