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Small Details You Missed In The Umbrella Academy Season 3 Trailer

Brace yourselves, everyone. A brand new trailer for the third season of "The Umbrella Academy" has exploded online in a flurry of sentient cubes and tattooing monkeys, giving us a tease of what kind of wild ride we can expect. If you've been waiting to see the return of the Hargreeves children on Netflix, you're in luck, because now there are twice as many.

Following that jaw-dropping cliffhanger at the end of the Season 2 finale, the new preview sees the Hargreeves back at home, but in a different reality in which Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore) is still alive and training an all-new group of super kids. We've been expecting a wild trailer featuring the collision of these two superhero academies, and Netflix didn't disappoint. Who are the Sparrows? Why is one of them Ben (Justin H. Min), who is somehow still living in this timeline? What is a kugelblitz, and are we about to get a duet of White Violins? 

Well, sit up straight and pay attention as we look at all the small details we noticed in the new trailer for the third season of "The Umbrella Academy."

Lila mimics the White Violin again

The whole series so far essentially revolves around the fact that Viktor Hargreeves (Elliot Page) has the devastating ability to turn soundwaves into energy capable of destroying the entire planet. Also known as the White Violin, Viktor's apocalyptic powers are the reason the team had to flee to the 1960s at the end of Season 1, and they start to cause havoc again in Season 2. But the new trailer suggests that Viktor has a better grip on them — enough to team up with Lila Pitts (Ritu Arya).

What's interesting is the fact that Lila is once again using her mimicking ability to copy the White Violin's skills. Remember, she first uses Viktor's energy against the team in the battle at the end of Season 2 — but the two characters are seemingly working together in the fresh footage. This suggests the former Temps Commission employee has really had a change of heart after all of her time with the Handler (Kate Walsh). It'll be interesting to see how that dynamic changes things for the gang in this new universe. They're going to need all the help they can get when it comes to dealing with the Sparrow Academy.

The Hotel Obsidian explained

There's also a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance of The Hotel Obsidian — with a huge neon sign that sits on top of a building. This might look a little familiar to fans of the comics by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá.

In the Dark Horse series, Sir Reginald Hargreeves creates the Hotel Oblivion as a prison to house all the villains that the Academy has faced over the years. Unfortunately, he created it outside of reality in its own dimension — which makes for a pretty grim existence for the Hotel's prisoners. They're guarded by a Doctor Manhattan-like figure called The Scientific Man, and he eventually fights a number of bad guys when they break out of the hotel.

So what does this all mean for the Netflix show? Well, it looks like the Obsidian is a different version of the Oblivion in this new, alternate timeline. Obviously, it's a little different from the extra-dimensional building in the comics, but it's easy to see why Netflix would play fast-and-loose with the lore in this respect. Hopefully it brings in some older villains from when the team were in their prime, because so far we've only seen flashbacks of the gang taking on petty criminals — rather than actual supervillains.

Give us Murder Magician and the zombie Gustave Eifel, you cowards.

Five gets a costume change

After meddling with the timeline in the past and present for the last two seasons, you'd think the nameless Five (Aidan Gallagher) has earned some time to kick back and relax a little. Of course, he could if he was in the right reality. After figuring out just what kind of mess he and his siblings have wandered into this time (keep reading to find out), it looks like the time-traveling rebel of the family is finally giving up his old threads and trying something new on for size.

In the new trailer, a brief moment shows Five looking more like a private investigator than a member of Hargreeves Academy. Chances are that after the first encounter with the Sparrows, he and the rest of the Umbrellas are in the wind trying to keep off the Sparrows' radar. Might he be ditching his classic school uniform to keep a low profile, or is Five finally making a change for the better, realizing that there's more to his identity than just a number?

Viktor is coming into his own

When you grow up in a repressive environment that does everything in its power to make sure that you doubt every aspect of your own life, it can get a little tricky to learn to be assertive, strong, and confident. In the very first season, Elliot Page's Vanya is often looked at as the outcast of the family. Believing themselves to be absolutely powerless and completely mediocre, Vanya pens a scathing autobiography that exposes the brutal training and isolation levied upon both them and their siblings by adoptive father, Reginald Hargreeves.

It turns out that the actions of Reginald are all an act intended to instill doubt in Vanya, to prevent them from tapping into their potentially world-ending power. Once Vanya realizes these manipulations, they lash out and cause the destruction of the world in Season 1. Attempting to avoid the apocalypse, the Hargreeves siblings jump back in time, which sees the family scattered. Eventually, Vanya falls in love with Sissy Cooper (Marin Ireland), which triggers yet another set of events that sees Vanya dropping another apocalypse on the world.

In the Season 3 trailer, we finally see Vanya, now transitioned to Viktor, learning to trust in himself and flexing a newfound confidence. He even threatens an opposing member of the Sparrow Academy, warning that he's already ended the world twice. This is a far cry from the person who had a hard time speaking up or making eye contact in Season 1. We're certainly looking forward to seeing more of Viktor.

Pogo's back with a new vocation

Near the end of the trailer, Pogo the chimpanzee (Adam Godley) — who raised the Umbrella Academy siblings and was killed by Vanya in the epic Season 1 finale — makes a brief appearance. He slowly turns toward the camera, holding a tattoo needle in one hand, while a man sits and waits. Pogo clenches a lit cigarette in his mouth and wears what looks like a motorcycle gang's vest with his name and the title "enforcer" in patches. Even in the dimly lit room we can see that Pogo's left arm is covered in colorful tattoos.

When last we saw Pogo he was dead, impaled on a set of antlers hanging on the Umbrella Academy parlor wall. The new timeline the trailer introduces makes his return possible, but it remains to be seen how he is brought back into the lives of the Umbrella Academy students. His return is clearly meant to be the promo's big reveal, with just a quick shot of Klaus (Robert Sheehan) offering a "spoiler alert" between Pogo's appearance and the end of the trailer.

Our best look yet at the Sparrows

As teased above, also back from the dead is Ben Hargreeves, although he is now part of the rival Sparrow Academy. According to Deadline, he'll be joined by actors Justin Cornwell, Britne Oldford, Genesis Rodriguez, Cazzie David, and Jake Epstein, as well as something called the "Existential Dread Inducing Psykronium Cube" — aka Christopher.

The trailer picks up where Season 2 ended, with the Umbrella Academy siblings jumping safely back from 1964 to 2019 to discover that Ben and their father Reginald (Colm Feore) are alive again and the Sparrow Academy has replaced them in their home. After the Sparrow Academy students are introduced, we mostly see them fighting with their Umbrella Academy counterparts. Oldford's character pursues the Umbrella Academy team through a hallway with the help of an army of conjured crows, and there are several quick flashes of punches and kicks being thrown between students of the two academies. Ben, who appears to be the leader of the Sparrow side, unleashes tentacles from his chest that reach from the Academy parlor floor to the balcony above — so his powers, at least, appear to be the same in this universe.

Whether they remain in conflict with the Umbrella Academy crew or eventually join them is unclear, but the Sparrow Academy team is clearly a huge part of "The Umbrella Academy" Season 3.

A kugelblitz is a real thing, actually

If one thing stands out in this trailer, it's the repetition of the inane-sounding word: kugelblitz. While it sounds like hand-wavy sci-fi technobabble, a kugelblitz is a real thing, actually. Just ask your local theoretical astrophysicist.

The Season 3 trailer for "The Umbrella Academy" shows Five (Aidan Gallagher) explaining that by jumping back into the future from the 1960s, the Hargreeves siblings have caused a time paradox, with a resulting effect called a kugelblitz. According to Futurism, kugelblitz is German for "ball lightning," and it describes a phenomenon that forms when a massive amount of energy is focused and concentrated on a single point in space. This focus causes both time and space to warp around the highly energized point, forming an event horizon beyond which nothing is observable (via Astronomy). The kugelblitz is similar to a black hole, and a prediction of general relativity necessitated by the prevailing theory's mass-energy equivalence. In other words, the concentration of energy should form a singularity in the same way a collapsing star would.

In the Season 3 trailer for "The Umbrella Academy," the kugelblitz is shown radiating waves of energy, which appear to cause things within a growing radius to turn to ash and disappear. Five gives the family less than week to figure out how to solve this issue, lest the Hargreeves be forced to once again flee from a timeline that they themselves have ruined.

It's all a lot to take in, so we recommend at the very least a survey course in astrophysics before you dive into Season 3. You have until June 22, so should be plenty of time.