The umbrella academy (season 3)

The Umbrella Academy has never really evolved beyond it’s initial elevator pitch (“What if you crossed the X-Men with the Royal Tenenbaums?”) - and that’s okay. The show has found a comfortable, irreverent groove, in which nothing ever quite feels at stake, even though the fate of the universe is always at stake - literally. The structural repetition has somehow gone from a weakness to part of the fun.

When we last saw the Hargreeves siblings, they’d left 1960s Dallas behind and returned to the present after narrowly preventing a nuclear apocalypse… only to discover they’d arrived in an altered timeline in which their father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore), adopted seven different children with fantastical powers and created The Sparrow Academy, rather than The Umbrella Academy. The Umbrellas being brought face-to-face with their Sparrow equivalents is, not surprisingly, a total hoot. These include Fei, who compensates for her blindness by wielding crows that manifest from her body; Alphonso, a misshapen brute whose body absorbs pain and reflects it back (in other words, if your fist connects with his face, you’re the one who feels it); Jayme, who spits a hallucinogenic venom; and Christopher, who’s quite literally a telekinetic cube. The two most significant members, however, are Sloane (the very cute Genesis Rodriguez), who develops a romantic interest in lovelorn Luther, and an alternate version of Ben, the Umbrellas’ deceased-since-childhood sixth sibling who, well… is kind of a raging dick. After spending two seasons in the largely thankless role of a spectral sidekick visible only to Klaus, actor Justin H. Min is finally given the opportunity to play a proper cast member, and he sinks his teeth in with gusto. All of the Sparrows - but Ben in particular - give the show’s core chemistry a healthy jolt, as if the team dynamics were remixed in a martini shaker. Good thing too. The characters might not have otherwise survived a third season without noticeable stagnation. 

The Umbrellas eventually take refuge at the nearby Hotel Oblivion and ponder their next move… until it’s revealed that their presence has generated a time anomaly known as a “Kugelblitz,” which threatens the very fabric of space and time. In other words - same shit, different day. Much had been made of how the show would handle the real-life transition of star Elliot Page and the answer turns out to be - with as little fuss as possible. Vanya decides he’s now Viktor, to which his siblings basically shrug and declare “Cool” (this could be seen as a heartwarming display of familial acceptance, if not for the fact that they mostly treated him like crap over the first two seasons). Page remains the cast’s biggest name, but the show’s reigning MVP continues to be teenage actor Aidan Gallagher. As Five, the cynical time agent trapped in the body of his 13-year-old self, Gallagher’s distinct blend of withering exasperation over his siblings and their frequently juvenile dysfunctions, and the sort of didactic disdain that inevitably comes from being the only reliable adult in the room, never fails to entertain - it’s honestly one of the more underrated and unsung performances on TV (if anyone else is deserving of mention, it’s Tom Hopper, whose Luther was a mostly run-of-the-mill meathead when the series began, but has quietly cultivated a self-deprecating comedic touch).​

The last two episodes of the season achieve a certain crackerjack pop fervor, though it takes a good deal of narrative meandering and side-questing to get there - some good (anything involving Diego and Lila, who shows up with a 12-year-old kid (amusingly played by Euphoria’s Javon Walton) she claims is their son), some not-so-good (anything involving Klaus, who remains best in small doses). Without the historical context of the JFK assassination and the Civil Rights movement that framed season two, some might feel a bit unmoored. But then a big part of the show’s charm - for better or for worse - is its weird blend of square pegs and round holes (after three seasons, I still have absolutely no idea why this series needed a talking chimpanzee butler). Not surprisingly, the season ends the same way the first two did - crisis averted, new timeline, new crisis. Netflix has already announced that the fourth season will be the last, which is probably just as well. No matter how many times you reshuffle the deck, the card trick remains very much the same. As a spiraling Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) comments at one point - "We can't just keep doing this."