The first trailer for season 2 of The Umbrella Academy certainly does not disappoint with its promise of just how much of the show’s exciting lunacy will return with it. A significant moment comes at the end though where the team encounter their adoptive father Sir Reginald Hargreaves decades before they were born, and suggests this is how he first learned of them.
A common trope in stories featuring time travel is that of a closed loop, where an event occurs in the past caused by someone from the future who would not have been there were it not for the past event. To be less irritatingly abstract, it means the adult siblings meeting Hargreaves in 1963 is what gave him the inspiration to locate them as children in (his) future, whereupon they grow up and travel back in time and meet him, thus continuing in a perpetual cycle for eternity.
In the comics, it’s stated that not all of the 43 babies born under mysterious circumstances survived infancy, while others were abandoned or put up for adoption and disappeared into the system, resulting in Hargreaves only being able to locate seven of them. The TV series doesn’t reference the fates of the other 36 children, and here it’s suggested that only these seven were adopted by Hargreaves because he was told by them that this is what would happen, and having advanced knowledge of when and where they were born gives him a head start in locating them. We know, time travel gives you headaches like this.
If you recall, Hargreaves is dead at the start of the first season, and in fact, his funeral was intended to bring the team back together to prevent the imminent apocalypse. He appeared in flashback sequences from the group’s time living together as teenagers, and he may well have a larger role to play this time around.
Children knowing their parents as adults rather than children always gives an interesting dynamic, and the adoptive siblings having the opportunity to call out their father for his terrible parenting may lead to some emotional catharsis that the first season of The Umbrella Academy lacked.
