The Umbrella Academy returns with a flat-out brilliant season 2 premiere

The second season premiere of The Umbrella Academy on Netflix sets the tone for what promises to be a fantastic sophomore season.

The first season of The Umbrella Academy was a wild, time-bending ride that seemed like it was going to be a tough act to follow. The story of a very dysfunctional superhero family trying to stop the apocalypse that they themselves caused after their teleporting brother returned home after many years looking exactly as he did when he left but now having several decades experience as a time-traveling hitman was…(pause so you can take all that in)…a refreshing take on the superhero genre. It was fun, it was irreverent, it was sweet, and it put a lot of pressure on season 2.

Happily, The Umbrella Academy season 2 premiere is terrific, picking up exactly where things left off while introducing a brand new apocalypse for our heroes to prevent, along with a brand new blast-from-the-past setting. It’s only the second season and the show is already reinventing itself, and doing a marvelous job.

The title of the episode, “Right Back Where We Started,” is also the name of the song by Maxine Nightingale that plays at the top of the hour, as we see each member of the Umbrella Academy arrive in the same alley in Dallas at different points in time from 1960-1963. The last to make it through the time jump is Number 5, who teleported the lot of them back in time in an attempt to prevent Vanya from destroying the Earth. But obviously, he took them too far back, but at least they have lots of time to plan now, right?

Wrong: the apocalypse has followed the gang back in time. Russian soldiers march through the streets of Dallas, killing everyone in sight until the heroes arrive. Finally, we get to see The Umbrella Academy go full Avengers mode, showing off their abilities like never before making mincemeat of the foreign invaders. But just as Five is about to join the fight, a silver-foxed Hazel arrives and pulls him out of the situation before a nuclear holocaust drops out of the sky. Hazel brings Five 10 days into the past, and the two are attacked by a trio of gun-toting villains presumably working for the Commission, Five and Hazel’s former employer.

After that, Five finds a UFO nut that’s been tracking the alleyway anomalies and begins the search to find his siblings and stop the apocalypse…again. He meets up with Diego, who is in a mental institution because everyone thinks he’s crazy for trying to prevent the Kennedy assassination. Five leaves him inside, but Diego eventually escapes with his new zany, butt-kicking companion Lila (Ritu Arya).

Elsewhere, Vanya is living with a family as a nanny with no memory of her past. Klaus and Ben are making their way across the country, Allison is married to a civil rights activist and seems to have regained the ability to speak, and Luther is a thug working for Jack Ruby, the guy who famously kills Lee Harvey Oswald. The episode ends with Five meeting him in a club only for Luther to tell his brother he doesn’t care about saving the world anymore.

Everything about this episode is great, especially the way the show lays out its cards out early on rather than drawing out the main conflict like it did in the first season. This season already feels much less frantic, with a more focused storyline that’s easy to get behind.

There’s no shortage of introspective character moments, beautiful set pieces, hilarious antics, and top-notch action. It took a while for things to get going the first time around, but here we literally start with a bang, and things only look to get more explosive from here.

The well-crafted unbroken take that showcases all the members of The Umbrella Academy in action is drop-dead fantastic, and makes it extremely difficult not to binge the rest of season to see if it happens again. We saw them working together a bit, as kids, in the first season, but nothing on this scale. This sequence goes a long way towards situating this series as Netflix’s answer to Marvel’s X-Men. We could go even further and say that The Umbrella Academy could turn out to be the best superhero TV show out there. “Right Back Where We Started” proves it has what it takes.

Episode Grade: A-

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