What Powers Will Harlan Still Have In The Umbrella Academy Season 3?

Season 2 of Netflix's hyper-violent adaptation of Gerard Way's superhero saga The Umbrella Academy has proven a bloody, beatific, and endlessly quippy beast that outshines its predecessor in virtually every way. 

That includes mind-melting narrative twists, for the record, because season 2 of The Umbrella Academy dispatched those with staggering regularity. Despite the frequency of these zingers, however, the show did save a couple of legit rug-pullers for the waning moments of its finale episode. One of those teased a new world of supers as the Hargreeves gang managed to jump back to 2019, only to find a mysterious new super-team occupying their home. The other confirmed that young Harlan Cooper (Justin Paul Kelly) had, in fact, kept some of the super powers inadvertently bestowed on him by Vanya Hargreeves (Ellen Page).

That fateful moment came about midway through season 2 of The Umbrella Academy, and found Vanya literally raising a lake to recover Harlan's drowned body. It also found Vanya using her powers to resuscitate the lad, an act that unexpectedly transferred her abilities into him. As the season progressed, Harlan's growing power was revealed. And. much like Vanya in season 1, he eventually lost control of himself, very nearly causing the same sort of cataclysmic damage.

Vanya ultimately intervened, and appeared to take back Harlan's gifts as a means of saving his life. As season 2 ended, however, we found Harlan and his mom (Marin Ireland) en route to California, with the youngster quietly levitating a toy bird over his hand, which means he clearly retained a bit of telekinesis, and likely some of Vanya's other powers (i.e. sound and energy projection, weather control, enhanced hearing, etc). 

Still, we'll have to wait for season 3 to find out just how powerful Harlan has become.

Either way, The Umbrella Academy is clearly not done with Harlan Cooper. 

And yes, it's worth noting the toy bird he's levitating certainly appears to be a sparrow. As the new team of supers — led by the Hargreeves' surprisingly no-longer-dead sibling Ben (Justin H. Min) — are calling themselves The Sparrow Academy, it seems very possible that Harlan is about to become a major player in The Umbrella Academy narrative.

Just given the name of the new super team, it's safe to speculate that Harlan is not just a member of The Sparrow Academy, but potentially even the first of Reginald Hargreeves' (Colm Feore) re-recruited protégés. Harlan was, after all, given his abilities in 1963, the very same year the Hargreeves kids tipped their hand to Sir Reginald about his future plans to form a super-team. Given that Reginald also got a firsthand look at how badly things went for his original crew, one could hardly blame him for choosing different kids the second time around. 

Harlan is clearly a special case, though, because he wasn't one of the original 43 supers mysteriously born on that fateful day in 1983. As Harlan was essentially "made" super in 1963, Reginald could have tracked the kid down soon after and spent a couple decades honing his powers in ways he never could with Vanya. Some theories even posit that the mysterious cube that appeared alongside the Sparrows may be harnessing Harlan's abilities in 2019 (in which year he'd be well into his 60s, by the way).

Needless to say, it should be fascinating to see how The Umbrella Academy continues Harlan's story in season 3; assuming the series ever gets an official green light from Netflix, that is.