Thursday, April 4, 2019

TV Review: The Umbrella Academy Season 1

                                           The Umbrella Academy Season 1 Review
The Umbrella Academy is about how on October 1, 1989 43 woman who were not pregnant when they woke up that morning gave birth and how eccentric billionaire Reginald Hargreeves decided to buy as many of the children as he could in the end he got seven of them and six of them ended up having super powers. Reginald forced the children become child super heroes and ended up psychologically abusing all seven of the children through out their childhood in different ways which leads to them being messed up as adults. Vanya the only child not to show signs of having powers was isolated from her siblings and told by her father repeatedly that there was nothing special about her which has led to her having very low self esteem.

The Hargreeves siblings reunite for the first time in years as adults after their father dies at his funeral which is where the series story really starts in the current time. Quick overview of what the characters abilities are and where they currently are when the series begins Luther has super strength and has been living on the moon the last few years because his dad told him to. Diego has the ability to curve anything he throws so that it hits it's target he generally uses knives and is currently working as a vigilante. Allison can make someone do whatever she wants as long as she says the phrase I heard a rumor before it and is currently a famous actress whose personal life is falling apart due to her over using her power. Klaus has the ability to talk to the dead and he spends his time getting high and drunk in order to block out the sounds of the dead since he can't turn off his power in any other way. Five can teleport and time travel and he has been missing since they were all thirteen years old. Ben had inter-dimensional monsters beneath his skin and he died several years before the series and currently follows Klaus around and tries to convince him to make better decisions. Vanya has no powers and works as a violinist who lives are very lonely life and wrote a book about her childhood that led to her family being pretty angry with her.

The siblings reunite at the funeral and things don't start off well especially when Luther accuses his siblings of murdering their father which obviously upsets his siblings who hated their father but wouldn't kill him. On the day of the funeral Five comes back and although he looks thirteen he's actually been gone for forty-five years from his point of view and only looks young because he made some kind of miscalculation with time travel that he won't explain to his siblings and it turns out that he went to the future and that the apocalypse will happen eight days from now and he has come back to stop it although it takes him awhile to really tell his siblings what is going on. Even when the siblings find out the apocalypse they really don't do well with focusing on how to stop it because everyone is still to focus on their personal problems and their dysfunctional relationships with each other.

Overall I loved this series I think it did a great job at exploring the dysfunctional family dynamics that the siblings share while also showing that they care about each other despite that and I think all they characters were interesting and I enjoyed learning about them. I really love that all of the characters have such obvious flaws and that they all still have so much more room to grow in the future. I like that the characters were so focused on the personal that the plot mostly took a backseat for them and I like that in the end even the apocalypse was something that was caused by the family's personal issues in the end. This also had a really great soundtrack that I love that made an already great series even better. Please tell me your thoughts on this series in the comment section below.

Book Review: These Broken Stars

                                                       These Broken Stars Review
These Broken Stars is set in a far off future where people live on multiple planets that have been inhabitable for humans and there are space ships that are as big as cities that take the wealthy across the universe in a fairly short amount of time. Tarver is a solider that is from one of the less well off planets but is young and accomplished war hero so he was assigned to travel on Icarus a spaceliner that is one the biggest that holds 50,000 people on it. Tarver ends up meeting Lilac who is the daughter of one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the universe whose company built the Icarus and is in charge of making most planet inhabitable, Lilac and Tarver connect right away but Lilac pretends that she hates him and looks down at him because her father is a tyrant who make sure that any guy that she gets close to ends up dead. The Icarus ends up crashing and Tarver and Lilac end up being the only two people who survive the crash and end up on an abandoned planet.

The planet being abandoned is something that Tarver finds suspicious from the start but he tries not to think about what that might mean and instead focuses on figuring out the best way to insure that both him and Lilac survive. Lilac believes that her father must know where they are and that them being rescued is a given which something that Tarver is unsure about since they have no way to contact anyone to tell them where they are or even send out a signal which leads to them finding a communication device to become a priority. After a few days of being on the planet Lilac starts to hear voices and after awhile it becomes clear that something is strange about this planet in the way that it's able to communicate with Lilac on some psychic level.

While on the planet and away from the rest of civilization Tarver and Lilac get to know each other better and start to admire each others strengths while relying on each other to survive. Once it becomes clear to both of them that they have just been pushing each other away to save face rather than actually disliking or looking down on each other in any real way the two realize that they do love on each other but are unsure if it is a good idea or not to act on those feelings.

Overall this was a good it had an interesting enough plot and the focus on just two characters for the majority of the story lead us to really get to know the two of them pretty well and allowed plenty of room for their relationship to grow. Please tell me your thoughts on this book in the comment section down below.