The Dumbest Thing That Happened In The Umbrella Academy Season 1

For fans of Netflix's breakout anti-superhero series The Umbrella Academy, binging the show's initial 10 episode run became a full-blown roller coaster ride of mind-bending narrative and big-budget bombast crossed with a heavy helping of both physical and emotional carnage. It was also a refreshing re-imagining of what a superhero story could be, with The Umbrella Academy's creative team frequently opting to keep the show's narrative focused on the human rather than the heroic. 

The series — based on Gerard Way's and Gabriel Bá's award-winning series of graphic novels — certainly kept in tune with the source material's overarching themes of familial strife, hard-learned lessons, and harder-earned redemption. Of course, this also resulted in a few of the series' more head-scratching narrative detours. Some might even say it was the driving force behind some of the dumbest moments throughout the inaugural season of The Umbrella Academy. Of those moments, few were as baffling or as genuinely weird as when Luther (former Game of Thrones star Tom Hopper) cut loose for a drunken, pill-popping night on the town.

Before we get too far into that painfully awkward side-story, we'll go ahead and assume that some of you might be keen to offer a few different Luther moments as the dumbest on season 1 of The Umbrella Academy — because the Luther hate has become a very real thing over the past year. To The Umbrella Academy fans eager to pile on with more Luther dumbness, we'd simply offer that a) we wholeheartedly agree that Luther did a lot of incredibly short-sighted things in season 1, but that b) his booze and ecstasy-riddled night of clubbing and casual sex is the sort of cringe-worthy misstep that remains burned in the brain in ways we never really expected.

Sweaty, shirtless Luther trying to cut loose and get down on the dance floor is one of the more agonizing moments in The Umbrella Academy's largely intriguing first season. The moment itself is made all the more inelegant as Tom Hopper is clearly not comfortable dancing — further evinced by his clumsy twisting to Tiffany in the series' first episode, and his excruciatingly stiff performance in that graceless episode 6 musical number. We'd like to think that stiffness is purely a reflection of adult Luther's pensive nature, or the emotional scarring born in the wake of his ape-like transformation, but it's clear Hopper just isn't comfortable cutting a rug on camera. 

Obvious awkwardness aside, what makes Luther's night out so dumb is that, strictly from a narrative standpoint, it's meant as an emotional outpouring from the big, hairy brute. After all, Luther only sets out on his bender after discovering that his adoptive father had been lying to him for years, and that his decade-long sojourn on the moon was a thinly veiled exile rather than a vital mission. Luther going nuts after this discovery should matter, and it should resonate as a bold attempt to break free from a lifetime of lies, brazen manipulation, and forced restraint. 

Instead, Luther's dancing dalliance is played for goofs. As such, the moment fails to resonate, and actually becomes more and more embarrassing with each passing second. The senseless narrative diversion ultimately contributes nothing to Luther's story, with the character reverting to his old modest self almost immediately. Simply put, what should've been played as a jarring emotional breakthrough becomes a big, dumb distraction that might've been better relegated to the cutting room floor; here's hoping that The Umbrella Academy season 2 sidesteps such ridiculousness.