The Umbrella Academy comes back stronger than ever with briskly paced S2 ~ USA Latest Games

The Hargreeves siblings find themselves trapped in 1963 in S2 of The Umbrella Academy. [credit: Netflix ]

Ars staffers were divided on the merits of The Umbrella Academy's first season. The pacing dragged a bit in the earlier episodes, and the deviations from the source material—the Dark Horse Comics series created by Gerard Way and illustrated by Gabriel Bá—were not to everyone's taste. But I appreciated the time taken to flesh out the main characters, and I thought S1 ended strong, with a promising setup for a second season. I'm happy to report that S2 is even better: faster paced and well-acted, with some intriguing plot twists and developmental arcs for the Hargreeves siblings as they find themselves scattered in Dallas, Texas, in the early 1960s.

(Spoilers for S1; some spoilers for S2, but no major reveals with regard to the final episodes.)

For those unfamiliar with the series, billionaire industrialist Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore, House of Cards) adopts seven children out of 43 mysteriously born in 1989 to random women who had not been pregnant the day before. The children are raised at Hargreeves' Umbrella Academy, with the help of a robot "mother" named Grace (Jordan Claire Robbins, iZombie) and become a family of superheroes with special powers. But it's a dysfunctional arrangement, and the family members ultimately disband, only reuniting as adults when Hargreeves dies.

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