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In Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy, a bunch of women get pregnant within a day (no, Zeus is not involved) and give birth to children who are endowed with special powers. The babies are adopted by an eccentric entrepreneur. But wait, all this is prelude. The actual drama is set in the present, several years in the future, wherein the children all have grown up and have gone their separate ways.
The said entrepreneur is dead due to seemingly natural causes. And it is this incident that brings the superheroes together. The death seems natural to the coroner, but one of them, Luther Hargreeves (Black Sails and Game of Thrones alum Tom Hopper) senses foul play. The others are not as interested, not because his theory is not compelling, but they simply do not care.
As for the entrepreneur, Sir Reginald Hargreeves or The Monocle, he was quite a man himself. He had as his butler a talking chimpanzee and, remarkably enough, knew about the babies and their superpowers. He also might have known about an apocalypse that is in the offing and one of his foster children, The Boy / Number Five (Aidan Gallagher), has seen it and lived to tell the tale. Well, his superpower is time-travel. His identity is The Boy because he is literally a boy, courtesy some screw-up during time-travel.
The first episode is mildly entertaining. There is action, mystery, a little tongue-in-cheek feel and even a bit of family drama — but all this feels like it has been done before.
In today’s superhero surfeit, a TV show or a movie has to be exceptional to distinguish itself. The Umbrella Academy, if it is fair to judge it by its first episode, is just above average and seems hackneyed at that. But it is still good enough to make me curious to know about the mysteries that the episode has put forward. Was the Monocle’s death natural? If not, then who killed him? How did he know about the children and their superpowers and why did he take them in? The apocalypse, who will bring it? And why? Is it Umbrella Academy’s task to save the world? The answer to the last one is likely in affirmative.
The Umbrella Academy is streaming on Netflix.
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