Multiversal variants. You can barely move without tripping over them these days – from Spider-Man: No Way Home, to Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness and Everything Everywhere All At Once, to the upcomingFlashmovie, there’s certainly something in the water right now. And that water, it seems, extends to Netflix – because, as teased at the end of Season 2, the return of The Umbrella Academy is about to introduce an alternate set of quasi-superheroes. The wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey consequences of the group's jaunt to the ‘60s mean that the Hargreeves siblings have created a time paradox – causing chaos in their reality, and resulting in the creation of the Sparrow Academy. Check out the trailer.
The introduction of the Sparrow Academy means an influx of new characters – but among their number is an alternate, alive version of dead sibling Ben, and a biker-jacket wearing variant of the family’s Chimpanzee butler Pogo. All of the action, weirdness and music cues that are The Umbrella Academy’s signature are present and correct in this Season 3 trailer – with more stoned posturing from Robert Sheehan’s Klaus, Aidan Gallagher still looking believably young as old-man-stuck-in-a-child’s-body Five, and Elliot Page returning not as Vanya, but Viktor this time around.
Will The Umbrella Academy manage the multiversal juggle as other recent hits have been able to? Frankly, the anything-goes nature of alternate-timeline stories has always been part of this show’s particular strange brew – so strap in for what should be another set of fun episodes when the series returns to Netflix from 22 June.