'The Umbrella Academy' season 2: Where are Number 5 and his siblings headed to now?
You’d think a monkey-man, a former actress, a vigilante, a drug addict, a dead guy, a violinist, and a thirteen-year-old time-traveler wouldn’t make for a particularly good superhero team but ‘The Umbrella Academy’ manages to take those characters and work wonders with them. The show's weirdness is its defining quality and the reason why it has enjoyed such great popularity. Now after the cliffhanger at the end of season one, the question on everyone’s mind is this: “What now for the Academy?”
‘The Umbrella Academy’ is adapted from the successful comic book series of the same name by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, which has already completed two volumes and is currently about to enter into its third. So you’d think we’d already know what’s about to happen in Season 2. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you’re the kind of person who hates spoilers) this is not the case.
The show tells a vastly different story than the comics that are, to be fair, far too weird to be adapted scene for scene to the screen. For one thing, the comics start out with a short monologue about an “Atomic Elbow”.
The first season’s finale didn’t just end the season, it ended the world. This is already divergent from the comics because there the Umbrella Academy manages to prevent the apocalypse. So we know right off the bat that the comics aren’t going to be particularly reliable guides for the show.
Season 2 will have to explain how the Academy hopes to prevent the end of the world and also shed some light on where (or when) the Academy is now after their jump into the timestream at the end of season one. Thankfully, we might have a clue that was dropped in the show itself.
The second volume of ‘The Umbrella Academy’ comics has the Academy trying to ensure the assassination of a certain president of the United States. This particular assassination was also shown in the show as the final mission of the time-traveling teleporter, Number 5. That president is none other than John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States.
If the show is going to be anything like the comics (which, as we’ve noted above, it probably isn’t) the answer to saving the world might be found on that fateful day in Dallas when JFK was assassinated.
While we don’t yet know exactly how the timeline of the show goes, there’s a chance that the future depends on whether Kennedy gets assassinated or not.
The assassination was Number 5’s last assignment and it makes sense to bring the character full circle and have him return to the one mission he failed to complete. While that doesn’t explain how the Academy might save the world, it does explain how the bullet that hit Kennedy curved, considering that sort of thing is well within the powerset of the Academy’s resident hothead Diego.
‘The Umbrella Academy’ is expected to return to screens in early 2020 and fans will have to wait till then to get real answers about the dysfunctional super-powered family’s final fate. Until then, here’s hoping the Academy, wherever or whenever they are, have a moment of peace, a safe haven, and a fresh cup of coffee before they (possibly) kill the president.