Most significantly, we meet Hazel and Cha-Cha: Two suit-wearing, gun-toting assassins who are sent to find and kill Five after the failure of the hired goons in the diner. With the apocalypse ball kicked a little further down the road, “Run, Boy, Run” spends the rest of its time fleshing out other corners of the Umbrella Academy universe. (Unfortunately, the owner can’t be identified because the mechanical eye hasn’t even been manufactured yet. Here, help comes in the form of his drug-addled brother Klaus, who storms into an office and causes a scene in an effort to help Five track down the owner of a mechanical eye. The entire world will come to an end if Five can’t Encyclopedia-Brown his way out of this problem, and he needs all the help he can get to fix it. Part of it is that 15-year-old Aidan Gallagher has the chops to play both the humor and the pathos of a 58-year-old, possibly insane man trapped in a kid’s body.īut mostly, I think it’s that the stakes in Five’s story are both very high and very clear. Part of the success here is that this blend of sci-fi, noir, and comedy - which plays like a blend of Minority Report and Inherent Vice - is a lot more compelling than everything surrounding it. The episode’s most compelling story, by far, follows Five as he tries to crack the mystery about how and why the apocalypse is on the horizon. But if that’s not your plan, the unfortunate side effect of the Netflix binge-watch structure is a shaggy, shapeless episode like this one, which comes just as the show’s story should be ramping up, not flailing around. And that’s probably fine for anyone who plans to spend this weekend knocking out the first season of The Umbrella Academy.

With that in mind, viewers should probably regard The Umbrella Academy as a ten-hour story - not a story composed of ten episodes. Netflix shows are designed, on some level, to be binge-watched.

Run boy run netflix