The Umbrella Academy S2 trailer: Same weird family, new weird problems

Time travel. What a headache, right? But as tricky as messing with chronology can be, it gets way messier when you also drag a world-ending apocalypse into the mix. That’s what the Hargreeves siblings are finding out in the first trailer for The Umbrella Academy season two.

The first season of Netflix’s comic book adaptation ended on about as cliffhanger-y a cliffhanger as you can get as everybody’s favourite weird family inadvertently caused the very apocalypse they were trying to stop and frantically had to use Five’s powers to jump away to safety. Except they’re not safe at all. As we recently learned when Netflix unveiled a batch of pics for the returning show, the Hargreeves have been accidentally scattered in the 1960s. As we’re not learning from this new trailer though, it’s not any 1960s that we’re familiar with as tanks roll through the streets of Texas and everything reduced to atoms in nuclear fire is just ten days away. Check it out below!

That looks fantastic! I have to admit, while I really enjoyed the first season overall, I wasn’t completely blown away by some of the plotting showrunner Steve Blackman did. I particularly felt it could do with a bit better pacing in places and lacked a bit of “OOMPH” factor in some key scenes. This looks to be upping the ante quite substantially though, because if you’re already dealing with timey-whimey shenanigans and the impending apocalypse, why not also throw yourselves right into the middle of one of the most infamous assassinations in history?

The original comics from writer Gerard Way and artist Gabriel Ba has run for three volumes, but the duo have planned up to eight volumes. This means that there’s plenty more story after this for Umbrella Academy to adapt, as Way told THR last year following the season one finale:

There’s eight graphic novels planned in total, and we’re on the third series right now. Now that we’ve started up again, we’re averaging about a year and a half per series for the turnaround. Steven knows what happens in all of those eight volumes; I wrote up this document for him and the writers, which explains what will happen through all of the graphic novels.

If this trailer is any indication of the quality that Blackman has planned, then I think we can expect Netflix to keep the show around for a long time to maybe even get through all of that story.

The Umbrella Academy season two is set to debut on Netflix on 31 July 2020. Here’s the full synopsis:

Five warned his family (so, so many times) that using his powers to escape from Vanya’s 2019 apocalypse was risky. Well, he was right – the time jump scatters the siblings in time in and around Dallas, Texas. Over a three year period. Starting in 1960.
Some, having been stuck in the past for years, have built lives and moved on, certain they’re the only ones who survived. Five is the last to land, smack dab in the middle of a nuclear doomsday, which – spoiler alert! – turns out is a result of the group’s disruption of the timeline (déjà vu, anyone?).
Now the Umbrella Academy must find a way to reunite, figure out what caused doomsday, put a stop to it, and return to the present timeline to stop that other apocalypse. All while being hunted by a trio of ruthless Swedish assassins. But seriously, no pressure or anything.

Last Updated: July 9, 2020