The Umbrella Academy season 2: 5 things we loved about the new episodes

The Timely Storytelling

While The Umbrella Academy is obviously rooted in fiction, the show didn’t shy away from depicting what real life was like for people of color and LGBTQ+ people in the early ’60s. The character of Allison is canonically white in the comic books, but the actress who plays her, Emmy Raver-Lampman, is a woman of color. Vanya had a previous toxic relationship with a man, but this season, she falls in love with a married woman named Sissy, played by Marin Ireland.

Allison becomes a part of the civil rights movement in Dallas, even going as far as participating in a sit-in at a local whites-only restaurant with her husband, Raymond (Yusuf Gatewood). Speaking with MTV News, Raver-Lampman stated,”You’re throwing a Black woman back into the segregated South in 1961, ’62, and ’63, so we’re not going to be able to not address it. There was definitely a care that needed to be taken.”

In Vanya’s case, she’s a little more comfortable in her own skin, which allows a confidence to come through that wasn’t seen much in season one. She has amnesia and is taken in by a local family, and develops a relationship with Sissy behind her possessive, alcoholic husband’s back. This is set six years prior to the Stonewall riots of 1969 that mark what is now known as Pride Month, when homosexuality was both illegal and thought to be a mental illness by some.