The Umbrella Academy

The third season of The Umbrella Academy may just be the most emotional and personal season yet.

Season three continues to honestly grapple with everything its seven protagonists went through in the past.

The Umbrella Academy never met a time traveling wrinkle it didn’t like, and for season three, there’s a lot of fallout to sort through. But with strong characters both old and new, there’s plenty of reason to see it through.

Generally speaking, these characters are interesting enough that the audience can just have fun hanging out with them, but it does lose its way every so often. Still, once The Umbrella Academy dives into the meat-and-bones of the Kugelblitz (and beyond), it kicks things into overdrive with a stunning cosmic conclusion.

Even if a lot of Season 3 feels like downtime, it’s still largely enjoyable downtime, thanks to a cast that understands their characters and how to play off of one another.

Perhaps eight episodes would have been more effective in creating a tightly coiled season with more streamlined stories and less meandering between major story turns. In the end, it feels like a very densely plotted season that doesn’t mind sacrificing the potency of emotional moments trying to pay everything off.

The Umbrella Academy is an impressionistic version of what a TV show should look like, all anthropomorphic monkeys in bike gangs and angry Amish mobs (both of which have little bearing on the narrative). But the characters are so charming and likeable, the aesthetic so beguiling, that it’s almost easy to forget that you have no idea what’s going on. Or at least no longer care.

The show descends from its second-season cliffhanger into an ever-more-convoluted world of shifting timelines, battling super-teams and existential dangers, presented with plenty of goofy humor and irreverence but as the strange new elements pile up, increasingly aimed at what feels like a hardy band of loyalists with the patience to keep pace.