When a trailer starts with a needle drop to a ‘70s banger like “Ballroom Blitz,” you know you’re in for a ride. While season two of The Umbrella Academy ended with the surviving members of the Umbrella Academy getting the suitcase to portal them back to 2019, they didn’t emerge into the exact right 2019. Today’s latest glimpse gives us an even better idea of what to expect.
As the season finale showed, the gang ended up at patriarch Sir Reginald Hargreeves’ (Colm Feore) alternate-timeline establishment… the Sparrow Academy. We get some pretty great moments between the adopted siblings as they figure out exactly what the hell is going on as they orient themselves in not-the-Umbrella Academy. In between some fun fight scenes and excellently cheesy displays of power, we get the kind of moments that I love to see in The Umbrella Academy — like when Five (Aiden Gallagher) states that the next person to say “dickhead” gets punched in the throat and everyone sitting around him proceeds to say “dickhead” multiple times to get a rise out of him. Another great moment is Five is explaining that even if Reginald didn’t adopt them in this timeline, they still exist, and while attempting to tell his brothers to avoid their alternate-timeline selves, Diego (David Castañeda) immediately suggests killing them and Klaus (Robert Sheehan) immediately suggests having sex with them.
Here’s the official synopsis for season three, courtesy of Netflix: “After putting a stop to 1963’s doomsday, the Umbrella Academy return home to the present, convinced they prevented the initial apocalypse and fixed this godforsaken timeline once and for all. But after a brief moment of celebration, they realise things aren’t exactly (ok, not at all) how they left them. Enter the Sparrow Academy. Smart, stylish, and about as warm as a sea of icebergs, the Sparrows immediately clash with the Umbrellas in a violent face-off that turns out to be the least of everyone’s concerns. Navigating challenges, losses, and surprises of their own — and dealing with an unidentified destructive entity wreaking havoc in the Universe (something they may have caused) — now all they need to do is convince Dad’s new and possibly better family to help them put right what their arrival made wrong. Will they find a way back to their pre-apocalyptic lives? Or is this new world about to reveal more than just a hiccup in the timeline?”
This is the kind of family dynamic that I really love to see on The Umbrella Academy. Horribly weird and utterly bonkers, but full of a kind of familiarly absurd dialogue. With Elliot Page, Tom Hopper, Emmy Raver-Lampman, and Justin H. Min returning, the season looks like it’s going to be a fun, pop-fuelled rollercoaster from start to finish.
The Umbrella Academy season three arrives June 22 on Netflix.
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Editor’s Note: Release dates within this article are based in the U.S., but will be updated with local Australian dates as soon as we know more.