Umbrella Academy season 3 review: the best season yet - The Verge

Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy is stronger than ever with its third season — out June 22nd — that catches up to and races past the comics to stunning effect.

By the end of the second season of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy, the series had tackled two apocalypses and begun teasing out details on the small screen that hadn’t yet become canon in Dark Horse’s The Umbrella Academy comics from writer Gerard Way and artist Gabriel Bá. In its third season, Netflix’s show finally starts to answer many of the mysterious questions that have been weighing heavily on the Hargreeves siblings’ minds since we first met them and digs into the world-ending strangeness that seems to follow them no matter which reality or timeline they find themselves in.

With all of this year’s superhero stories about broken, beleaguered people fighting to save the world, it’s easy to write The Umbrella Academy off as just another comic book adaptation vying for your attention. But in its third season, The Umbrella Academy opens itself up to a slew of new possibilities with a fresh yet familiar story about found families figuring out what really matters to them in life.

In the final moments of The Umbrella Academy’s time-traveling second season, Sir Reginald Hargreeves’ (Colm Feore) first set of children found themselves transported back to a future in which they’d seemingly never become members of the Umbrella Academy. Though the building everyone knew as the Umbrella Academy’s headquarters still stood, a very much alive and corporeal Ben (Justin H. Min) informed Viktor (Elliot Page), Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman), Luther (Tom Hopper), Diego (David Castañeda), Five (Aidan Gallagher), and Klaus (Robert Sheehan) that they’d arrived at the base of the Sparrows, another family of costumed heroes raised by Hargreeves.

Justin H. Min as Ben, Cazzie David as Jayme, Jake Epstein as Alphonso, Justin Cornwell as Marcus, Britne Oldford as Fei, and Genesis Rodriguez as Sloane.

    Image: Netflix
  

When The Umbrella Academy’s second season ended in 2020, Hollywood’s current fixation on comic book adaptations featuring multiverses and / or realities fractured by time travelers messing with history had only just begun. Back then, it wasn’t yet clear what the Sparrows sudden appearance would mean for the Hargreeves family, but in 2022, their arrival makes The Umbrella Academy feel much more prescient about audiences’ appetites for stories involving alternate superheroic timelines.

Though it brings all of the Umbrellas great joy to see a variant of Ben who actually lives through his childhood, much of this season’s story focuses on how unnerved the original team is by their alternate counterparts and a still-living version of their father who genuinely loves his children.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/15/23168014/umbrella-academy-season-3-review-netflix

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