The Umbrella Academy cast on their time-bending second season
Apocalypse wow! The #UmbrellaAcademy squad avoided lunar asteroids, but what’s next? Get an inside look at the trouble the Hargreeves siblings are stirring up in @UmbrellaAcad season two: https://t.co/yYdAcbzDDR Story by @cmholub pic.twitter.com/jWsqMg5gW6
- Entertainment Weekly (@EW) July 29, 2020
At its heart, Umbrella is about a dysfunctional family of misfit superheroes, trained to exploit their powers in service of justice, but all a little underdeveloped when it comes to basic love and kindness.
Talks a little about the history of the comics, the music, the casting and the differences they brought to the characters off the page.
Where the characters are in season 2:
-Five is the last one to arrive in the past and he is immediately confronted with russia invading the US. So once again he has to find a way to save the world.
“Everyone's got this new and really interesting arc for their characters. [He’s] becoming a lot more personable, but coinciding with that, he's got this huge problem of a completely new apocalypse happening several decades before an apocalypse even naturally occurred in the timeline. So yeah, in season 2, he just crawls out of that insanity and more into his anxiety.”
-Luther feels guilt about his part in the 2019 apocalypse and deals with his angst in unhealthy ways
“The fact that the world ended, and he did bad things in the process of getting there like locking Vanya up, that’s all weighing on him. He's taking out all that angst into the role he now has in the past, which is, he's ended up basically working as a henchman, an underground cage fighter.”
-Diego is obsessed with saving JFK because of a memory of his father
“He wants to stay in this timeline to fix some things. He has a clear thought of, ‘You're not taking us back. You left us here. Great. Stay away. I'm going to fix some things here.’ I think all of us are in that mindset.”
-Allison's change is the most different from the comics going from a white woman in the 1960s to a black woman in the 1960s. Alone and without her powers she's taken in by civil rights activists and even falls in love.
“Allison knows... the ability to change people's minds and opinions is a huge power. The outcome of the civil rights movement could be completely different, but she knows how tricky her power is and what the backlash of that could be on that kind of a scale”
-Vanya has no memories and a clean slate. She loses her memories and develops a relationship with a sweet housewife.
“You see someone who's much more comfortable in their skin. I think in many ways, what happened at the end of the season with Vanya, I guess that was not great for the world, but for her, it was the ultimate release - a way of coming to terms with so much in her life. This is the step after that, where she goes on a journey discovering and exploring who she is in a whole new way.”
-Klaus starts a cult. Which of course. While he's waiting to find ways to stop the love of his life, Dave, from joining the military (and dying in Vietnam) he finds ways to pass the time.
“We all have a kind of a nostalgic facsimile of what the ‘60s were. All of the iconography that has survived the ‘60s, we all put that into a hodgepodge in our brains and go, 'This is what the ‘60s was.' That’s what Klaus sort of does,” Sheehan explains. “He goes back and embodies that thing to a bunch of people who don't understand what that is, but he kind of gets the jump on it. He takes credit for it. He takes credit for a lot of things.”
-Ben is still stuck with Klaus. And getting really tired of it.
“This season it was really important for us to try and establish the agency and independence of Ben as a character,” Min says, “even though he is still tethered to Klaus.”
After brief bits with everyone's personal journeys, it's time to all come together to save the world. Again. And possibly be able to find a way to get back to their original timeline with everything intact.
Spoilers!
'The Umbrella Academy' stars Ellen Page and Justin H. Min, along with showrunner Steve Blackman, discuss that climactic confrontation at the FBI building in season 2. https://t.co/KPwsJjWy3L
- Entertainment Weekly (@EW) August 1, 2020
Because of course Vanya would have once again been the start of this new apocalypse. Poor girl can't catch a break. But the FBI is more to blame on this one. The Red Scare? True.
The LSD they used to interrogate her? Also true.
Giving those drugs to someone with Vanya's powers? Bad idea. Even tho Diego, Allison, and to some extent Klaus try their best to get to their sister the only one that can get through the waves of power is already dead. Here comes Ben to save the day.
“I think there's a certain sort of innocence, compassion, kindness, and empathy that Ben has more so than some of his other siblings,” Min tells EW. “He was able to connect to them on a deeper level, which is I think why, when he did die, it did sort of cause the family to separate. In season one, he realized along with Klaus that he had this ability to become more corporeal. He wants to use that even more so in this season, to help his family in whatever ways that he can.”
Vanya spent most of season 2 happy and easy going. Then everything we saw back in season 1 comes back to her like a punch in the gut and she has a hard time dealing with it and unfortunately that manifests into her losing control of her powers.
“I think that’s a beautiful moment with [Ben] when she's feeling incredible guilt and sorrow, and he’s just really explaining to her what she's been put through and helping her come to the realization that she doesn't have to be the only kid at the table anymore,” Page says. “So, I think her perspective comes to maybe just accepting the fact that she had a s----y childhood. I think it allows her to have more compassion for herself.”
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That soundtrack tho
