We’re back with the Umbrella Academy as we continue down Netflix Month 2, we saw the day that wasn’t. Now it’s time to see…
The Day that Was
We find out that Harold Jenkins was born on the same day as
the Academy Students but through a normal pregnancy. Unfortunately his mother
didn’t survive childbirth. He grew up idolising the Umbrella Academy, playing
with the dolls, reading their comics but his dad was an alcoholic and abused
him. He created his own Umbrella Academy costume and is in the audience when
they return to the house. His plan, was to try and convince them he was one of
them but Reginald sees right through him.
His advice is that chasing something unattainable is a
recipe for a lifetime of disappointment and resentment, which he’s not wrong
about. After being pushed too far by his father, he beats his head in with a
hammer. He ends up in prison for 12 years. We see him watch as Klaus ditches
the artefacts from Reginald’s box, and he finds the diary and it’s confirmed
here that Harold Jenkins is in fact now known as Leonard.
We now see him take the Reginald Hargreeves figurine and we
know why, it’s the one missing from his collection. We get a repeat of the
scene with Vanya bending the lampposts discovering that she has powers. Five
manages to rally everyone to the cause, despite some lingering doubts. Luther
though is still going to check Reginald’s notes, thinking it may be connected to
his trip to the moon.
Klaus leaves feeling ill as Diego heads off in search of
Harold Jenkins. We see the scene from the previous episode played out from
Hazel’s perspective as he gets a message to terminate Cha-Cha for immediate
extraction. Diego’s plan to find Harold involves asking the police,
particularly Detective Beeman.
He’s warned that because he was dumb enough to get his
prints all over the crime scene, they have him pegged for her murder. Meanwhile
Allison calls Vanya to try and apologise over what happened during the meeting.
And Allison immediately, upon looking through the files discovers that Harold
is in fact Leonard.
Luther once again discovers that no-one even looked at the
files and without Allison to comfort him this time, he gets himself drunk.
Klaus is about to ask him to tie him up, but Luther wants to converse with
Reginald. Interestingly, Klaus is trying to ward Luther off the drink and
console him over his grief. I wish Luther had tried in reverse at some point,
would’ve made for good role-reversal.
Luther’s decided he wants to be carefree and off his head,
but Klaus is surprisingly level-headed telling him that’s a terrible idea.
Luther decides to head off to do it anyway, and Klaus is now trying to stop
him. We get the scene with Hazel and Cha-Cha in the woods again, Hazel was
packing a gun the entire time and he prepares to carry the mission out. But to
be honest, his hear was never in and his talk about birds and finding the life
with the right partner, which Cha-Cha presumes is her gets her to back down.
He heads off to get ‘chinese food’ but instead it’s a date
with Agnes for him. Allison, Diego and Five arrive and Leonard’s house and
Allison inspects the attic, evidently the dead body is now gone but what
remains is a wall filled with pictures of the group, with their faces burnt
off. Five collapses from a bullet wound from the battle in the last episode.
Leonard and Vanya head to a cabin in the woods and despite
her hesitation, he convinces her of the need to try out her powers in the
middle of woods with no-one around. Hazel is telling Agnes that he’s leaving
and wants her to come with him. Steady on, Tiger, you’ve known her for maybe 4
days. She can sense that something’s and he says he’s feeling uneasy with the
corporate structure of his work, she reminds him than you only live once, and
she agrees to go with him.
She also tells him that he should tell Cha-Cha and not just
disappear on her. Helping Luther means going into possibly the worst places
someone like Klaus could be but Ben helps talk him into it by reminding him
that Luther would do the same for him. Diego and Allison take Klaus home where
they discover that Grace has been reactivated.
Klaus and Ben discover Luther at a rave, filled with loud
noises and stobe lights. Luther has taken off his shirt and is dancing with his
chest bear. He’s having the time of his life but Klaus seriously isn’t, he threw
a pill away earlier but breaks down from all the noise and begins crawing
through the crowd for it. In the process getting his war flashbacks. He sees
Dave’s corpse.
Grace attends to number 5. And Diego and Allison discuss
their next move, the Grandmother’s address but as they’re about to head out,
the police show up to arrest Diego for Patch’s murder. Vanya is unable to move
a boat consciously, she begins to wonder why Leonard is so invested in her
trying. He coaxes her off that line of questioning.
Hazel arrives home and begins preparing a note for Cha-Cha,
he sees the discarded order in the bin. He turns on the shower and hides
waiting behind the curtains as she shoots through the shower. He knocks her out
after she sees his order. Klaus gets the pill but his moment of bliss is
interrupted as the husband of a guy that was attracted to Luther earlier has
come with friends to beat him up. He tries to attack but is knocked down.
He wakes up in a colourful vest in an otherwise black and
white world. He hears the sound of a ukulele as a girl on a bike tells him that
someone is waiting for him. He thinks it’s Dave in a cabin and he rushes into
it, entering a barber’s shop. He sits in the chair and it’s revealed it’s Reginald,
who even in death is a complete bastard. I could lay it on how horrifying this
character is like I did with Donald Davenport in my Lab Rats review, but unlike
that show he’s never been portrayed as morally in the right.
And it turns out he faked his own death as a means to get
the group back together. Before he can get any further information though, he
regains consciousness. In the time that took, Luther was kicked out by the
bouncers. In a weird deviation from the last timeline, when Vanya and Leonard
leave dinner they’re set upon by 3 thugs. To save herself and Leonard, Vanya
unleashes a burst of energy that knocks them into hard objects. But Leonard is
also injured in the attack.
Hazel chains Cha-Cha to the radiator and tells her he’s out.
Cha-Cha promises that she’ll go after him and kill him, but first her. I don’t
know why either of think there’s a way back to the agency when they’ve both had
kill orders made against them.
So here we are, Diego’s in jail, Five is unconscious,
Allison is en-route to the old house, Klaus just left the nightclub as Luther
is still having sexy-time. And Harold/Leonard is in hospital, missing an eye.
I warned that the episode would be worse for all of them,
and that turned out to be much the case, still don’t know what changed to
affect Vanya’s timeline.
Rating 8/10
I heard a rumour
We flash back to 1 year ago, where Allison is reading her
daughter a bedtime story, the story of how the Umbrella Academy stopped the
bank robbery we saw in an earlier episode. It’s shown to us in a decent
story-book art style which I quite like. She asks why Vanya isn’t in them and
Allison doesn’t say that she doesn’t have powers.
When Claire refuses to go to sleep, Allison uses her rumour
powers to make her tired and fall asleep. Unfortunately, Patrick was outside
when it happened. She flashes through a bunch of other times she used that
power, to gain her fame as an actress, and potentially to make Patrick love
her. Yikes! The implications of that are horrifying.
She arrives at the house and begins to investigate, finding
Vanya’s violin inside. Leonard is discharged from hospital. He needs to come in
for a check-up and to get a prosthetic eye fitted but that’s all, or so he
tells her but he has to voluntarily discharge himself. Its here Vanya finds out
only one of the thugs survived her attack.
Klaus wakes up Luther to call a family meeting where he
tells all about Reginald’s suicide. And by all I mean just Klaus and Five as
the others are indisposed. Pogo validates the story and reveals that Grace’s
programming had been adjusted so she couldn’t administer first aid.
Klaus and Vanya head back to the house in the wood, with
Vanya blaming herself for killing those 2 thugs. Hazel and Agnes are stuck in
traffic. Traffic caused by the police, as they’re investigating the ‘accident’
at the restaurant. Allison sees Vanya’s scarf and decides to investigate,
convincing a local officer she’s doing research for a role so she can tag
along. He gets a call that one of the thugs from the night before, ie the one
that survived, has woken up
Diego talks with Beeman, they know he was at the hotel and
the two had a ‘contentious relationship’ and he’s getting transferred to an
upstate prison. Still, deep down, Beeman knows Diego isn’t responsible. Diego
managed to steal his key from him. Leonard tries to see if he can find a way to
train Vanya using Reginald’s diary. He uses line of glasses and a resonating
frequency to get Vanya to smash a specific glass.
Describing the attack last night, her powers sprung up where
mind concentrated on a specific sound, the car engine. Diego’s got himself out
of jail and is joining 5 and Klaus in saving the world as Luther has
disappeared. We see 7 days into Reginald’s training regimen with Vanya, it
started to reach blocks, she began to resist training and lash out.
Leonard asks her to concentrates on a single sound, creating
a gust of wind around them. She is able to control it by calming her emotions.
Luther is drowning his sorrows in the bar, but Diego knows exactly how to get
him going, by telling him Allison went after Harold Jenkins, a convicted
murderer. Hazel, having escaped the radiator, breaks into the donut shop and
finds the address of a bird sanctuary that’s likely their first stop. Just
because she can, she blows up the donut shop, in broad daylight and no-one
f*cking saw her.
In the hospital, the policeman, Sergeant Cheddar, asks about
the accident. Turns out Harold Jenkins/Leonard paid the thugs up front to rough
him up and things just went downhill from there. Allison presses a little too
hard and Cheddar realises quickly that he’s been had. Vanya realises that her
concert is tomorrow and she should practice.
Leonard is hesitant but he can’t reveal all just yet so
let’s her do it. It’s clear that Agnes has fallen Hard for Hazel, seriously
hard. You’ve known each other for a week, tops. Hazel says there’s something he
needs to take care of something before they can go together but he will be
back, come hell or high water. She’s a bit upset to be left at the hotel alone.
Vanya finishes her practice and comes in, hearing a heavy
banging sound, which makes her flash back to being locked in a bunker in an
effort to contain her power, she begins hyperventilating and reaches for her
violin and with that she creates a ripple across the entire pond. Our Thug went
missing when he went into x-ray. But a Doctor verifies that Vanya was in the
hospital and left with ‘Leonard’
Allison heads back to the house, seeing the wind resonating.
She tells Vanya everything she’s found out about Leonard and it’s a lot to take
in. Allison begins to piece things together. When they were 4, they were told
Vanya was sick and needed to be kept in the isolation bunker. Allison came down
to pay her a visit as Grace and Reginald fed her lunch and pills. Allison is
told to use her abilities to convince Vanya that he’s just ordinary. Too young
to really understand what she was doing.
But this revelation has Vanya pissed off to no end. Allison
is about to use her power to make her forget again, but Vanya uses her violin
bow to slash her throat. Leonard arrives and drags Vanya away, and we see that
the thug is another of Harold’s victims. The rest of the family arrive to find
Allison on the ground, bleeding.
It’s another great episode as the threads begin to come
together. And we’ll be back to see how the world ends next time.
Rating 8.5/10
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