Quick review:
I watched ep6 “The Day That Wasn’t” and then rolled right into ep7 “The Day That Was”. These two episodes should be seen together. They compliment each other perfectly.
I have a feeling that some people aren’t going to like them or suggest that they should have been cut down to one episode. I haven’t looked up reviews or recaps of any of the episodes so I don’t know yet. I tend to like the oddball episodes like these two. I also liked the episode of Stranger Things in season two where Eleven has a side adventure.
Spoiler thoughts under the read more:
During “The Day That Wasn’t” I didn’t know what to expect. I figured time travel was going to be involved but I didn’t think the entire episode would be undone at the end. “The Day That Was” shows us how small changes have big effects on events. No. Five comes back with just a name and it sets all the Umbrella Academy off on different paths from the previous episode.
It’s a bit of a change up from how most shows use time travel. Usually, the day that is erased is the bad timeline and the time traveler is fixing mistakes they or other characters made. At the end of ep6, everyone is in a pretty good place. Luther and Allison are acting on feeling they had buried. Diego is about to learn something important from Mom. Klaus has sobered up and has contacted his love, Dave. In comparison at the end of ep7, Luther has gone on a bender, Diego is in jail, Klaus wandering the streets looking for Luther, Alison is driving (to Harold’s cabin?) alone, No. Five is seriously wounded though that happened while he was in the act of resetting the day, and the “one-eyed man” has been revealed.
So, No. Five coming back probably caused the Apocalypse. Before he came back and undid the day, Vanya had found the professor’s journal in “Leonard’s” house. I can only assume that she would have confronted him and hopefully returned to her family for help. In the revised timeline “Leonard” hears his real name spoken by No. Five and gets spooked. Instead of going to his house he takes Vanya to his grandma’s remote cabin.
This also causes him to get into a fight that costs him his eye. I think we are supposed to assume that because he lost an eye that the prosthetic eye deadLuther was holding in the rubble is his. The Apocalypse is in two days, which I don’t think is long enough to be fitted with a prosthetic eye but maybe in tv-time, it is.
There is a bit of me that wonders if No. Five was supposed to “escape” from the “adjustment bureau” to cause the Apocalypse.
The real twist is that Professor Hargreaves killed himself to gather the Academy members, which enabled Klaus to steal that box and throw out the journal that enabled “Leonard” to come up with a plan to use Vanya against the Academy for revenge. If the Professor hadn’t killed himself these events wouldn’t have happened and the Apocalypse would be averted. Which means he wanted the Academy back together for some reason other than the coming Apocalypse.
That brings me to the one nitpick I have about ep7 which is about Klaus and Professor Hargreaves in the afterlife. Most of it is good but I felt the fading out right before being told something important was a bit of a cop-out. I would rather have had Professor Hargreaves tell Klaus something but it’s cryptic or unrelated to the end of the world.
While the Academy members are going through a “what if” scenario, Hazel and Cha-Cha’s story remains unchanged but we do get some variation. Ep6 shows us Cha-Cha’s perspective and ep7 Hazel’s perspective and the resolution. I don’t have a lot to say about their storyline except that it’s well done and engaging.
That’s all for these episodes.