Ok, spoilers now, or does the thread title actually mean ‘Open spoilers starting on July 2nd’?
Well, it’s 2 July here so…. spoilers.
Regarding the ending and set-up for the next season. ISTM that ‘heroes lose their powers’ is a pretty well-worn trope in the super hero genre and, although the family dynamics are an interesting part of the show, I hope they don’t draw out getting their powers back in the next season. I’m hoping for a time jump - something like ‘4 years later’ (that will get us out of 2019 to the present too, and deal with Five’s aging) and we get to see how each of them has hilariously progressed (or not!) as normals before, whoop, their powers mysteriously start to reappear. And of course… APOCALYPSE!
OB
I’m just curious why none of the Umbrellas even mentioned it. It seems like the sort of thing that Klaus would bring up.
Everything was weird in the Hotel Obsidian/Oblivion. The cars (The Toyota Century) belonged to the hotel and had its emblem on the door panels. The Japanese drive on the left side and the Century is primarily sold there.
But yeah, it is weird. Maybe not pointing it out was just part of the general strangeness.
And another spoilerrific question: When Harlan killed the Umbrellas’ mums, did he get Sparrow Ben’s mother too? In fact, did he get Lila’s mother?
He didn’t get Ben’s mom, since he was still born. We don’t know about Lila. According to the beginning scene, only 11 women have birth in this timeline. 7 are sparrows, the other 4 are unaccounted for.
My inference was he only killed the mothers of the Umbrellas he’d encountered back in 1963 and in his grief blamed for his and his mothers misfortunes. Ben was dead/a ghost ‘by’ then and Lyla isn’t an Umbrella (and I’m not sure Harlan encountered her?).
OB
No, the total number went from 43 to 16 - Harlan was homing in on energy patterns. He managed to control himself before all of the mothers died, leave Reg with a smaller set to select from.
I wonder if he limited himself to seven because that was all he needed, or if he just luckily managed to get that number both times. It seems unlike him not to train up at least one spare in case one dies. I assume he could have still used Vanya/Victor as a battery even if he didn’t know he had powers. deadnaming because I doubt he would have come out/transitioned in that timeline
Question about proper form:
I had thought that when discussing someone’s past it was proper to refer to them by the name they preferred at that time. For example, it was Bruce not Caitlyn Jenner who competed in the Olympics.
Is that incorrect? Honest ignorance.
This just in: General Mills has announced a recall of all Wheaties boxes produced since 1978. A spokesman for the company remarked, “We need to make some edits.”
Thanks for the correction. I didn’t pick that up at all, so obviously just inferred it myself 
OB
Considering that there were another 6 he was able to get in timeline B, I assume he limited to 7 as a matter of control. We saw in the finale that having an 8th (Allison) almost ruined his plans.
I don’t think that is right - Allison was going to step in, which would have powered the machine. He signaled her to not do it because his plan/assumption was that the seven would die. He’d made a deal with her, and was holding to it.
Considering how close the guardians came to killing some of them, I think he should have planned on at least eight, and maybe more.
Yes, and then Allison killed him. But he had already done enough to complete his plan.
Edit: And he also stopped Klaus from going through. He clearly knew that having more than the 7 had a chance of ruining his plans.
And then there’s the general ‘no cell phones’ rule. It’s obvious in hindsight even in S1 (none in S2 but for obvious reasons), but at the time I didn’t think anything of the characters leaving messages on answering machines or using pay phones, which just never happens anymore. Makes me feel old that it took so long to notice.
Having certain bits of technology or culture just not exist adds to the general pervasive oddness.
It’s also a not totally unsubtle dig about the nature of communication among the siblings. There’s a lot of issues that could be resolved if they just stopped to talk to each other but they never really do.
I’ve watched the whole season about twice through now and I have a lot of thoughts.
Overall, the writing for this season was quite poor. There were a lot of situations in which we had something on screen, and then one of the characters explicitly spells out what we are supposed to understand. This is not good writing.
In this season, the plot seemed to be driving the characters instead of characters driving the plot.
We had somewhat of a “mystery box” plot this time, and everyone should know by now how hard that is to pull off. In the end, the mystery was … kind of? … revealed, but what exactly happened was not clear. Why did Old Number Five tell Young Number Five not to save the world? If Reginald is so powerful that he can reboot reality after it has been destroyed, why did he have to come to Earth and work through these kids?
Originally there were 43 children; now there were 16, and we get to see 14 (7 Sparrows + 6 Umbrellas + Lila). What happened to the rest? Were all of the extras killed by Harlan?
Worse, yet, the final episode was very confusing. No idea what was happening or what happened. Is Allison in a completely different reality than the rest? Why are there still two Bens?
Oh, and a quibble to pick with Number Five. There was no reason for him to believe that they would have doppelgangers in this reality. It’s just them returning to their proper time line. The only problem should have been that Harlan killed their mothers before they were born.
Overall, the Sparrow Academy was poorly developed and seemed to be wasted as characters. We lose Marcus almost immediately, and then Alphonso and Jayme soon after that, and then Christopher and Fei near the end. They dropped like flies! That might be because of the limited time to work with, but all this seemed like pretty poor planning.
Luther: Luther has the most consistent character, and it’s nice to see him finally get some happiness. However, this was wayyy to fast to be love. Even while their families were still in combat with each other, Sloane and Luther were making googly eyes. This wasn’t a believable love arc, or even a lust arc. There should have been some build up to where they realized their attraction to each other. That would have made it a bit more natural, rather than completely aaaaa-ooooo-gah! cartoony. also, falling in love with Sloan shouldn’t have made his feelings for Allison just vanish immediately. The Luther as the butt of the jokes bits were fine.
Diego: Diego’s story line was adequate, but not great. The “pretend Stan is our child to test whether I should tell him I’m pregnant” is very straightforwardly sit-commy. For the most part, I like the changes from the comic book, but I miss the subplot that Diego is or was in love with Vanya.
Allison: Allison’s heel-turn is what I find the most unjustified. Yes, she has lost a daughter and she has lost a husband, but everyone in this group has lost a shit-ton of stuff, and it’s still only really a relatively short time. There hasn’t been enough time for her to turn into a cold-hearted killer and rapist. This was just way too much. Nothing she did rang true to me.
Klaus: No complaints about Klaus, except his secret way into the Sparrow Academy didn’t make any sense. What kind of hot-water sewage line is accessible from a roof? And how would a snorkel help?
Five: No big complaints.
Ben: The Sparrow Ben was way too one-note. No nuance at all. There should have been some overlap in their personalities.
Viktor/Vanya: My biggest complaint about this character is that Elliott Page is at once the most famous actor in this show, but at the same time the worst actor on the show. He gives this character no life, no personality at all. This is the biggest thing I miss from the comics, Vanya (who isn’t Viktor, yet) is a bad-ass lead singer for a punk rock band. She (now he) should have a much bigger personality. Also, Vanya in the comics has an on-off romantic relationship with Diego. That would be an interesting twist on the show, especially with Viktor’s transition.
The umbrellas and Lila don’t count. Harlan killed off 27 moms, stopping himself before they all died. Included in that count were the Umbrella’s (and possibly Lila’s) mom. As for the other 9, no we don’t know what’s going with them. But until Lila showed up, we didn’t know what happened to the other kids in the original timeline either. Keeping them secret allows them to eventually introduce other kids as needed.
The questions isn’t to me primarily “what happened to the other kids?” but rather “why is it 16 instead of 43?”
Even in the original timeline, we don’t know what happened to the 36 that Reg wasn’t able to buy. And there are 9 in the Sparrow timeline we don’t know about - it’s stated that the 6 umbrella mothers all got killed by Harlan (stroke of luck/plot that Ben’s mother wasn’t one of the ones killed (although since we don’t know how his power sought out them out, if it was random it makes sense that at least one of the original seven survived)); not sure if we know the status of Lila and her parents in this timeline (did her mom survive to be killed by Five, who paradoxically may not have been able to kill her?).
Because he isn’t “that powerful”? The way I saw it, he knew roughly where to find the control room for the universe simulation (conveniently on Earth instead of 10 billion lightyears away) and built the hotel to get to that door. But he still needed people to get rid of the guardians to get to the control panel, and still needed a power source to run the control panel. (The kids were both.)