How Umbrella Academy Season 2 Hints At Lila's Abilities Even Before The Finale

Contains major spoilers for The Umbrella Academy season 2.

The sophomore season of Netflix's The Umbrella Academy is a masterful piece of work, with enough twists and turns to fill half a dozen of lesser shows. This time, the powerful but troubled Hargreeves siblings have to deal with being stranded in 1960s Dallas, Texas, with a brand new apocalypse on their heels. They also face numerous enemies both old and new, as well as a delightfully strange ending that completely uproots the show's status quo (such as it is). 

The season's ten episodes take you on a thrilling ride that leaves you wanting more, and one of the biggest reasons for its effectiveness is also its biggest surprise: Lila Pitts (Ritu Arya). She starts out as a happy-go-lucky insane asylum patient who gets swept up in Diego's (David Castañeda) story early on, but it soon turns out she's actually a lethal assassin and the adoptive daughter of the Academy's old adversary, the Handler (Kate Walsh). Still, the show saves its biggest Lila-themed twist for the series finale, in which we find out that she's one of the 43 mystery babies born on October 1, 1989 ... and that she can copy all of the Hargreeves' superpowers.

Though the show plays its Lila-themed cards pretty close to the chest until she unleashes her power in the final episode, astute viewers may notice that an earlier episode drops a low-key clue about her true nature. Here's how The Umbrella Academy season 2 hints at Lila's abilities even before the finale.

Though Lila has Diego basically eating from her hand from the jump, the far more cynical Five (Aidan Gallagher) isn't quite as trusting. Noticing how convenient her appearance is and how suspiciously good she is at fighting, he decides to banish her from the Hargreeves' temporary base and threatens to kill her if they meet again. 

In episode 5, titled "Valhalla," Lila uses this animosity to lure Five to an abandoned warehouse, where the two face each other in a brutal fight. As an experienced assassin who can essentially teleport, Five seems to have an easy battle ahead of him. Lila, however, somehow manages to dodge his attempts to blindside her with his powers, and the visibly flustered Five gets a taste of his own medicine when he repeatedly finds out that his opponent's not where he assumed her to be. During the first viewing, it's easy to assume that this is sheer skill on Lila's part, but when you rewatch the scene with full knowledge of her powers ... well, doesn't it seem awfully convenient that a person with power-copying abilities just happens to easily evade the dangerous teleporter she's fighting? 

In an interview with Esquire, Ritu Arya confirmed that Lila is totally mimicking Five's space-hopping power in their fight scene, a full five episodes before her power set is finally laid out in the open. "I was concerned about watching back, because I really don't want it to be too obvious," she says of the scene. "I think that was the hope for my performance as well, that you wouldn't know anything that first time, but when you watched it the second time, you would see those moments. And that's how I felt the second time I watched the series. They kept in a few little bits that you would be like, 'Of course, she's lying.' Or, 'How did I not see this before?'"

It's a clever trick in a clever show, and judging by Arya's words, the fight scene might not even be the only time when Lila gives us a stealth sample of her power. For instance, isn't it weird that when Diego and Lila are running from the Swedes in the very first episode of the season, the three expert assassins can't hit their targets with a single bullet, despite having a clear shot in a narrow asylum corridor? It's almost like a certain someone was using her power copying abilities to borrow Diego's trajectory-altering powers to make sure that the hail of bullets misses them.