The work of Steve Blackman, creator of the homonymous series inspired by the comics of Gerard Way e Gabriel Ba, has always been to transpose the misadventures of the boys of the Umbrella Academy from comics to TV, trying to take all that material created and in order to bring it back to life in a decidedly different medium. If this allowed the first season to be as faithful as possible to the paper counterpart, with the second the work was decidedly more daring, as there were quite a few things to change. Maybe that's what makes it The Umbrella Academy 2 cooler and more interesting.
The Umbrella Academy 2 returns on July 31 on Netflix with a second season, which, in 10 episodes, tells the story of the seven students of the homonymous academy, starting exactly from where they stopped at the end of the first season. Ended in the 60s, in one way or another they also brought with them the apocalypse, no small problem to be solved in just 10 days.
Well-established team
The first thing that catches the eye, immediately after watching the 10 episodes that make up the second season, concerns the dynamics of the group: the series, stripped of all the cognitive preamble due to not knowing who the characters are, is more agile and shrewd. However, this proposes a sort of altered status quo to be brought back to the norm, but all this does not happen - as in the first season - for all 10 episodes, but stops only at the first, giving space to the development of the main plot and the subplots of the various guys. Dwelling precisely on the latter, the main plot is as always very messed up (in a good way), playing on time travel, on causes and consequences and on what the commission does about it, a kind of agency that preserves the timeline. The subplots of the individual protagonists are just as well developed, certainly simpler but useful enough to make them alive, human.
One of the mistakes that series of this genre often make is to fall into the same clichés season after season. When a character grows up, he often leaves behind old ways that perhaps made him interesting to the public, and for this reason sometimes the writers take care of regressing these peculiarities, leaving them in a limbo that makes them seem too artificial: luckily this doesn't happen in The Umbrella Academy 2. Of course, each of them shows the classic side out of the lines, sometimes amplified to give a sort of caricatural impression, but all this is always well limited to single characteristics, which really give a sense of growth that develops over the course of the 10 episodes. and which culminates with specific events of the last 2.
Time travel
It must be said that messing up time seems to be one of the funniest parts of being a screenwriter: even this time in fact the boys will find themselves, due to Five, having to solve a problem much bigger than them. All this obviously will not be relegated only to the year in which they are found, but even to many dynamics related to their characters, to someone already known and to many cause-consequence relationships that are not too easy to deduce but important enough to solve. In this race against time, the various actors take on the role of their "heroes" in a much more accurate way; none of their interpretations stands out over the other, not so much for a lower quality but because the team's work is choral, it is a group that works thanks to interpersonal relationships. Among the many, however, Cinque also remain interesting individually, especially towards the end of the season, and Klaus, as always, the craziest character.
Obviously there will be no lack of old acquaintances, as well as new torturers ready to put a spoke in the wheel of the academy boys: these, without spoilers, were one of the most interesting "new" parts to discover, with some really funny gags and an unprecedented ability to color scenes. To close the package, perhaps due to the strong pop component of the series, The Umbrella Academy 2 returns with a fantastic soundtrack, full of interesting and well-known pieces, embedded in equally well-constructed scenes. Finally, there will be real pearls of genius in some moments of the series, where the choice of framing and photography will give a definitely unique impact to the scenes.
