The Umbrella Academy season 2, episode 7 review: Öga for Öga

It’s episode 7 and even when The Umbrella Academy tries to get their act together, circumstances conspire against them because it’s an eye for an eye.

The writers of the Umbrella Academy must be watching too much WWE programming lately. In this episode, the motto, and title, is “Öga for Öga” (Swedish for “an eye fan eye”) and they live up to it. Everybody has a vendetta and seeks vengeance. The Swedes make an example of Elliot to send a message to the Hargreeves kids. Five accepts The Handler’s (Kate Walsh) deal and takes out the Commission’s Board; plus she has plans for Diego – her daughter Lila’s “boyfriend” officially.

Five’s mission sends him to Wisconsin in 1982 crashing a meeting of the “Midwest Soybean Society,” a cover for the Commission. He does the job and exacts bloody revenge, for himself as much as for The Handler, in exchange for safe passage away from Dallas and away from the second apocalypse for his whole family.

Simple Tasks

Oh, if only they were on the same page. Last episode, they were all together in the same place for the first time since season 1 (or it felt like it) to have supper with their deadbeat Dad’s past self (Colm Feore). Reginald, in turn, treated it like Festivus by psychoanalyzing the children he doesn’t know and testing their powers. Diego still doesn’t impress him.

It would’ve been easy for them to just stick together but they get pulled into different directions by their personal issues. That’s their dysfunction at work and it couldn’t come at a worse time with three episodes left and Armageddon in six days – or less.

Hanging Plot Threads

Conversely, some of the lagging subplots gained steam these last few episodes. Allison and Klaus’s plot threads are developing nicely while Vanya’s got spicier and more emotional.

She wants to run off with her lover, Sissy (Marin Ireland), and her son but husband Carl (Stephen Bogaert) finds out. Far from the brainless simpleton drunk who sells showerheads (or whatever) he came across as, he puts Vanya in a corner with an ultimatum: Back off his wife and son or the kid goes in a mental home.

Business got real, but Carl has no idea who he’s threatening; just ask the Moon and Earthlings fifty years from 1963 in the Umbrella Academy’s timeline how poking that bear works out. We won’t find out how it ends for Carl until the next ep., sadly.

Ghosting in Plain Sight of a Cult

I agree Klaus (Robert Sheehan) is becoming the best part of the show – or at least is running off with the attention due to his tortured magnetism.

He’s also proven to be complex. Last time, he and ghostly brother Ben (Justin Min) learned you can’t get rid of the clingy hangers-on so easily, especially when they’re your followers. Klaus laughs it off and goes back to living it up as a reluctant cult leader. Then he suffers a blow he can’t balk at.

Dave (Calem MacDonald) confronts him and says he is enlisting, sooner than expected, and than he was supposed to. Crushed, Klaus realized the more they try to change the past, the worse things get no matter who is meddling with time.

Ben thinks he can get Klaus back on the right track, but he has to jump into Klaus’s body and take over. Klaus willingly offers himself as Ben’s new host and he pulls Klaus away from his Destiny’s Children cult. Meanwhile, the team needs to reassemble and get back to the future which goes as well as you can imagine, souring Klaus and Ben’s possession scenario out of Ghost.

How Does the World End?

Time is running out. Whatever the secret behind doomsday, it lies with The Handler. That much is clear although we still don’t know the trigger. It could be her, Lila, or Diego.

Each has intriguing possibilities but the likeliest outcome is Lila (Ritu Arya). They wouldn’t build her up all season and give her such a dramatic twist, striking at the heart of the Academy and the Commission, just to waste it, but who knows?

Will the Umbrella Academy get their act together and make it back to 2019 or fumble the ball again and stay stuck in the past? Tune in next time to find out, unless you’ve binged the whole season already. In that case, be back here tomorrow-ish to read our thoughts.