Umbrella Academy Season 2's Biggest Unanswered Questions
The Umbrella Academy season 2 leaves a lot of unanswered questions - and it's going to be exciting to see how they're explored in the future. The first season of The Umbrella Academy released in early 2019, and it proved Netflix doesn't need Marvel anymore. Season 1 was almost pitch-perfect, but somehow The Umbrella Academy season 2 is actually an improvement. It sees the Hargreeves children travel back in time to 1963, where they attempt to avert the assassination of President Kennedy.
Curiously, The Umbrella Academy season 2 avoided dealing with a lot of the unanswered questions from season 1, instead choosing to tell a completely fresh story. At this stage, it's unclear whether or not the show ever intends to deal with any of those questions, or whether viewers are instead simply expected to sit back and enjoy the wild ride. Viewers who watch the two seasons in succession will also notice a number of inconsistencies; the writers haven't really bothered too much about continuity, presumably figuring that doesn't matter much in a show that bounces through the timeline with joyful abandon.
So let's take this opportunity to explore The Umbrella Academy season 2's many unanswered questions, and try to figure things out ahead of the surely-inevitable Umbrella Academy season 3.
Time travel is hard. It's a purely theoretical idea, with no real-world analogue - and as a result, every film, TV series, or book tends to handle temporal mechanics slightly differently. In fact, it's often the cases that the rules of the game are rewritten at plot convenience. Precious few franchises manage to stay consistent, and the few that do often wind up in difficulty. Take the example of Avengers: Endgame; even the film's writer and directors disagree about how its time travel works.
The Umbrella Academy season 1 appeared to suggest the apocalypse was inevitable, and could not be averted, however much Five tried to change the timeline. But it's likely this was because of the Commission, who were policing the timeline in order to guide it towards the apocalypse, for a completely unexplained reason. The Commission are in chaos in The Umbrella Academy season 2. They're distracted, and as a result the timeline is now completely out of control. As far as time travel in The Umbrella Academy is concerned, anything can happen - and it does, when the Hargreeves siblings unwittingly rewrite history.
The Umbrella Academy season 2 creates a new timeline in which Sir Reginald Hargreeves created the Sparrow Academy, rather than the Umbrella Academy. It's clear that the Sparrow Academy are not just alternate versions of Luther, Allison, Five, Vanya, Klaus and Diego, since the alternate version of Ben that greets them doesn't recognize them. They're lifted from the comics, where they are yet to be developed to any real extent but will apparently be key to the next volume. Speaking to Forbes, comic book writer Gerard Way explained they are the answer to a question that's long bugged fans of The Umbrella Academy. "The series finally starts to answer the question: ‘What about the other babies born on that day, in that moment?’ The Umbrella Academy siblings are not alone in the world anymore." It's unclear what happened to these children in the original timeline, but that may not matter anymore.
Grace was introduced in The Umbrella Academy season 2, where she served as an affectionate mother figure to the Hargreeves children. In The Umbrella Academy season 2, the time travelers learned the android was based on a real person who Sir Reginald Hargreeves had loved, a woman who worked for NASA. Presumably in the original timeline, Grace passed away and Sir Reginald "replaced" her. Unfortunately, while in 1963 Diego planted doubts about Sir Reginald in Grace's mind, and she presumably left him. It will be interesting to see whether she is still alive in the new timeline - and if so, whether she could prove a useful ally for the Umbrella Academy.
Pogo's lifestory may well have changed as well. For all Sir Reginald referred to Pogo as "my monkey" in 1963, he actually appears to have belonged to Grace. As such, it's possible the Pogo of the new timeline stayed with Grace, rather than becoming Sir Reginald's "manservant" as he did in the original timeline. Either way, no doubt the Umbrella Academy will soon wind up interacting with a new version of Pogo.
The moment she arrives in the present, Allison's first thought is to reach out to her beautiful daughter Claire, who should be alive now the Apocalypse has apparently been averted. That should serve as a disturbing reminder Allison has the most to lose if the timeline has changed so much; indeed, there's a sense in which she is the only one of the Umbrella Academy who has anything to lose at all. It's unknown whether Claire exists in this new timeline, and if she doesn't it's safe to assume Allison will want to rewrite history again - no matter the cost.
The Hargreeves children were supposed to have separated years ago, before they'd even finished training. As a result, The Umbrella Academy season 2 suggests they have all wildly underestimated their actual powers. Two key scenes hint Allison's psychic ability to control others is far more powerful than she previously believed, when she retains mental control of a bigoted cafe worker without even saying the words "I heard a rumor." In the Apocalypse scene at the beginning, Allison tells some soldiers, "I heard a rumor that I blew your minds," and their heads explode. This suggests her voice actually rewrites reality itself, because nobody can will their own head into exploding.
Interestingly, this is more similar to Allison's powers in the comics, where she even accidentally created an evil double of herself when she lied. If Allison really does manipulate reality itself, then she could become the most powerful of all the Hargreeves children. Imagine her saying to a super-powered opponent, "I heard a rumor you lost your powers." Meanwhile, this might well provide Allison with an easy way of getting her daughter Claire back, if Claire really has been erased from the timeline; she could simply wish her back into being.
Diego's powerset is expanded as well. In the comics, Diego is the Kraken, able to breathe underwater; this has been dropped completely from the TV series, and instead Diego appears to have the ability to psychically redirect projectiles. He typically uses this to guide his knives, as seen in the Apocalypse scene in which he kills a bunch of soldiers - even those who are behind him. But it seems Diego can also redirect bullets, a trick that could have come in useful in season 1 but proves pretty effective against the Commission in season 2. The strange thing is that, where the others appear to be discovering new aspects of their powers, Diego instead seems quite comfortable with this - so it's hard to say why he didn't use it before now.
It seems Five has been underestimating his abilities as well, as he learns when he manages to reverse time around himself - although who knows what effect that had on the time-space continuum. It makes sense that Five would be the one who has the least understanding of his own abilities, though, because he was the first to end his training with Sir Reginald Hargreeves when he hopped forward to the First Apocalypse. It will be interesting to see how his powerset expands if he takes advantage of the opportunity to continue his education now history has been rewritten.
In The Umbrella Academy season 1, every use of Vanya's power was potentially devastating. She seems to have it much more under control in season 2, though, and even uses them a couple of times without any real negative effects. But one of the most striking scenes sees Vanya use her powers to somehow bring a young boy, Harlan, back from the dead. It's unclear exactly how she does this, but it leads to her creating some sort of quasi-permanent bond between them. Although Vanya ultimately draws her power back, she seems to have permanently affected Harlan, who is shown possessing a lasting telekinetic ability of some kind.
The circumstances of Ben's death are now shrouded in mystery, although Sir Reginald Hargreeves clearly blamed them on his brothers and sisters. The Umbrella Academy season 2 reveals Ben died over a decade ago in real time; it's difficult to set a precise date, because Klaus and Ben both quote different numbers of years. So why has Ben aged? In The Umbrella Academy season 1, episode 4, Klaus summoned the ghosts of people who had been killed by Hazel and Cha-Cha, and none of them had aged. Presumably something about Ben's powers interacted with the "rules" of the Afterlife, whatever they may be.
In a shock twist, The Umbrella Academy season 2 introduced another of the super-powered children born on that fateful day in 1989. Lila is potentially the most powerful to date, because her ability is to reflect the powers of others. The interesting question, though, is just how the Handler trained her to use her abilities so effectively. The most likely explanation is that Lila was sent on other missions where she encountered people born with powers, presumably killing them - they certainly haven't been taken by the Commission.
The Umbrella Academy season 2 confirms that, just as in the comics, Sir Reginald Hargreeves is an alien disguising himself as a human. It's actually possible he's a time traveler, because his study contains plans for the Televator, a device he used to travel through time and space in the comics. But this naturally raises the question of just what Hargreeves is, and what his real purpose is on Earth. Whatever that may be, it is clearly tied to the super-powered children born in 1989, because in both timelines he winds up assembling a group of students.
One of Sir Reginald's (many) oddities is his strange obsession with the Moon. It seems that runs all the way back to 1963, because the Majestic 12 referenced his interests in the Dark Side of the Moon. In The Umbrella Academy season 1, he'd established a moonbase and sent Luther there to man it for years. Viewers had previously assumed this was tied to Hargreeves' knowledge of the Apocalypse, but that's unlikely to be the case if Hargreeves was interested in the Moon as far back as 1963. Something else is clearly going on.
One of the burning questions from The Umbrella Academy season 1 is still unanswered; just how did Sir Reginald Hargreeves know the Apocalypse was coming in the original timeline? He was so confident it was imminent that he went to shocking lengths to reunite the Umbrella Academy, right down to orchestrating his own death. But that mysterious foreknowledge has yet to be explained. An answer to this question may not be forthcoming in The Umbrella Academy season 3, because this timeline is a non-apocalyptic one.
The Umbrella Academy season 1 finale ended with the world consumed by an Apocalypse, and Five attempted to rescue his siblings before transporting them through time. Before he did so, he cautioned the experience could affect their bodies and cause them to regress to teenagers. The final shots apparently confirmed this, with all of them turning into kids instants before they vanished into time. But that was neatly forgotten for The Umbrella Academy season 2, with the effect presumably negated due to the temporal instability. Instead, Five's wild and speedy calculations dumped them all in Dallas over a period of years.