Mid-20th Century Americana in Season Two of Umbrella Academy

Having finished Dark, a show that wove a meticulous and deadly serious, heartbreakingly bleak (even if there's a note of... not exactly hope, but a kind of redemption - I should write a post about it) time travel narrative, jumping into the brightly-colored, over-the-top Umbrella Academy is a nice sort of palette cleanser - some ice cream after a fancy dinner.

Umbrella Academy's first season left me with the following impression: this is fun, enjoyable, and also something I can't imagine ever becoming part of my canon of favorite shows. The show explodes with style - the art direction and overall tone is a dizzying thrill ride - but it never felt like it was saying anything that profound, its themes of adult imposter syndrome and the way that parents leave us scarred always seemed to serve the true purpose - which is the stylistic flourish.

But that can be fun, and the show, for all its flaws, was entertaining.

I'm now two episodes into the second season, and I can't say it's all that different. Interestingly, the sort of mid-century (which is going to become an outdated term in about ten or twenty years) aesthetic the show played with - especially in its evil "Commission" - now becomes not just style, but setting, as the dysfunctional Hargreeves family escapes the Vanya-induced apocalypse that they just sort of failed to prevent in the end of the first season by voiping back in time to the 1960s.

The various characters get scattered to different times that range from 1960 to 1963 in Dallas, with Number Five emerging the latest, just in time to see the Soviet army driving tanks down the road and fighting the US Army. We get one cool shot of each of the Hargreeves using their powers to fight the invaders (including, horrifically, Allison using her "rumor" to explode three dudes' heads, which feels like a serious upgrade over simple mind control) only for an older Hazel to appear and inform them that there are nukes heading for the city, so Number Five has got to come with him.

They pop in 10 days earlier, prior to the Kennedy assassination (one that, given a newspaper that reads "Kennedy Declares War on USSR" suggests was thwarted). So we once again have a ticking clock to prevent another apocalyptic event.

Naturally, the show is hinting strongly that they'll wind up stopping Oswald from killing Kennedy, only for this to result in nuclear war, though I wonder if that's a red herring.

While the others are trapped in 1960s Dallas for as many as three years, Number Five shows up only ten days before his original arrival, which means we have some catching up to do.

Luther is working as muscle for none other than Jack Ruby, the mobster who shot Oswald after he was arrested (and I believe died shortly thereafter as well, which has really fueled the conspiracy theories).

Diego is in an insane asylum after he tried to kill Lee Harvey Oswald shortly after he figured out when he was.

Allison is married, and to a charismatic civil rights activist named Raymond Chestnut, who is trying to organize a demonstration in Dallas to coincide with the presidential visit to draw Kennedy's attention to the evils of segregation. Clearly this plotline was written prior to the George Floyd killing and the protests that have followed (and the brutal crackdown on those protests that continues as I write this,) but it remains to be seen if this plot works well or feels tone deaf given the current national mood.

Klaus is still haunted by Ben, and essentially has Ben's ghost anchored to him everywhere he goes. And it appears that in this time, he's become some kind of hippie guru cult leader (a little ahead of schedule, if my understanding on 1960s culture is accurate,) apparently with some friends in high places.

Finally, Vanya gets hit by a car and loses her memory, living with a family outside the city, where she's formed a bond with Sissy, the woman who hit her with the car, that seems to be leading somewhere romantic (though likely to be hard to pursue in the 1960s).

So once again, Five has to reassemble his siblings. In the meantime, however, a trio of never-speaking killers from the Commission known only as The Swedes is coming after them. And in the meantime, the Hargreeves begin to suspect that their father, still very much alive in the 1960s, has something to do with the assassination.

Yeah, it's another time travel show, but dear lord could it not be any more different from Dark. While I really liked Dark (despite not liking the third season as much as the previous ones, it was like the first two were A-'s and the last was a B/B+ - nothing to be ashamed of) I think this is the perfect palette cleanser, and actually helps to show how the time-travel subgenre of sci-fi can really come in profoundly different shapes and sizes.