still can't believe we were denied a montage of the hargreeves breaking into a random assortment of hotel rooms to scavenge their wedding outfits since, as we recall, they arrived in the timeline with nothing but the emo clothes on their backs

“Hi, I’m his loving brother.” With the same grin he uses when threatening people? Yeah. So believable, Five. That entire scene is so funny though. Lila looks SO offended when she’s called a crazy lady and then so happy when Diego says he’s “bringing the crazy lady.”

Aidan Gallagher as an actor is so funny. there were no awkward first few episodes. no easing into the role. no 'he gets better over time'. my 15 year old man (at the time) showed up and immediately served

"you two sentient STDs" is one of my favourite Five insults ever

(all text edits above are courtesy of yours truly. all images were found on google)

tua mass rewatch is over at the same time as me finishing season 3 for the first time! agh can't wait for season 4 :0 how will this dysfunctional family save the world this time? will five finally learn to walk down stairs instead of teleporting?

more five text edits

even more five text edits

five pretending to be an actual teenager is … so unconvincing. i would rather believe he’s an old man stuck in the body of a child than believe he is 13.

“hi, i’m selling encyclopaedias for my youth group. i was wondering if-”

dude you are doing the leaning-forward-with-hands-in-pockets thing exclusive to older men. you are not even trying

The Wedding at the End of the World has so many enjoyable character moments. You just have to completely suspend your disbelief for how they managed to do literally anything depicted in the episode, and who really cares if it makes sense? It's a great setup and gives every character something interesting to do.

Hot takes:

Love that we're continuing not to address Five's very obvious alcoholism. He's literally got a bottle or a glass in hand every scene and nobody can blame him.

It's the One Episode where Sparrow!Ben isn't a cartoon character, and good for him. I feel like it took until this episode to find him. I desperately needed more human-shaped Ben and less arch villain, please continue this trajectory.

Reggie's toast/poem at the wedding is iconic and also probably about his wife?? We don't talk about this enough. I'm obsessed with everything he says. The sun rises over a lily’s field A mother veiled, her lips concealed The mourners come in droves of black To bury what their hearts unpack With shallow breath and time eclipsed, I pray you miss death’s gentle kiss

Only major complaint is that 'Teenage Dream' cover. Ugh. I know they were so happy to get this in, but it's not the vibe that I enjoy from my Umbrella Academy soundtrack.

I just want to talk about how TUA’s pilot episode uses specifically the Phantom Medley, ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ and ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople)’ as interconnected character (re-)introductions, because they are so, so good.

So, the Phantom of the Opera Medley gives us our first, mostly silent introductions to five out of the seven siblings. Everyone is doing their thing: Luther is on the moon, Diego is being a vigilante, Allison is at her movie premiere, Klaus is released from rehab and instantly relapses, and Viktor is playing the violin part of the medley by himself on a stage. It establishes what each of them has going on in their life, and it establishes that all of them are alone. The Medley is an instrumental arrangement of several songs from the musical adaptation of the Phantom of the Opera, which is an interesting choice in itself, being a story about a brilliant, reclusive, and unhinged genius who harnesses a young girl’s talent for his own personal gain. There is more to it, but this is the relevant part, for obvious reasons. This is also the scene where we see the siblings find out about the death of the shadowy figure that nurtured their powers and abused them for selfish reasons. If the medley had used the lyrics of the musical, the first song used in the medley – the main theme – has as its key lyrics the following: “The Phantom of the Opera is there, inside my mind.” And isn’t that something for the adults introduced to this melody, whose puppet master messed them up so badly during childhood that that still lingers in all of them, a throughline of that first season?

To this first introduction, ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ serves as a re-introduction. It’s the same principle: a musical montage that focuses on each sibling to an overarching song. The theme of being alone is carried through, but this time, surprisingly, they’re not lonely. They’re not unified, they are certainly not getting along, but you get a feeling of their shared past. There is something that tethers them together. And where in the Medley, only Viktor could hear the music, because he was playing it, this time, the music is fully a part of the world. They’re all listening to the same song. They’re alone, but they’re not. They’re alone together, which is a step closer than it was in the Phantom Medley. And while the first montage focuses on what they were doing, established their occupations, this montage just gives us them…being. Existing, without anyone watching. Not their father, not the other siblings. We get such good insights into their personalities. Luther’s un-awareness of his own body leading him to accidentally punch the plane model. Diego’s array of dorky dance moves. Allison’s hesitance before she gets more and more into the song and allows herself to let loose. Klaus dancing with the ghost of his father. Viktor’s dancing being contained and unassuming. The title line, ‘I think we’re alone now’, just perfectly fits, and it’s a great example of visual media recontextualising a song’s lyrics. The original song is about sex, specifically the prohibition and taboo of teenage sex, and with the framing of the show, the lyrics instead become as literal as they could be. “Children behave / That's what they say when we're together / And watch how you play / They don't understand,” becomes about their childhood, about how they were never allowed to be kids, how they had to obey their father’s whims. And now he is gone, and they are alone, and it is good. Kind of. Sort of. While that iconic slow zoom-out visually shows that, their unity, despite all their differences, it is also all of them inside the Umbrella Academy. Them, and Grace, and Pogo, still in an environment that Reginald made. Reginald is still inside their minds. He is gone, but the structures he built, the damage he did to them is not. It’s this moment of catharsis, this instant where each and every one of the siblings allows themselves to be, to live, just for a moment, brought together by Luther playing a song loud enough for everyone to hear, where they think they’re free of Reginald’s abuse, and the rest of the show is them finding out that the death of an abuser doesn’t erase the effect he had. And then the music gets disrupted by someone quite literally crashing the party. But he crashes it from outside the house, because he is the one least concerned with (and, in this season, very clearly least affected by) Reginald.

Five gets his own musical (re-)introduction, and he gets it seven minutes before the end of the episode. Different from his siblings, we get to see his personality before he gets his musical key scene. And we meet him as a kid first, his arrogance, his powers, the use of teleportation to knock a guy out with a stapler. He then appears to inadvertently interrupt the first moment of unity his siblings have had in decades. He brushes off their father’s death. Casually reveals that Reginald has been dead to him for 45 years. It doesn’t matter to him. He has other things on his mind, but of course he doesn’t tell them, why would he? The arrogance is still there, his powers too. He’s insufferable, the viewer understands, and different. Different because he looks like a kid, a literal embodiment of the Umbrella Academy at its height, all knee-high socks and blazer, frozen in time, while at the same time having lived a very different life from his siblings. That’s all the viewer knows of him, by that point. And then ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople)’ happens, and the understanding of the character shifts abruptly, as do the stakes for the entire show. While the introduction scene with the Phantom Medley and the re-introduction scene to ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ are about these different siblings, apart, but maybe closer than they think they are, united by the loss of their father, ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople)’ shows you that this one has a completely different set of problems from his siblings. Namely, he is being tracked down, a wanted man, a very skilled killer. The two montages are so calm in comparison to the breakneck (pun intended) pace of Five’s kill spree. He takes out half a dozen men armed with machine guns by outfoxing them, killing them with a wide variety of items in a wide variety of different ways. While ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ contrasts the Phantom Medley, ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople)’ contrasts the Five previously established in the show, especially his childhood self, and shows how his skills have developed. The innocence of the school uniform is quickly lost when he uses its tie to strangle a man to death. The first line in the song is ‘Istanbul was Constantinople / Now it’s Istanbul / Not Constantinople / Been a long time gone, Constantinople.” It’s about how something is technically the same thing – a schoolboy, perhaps – but time has irrevocably changed it, and it can never go back to that old version, because it hasn’t existed in a long time. It’s about Five, and it’s about the apocalypse, and the Commission, but it’s not about Reginald. ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople)’ is the only non-diegetic song of the three discussed here, as in, it is not part of the show’s internal universe. The song is not playing in a jukebox in the diner. It doesn’t partially exist in the universe, like Viktor’s violin being the violin in the medley, or Luther playing the vinyl in the house. It is so different in principle and execution from the other two scenes, but it is still a scene meant to convey an understanding of the character, just like the other two are.

And despite it being purposefully and obviously different, I still think that ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople)’ belongs to the other two scenes, that they form a united whole of introductions to the Hargreeves siblings. The diner scene rhymes with the other two, I think, in its marked differences, but there are threads that tie them together. How the violin is a key instrument in both the Phantom Medley and ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople)’. How the medley shows the Hargreeves in the lives they had carved out for themselves away from Reginald, ‘I Think We’re Alone Now’ positions them in the house they grew up in, in the Umbrella Academy, Reginald’s domain, whereas ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople)’ is set in a place where the kids defied Reginald. How the theme of loneliness and being alone threads through all of them. How the songs are, in order, partially diegetic (siblings apart but tied together by their past), fully diegetic (siblings enjoying the same thing despite being physically apart) and non-diegetic (the one sibling that is apart from them in age, time, space, part of his upbringing, you name it). How pertinent the lyrics are in each case, even the ones that aren’t technically in the song. I just think all three of them are brilliant needle drops that add so much to the story, the understanding of the characters and their relation to each other, just in the microcosm of this one pilot episode. Also they’re all incredible bangers.

actually forever angry that they didn't expand on diego's powers in season 3. like the season 2 finale moment where he stops all the bullets is SO COOL and really makes you go woah! we've underestimated diego this whole time! i can't wait to see the full extent of his powers and what he can really do! and then in s3 he kinda just sucks shit

"i was fine for three months until you showed up"

diego you were in a mental asylum

^the s2 poll

five in this episode really embodies

To the umbrellas, it doesn’t make sense why Five is so angry about the others not showing up in the alley. But for the viewers, and Five, it makes perfect sense. Five had to kill a board room full of people to get that briefcase. He had to do something he really, really didn’t want to do, had make a deal he didn’t want to make (and specifically said he didn’t want to make). To him, all his siblings had to do was show up and everything would be fixed.

Of course, we know why people didn’t show up. Viktor was taken into custody of the FBI, Allison had to fight the remaining Swedes, and Diego was kidnapped by Lila and taken to the Commission. But from his perspective, he did something horrible that would give them access to a safe timeline and it didn’t matter.

I always have such a hard time wrapping my head around the scene where Diego discovers Klaus's dead body. he is devastated. his 12 year old son just killed his brother with a crossbow. "And you were gonna dissolve the body?!"

he considers the horrifying implications of this situation for about 5 seconds. decides that this is the moment for him to step up as a father and save his son from prison. begins to help him get rid of the body of his own dead brother whom Diego is very close to.

like David is trying so hard here and doing a good job portraying a million different conflicting emotions but the script is just so utterly ridiculous so help me GOD

why are they all so mad at Five?? he did nothing?? Allison hit the button and he knows the same amount as the rest of you??? leave him alone!!

me: *I build a time machine and step on an ant* *the timeline* the chemical academy (luther, diego, allison, gerard, five, mikey, vanya/victor) five: I'm gonna write a comic about a band of 4 men with mental trauma and superpowers :D *creates my umbrella romance (klaus, frank, mikey and ray)* klaus: hi, I'm the lead singer of my umbrella romance and can I see ghosts frank: hi, I'm frank hargreeves and I teleport... ray: hi, I have super strength, i can play the guitar ben: I'm an octopus *plays the bass*