I liked the Umbrella Academy Season 1. It had characters I enjoyed watching, a great aesthetic, and a bunch of neat world building that I wanted to see more of. It wasn't perfect, but I had a great time with it.
Unfortunately UA ended up being a lot like The Matrix. It had all these cool ideas that didn't quite fit together, but it didn't have enough time for you to sort out exactly how they didn't fit. There was still tons of room to imagine that the writers had all of it figured out, and that later on you would see the story come together beautifully. Then the next chapter came out, and everyone realized that they had been just making shit up the whole time and when they actually tried to put it all together it looked like a junkheap instead of a carefully crafted narrative.
A substantial part of the problem was that UA was determined to have a bunch of time travel. You *can* do time travel well (see Terminator 2), but the way to do it well is to simply have it happen off screen. Time travel happened, sure, but now the characters just have to cope with the situation they are in. Shows where the characters can time travel and change the past all end up being a disaster. UA had the time travel pretty much off screen for the first season, which was fine, but in the second season they elected to have lots of time travel in the plot, and that blew everything to bits.
You can't just have a character who can go back in time and fix anything that goes wrong. It makes all the decisions everyone makes totally silly. Heck, the revelation that he can do this retroactively trashes the first season of the show, since now we know that he could have solved all the problems any time he wanted, and he just didn't because the writers told him not to.
Having everything go terribly and then fixing it by 'turns out the character can go back in time and change anything he wants!' feels like they were trying to go for a big emotional scene but lacked any sense of creativity or long term thinking and came up with the most silly, hackneyed, destructive idea they could and ran with it. It isn't easy to write characters into dire situations and then have them get out of those situations in a believable but surprising way, but if you can't write that, then find someone who can. Just throwing up your hands in despair, employing a Deus Ex Machina, and giving up on any world consistency or dramatic tension going forward is pathetic.
It is easy to see where this heads. In future the character simply forgets to use his 'fix anything with time travel' ability, and they write stories as if this major plot point never happened. I know that in superhero stories characters forgetting to use their powers is common. That doesn't make it good. It isn't just with nonsense time travel either - characters in UA consistently have abilities they forget about, or don't bother using, for no reason. They have a hugely important conversation in the show where all the main characters desperately need a villain to tell them something. One of those characters can mind control people, and does so regularly. All she has to do is say "I heard a rumour that you answered all of our questions" and the villain would spill any secret they desired. Since they were desperately trying to prevent Armageddon at that point, it would be entirely justified! But she forgets, because that way the plot can happen.
It sucks, because I like the people in the show. I like the weird retro/futuristic blend of the tech. I like that they blend in stories about people of colour and queer people and make those struggles part of the narrative.
But the plot is a travesty, and the worldbuilding is an inconsistent mess. Whenever the characters need to be in a place for the plot, they go all robot 'beep boop I am going over here now' even if it makes no sense whatsoever. What a waste of a bunch of good character building.
So many superhero shows fall into the trap of gifting characters amazing powers to solve problems and then completely forget that this changes the world and they will actually have to account for those marvellous new powers at other times. Unfortunately Umbrella Academy does this, and to an extent that I just can't care about it anymore.
Have you watched Dark? It is, as the name implies, quite dark, and it doesn't have any superheros. I also haven't watched the whole thing, but so far, it seems to stick to its own rules. I think? It's pretty complicated.
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