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Warning: This review contains a few minor spoilers for the first half of season two.
The second season of a Netflix show is often indulgent. With a world already built, creators take their time, creating couples and grouplets of the ensemble to build character and sending them on zany missions, resulting in much-bloated storytelling.
Since the first season of The Umbrella Academy flew mostly under the radar, the second season does not suffer this hubris, instead delivering a tightly-written and effective set of episodes.
The runtime has dropped from hour-long episodes to 50 minutes and under, with the shortest episode coming in at 40 minutes. While the difference may seem insignificant, the result is an exhilarating well-written story with no superfluous scenes.
That doesn’t mean a lack of wacky adventures, by any means. The season picks off a few seconds after (or decades before, as things do with time-travel) the avoidance of the first apocalypse. All the Hargreaves siblings are scattered throughout time, coincidentally all within a year of each other in the 1960s.
This sets off a slightly frustrating but nevertheless fun set of close misses and misadventures where they almost find each other, but of course none of the fun really begins until Number Five (Aidan Gallagher) shows up, sees another apocalypse and brings the “Umbrelliers” together.
Setting the story in the 1960s, a time both distinct and highly relevant to the world we live in today, gives us the opportunity to see a unique side to each of the character’s stories.
Luther (Tom Hopper) is a bouncer and underground fighter for a shady dance club owner, Klaus (Robert Sheehan) is a cult leader, Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) is involved in the civil rights movement and Diego (David Castañeda) is just as annoying as last season as he keeps trying to save John F Kennedy.
Number Five (Aidan Gallagher) is time-agnostic as always but not as omnipotent as last season, and because they seem to have run out of unique era-defining moments, Vanya (Ellen Page) is thrown into the middle of nowhere where she constantly comes into conflict with social mores of the time.
Each of the cast have really come into their characters, with Robert Sheehan as Klaus and Aidan as Number Five particularly standing out, always managing to steal every moment in which they are onscreen.
But what really stands out in this season is the cast of supporting actors. We see a greater multifaceted role from Reginald Hargreaves (Colm Feore), the patriarch of the Umbrella Academy and an outstandingly wily and villainous presence in the form of The Handler (Kate Walsh).
Unfortunately, and presumably due to budgetary constraints, the scarcity of Pogo moments may leave some audience members “unh-ape-y” but all in all, the story, the action sequences and the effects lend themselves to a truly well-constructed season that easily surpasses its predecessor, easily earning its 4.5 popcorns.
With such a strong addition to the canon, it would be a shame if we do not get another season or two.
