#sparrow five

Glaring into the eyes of the man once their father, now a stranger, Five waits for the retaliation, the retort, for the barbed words and condescension. Because that’s what their father does best, what he’s always done best. The long winded speeches and reprimands, the cruel words and even crueler lessons. Reginald’s always known best how to find your weak spots and dig his fingers in until it’s a gaping wound, bleeding freely. Until all that’s left is an all consuming feeling of insignificance and weakness. Five would know. For 45 years, Reginald’s words had haunted him at the end of the world. ‘‘I told you so.’‘

But things are different now, and Five won’t be caught off-guard. He’s ready for the blow to be struck, whatever it may be. But it never comes. To Five’s surprise, it’s not Reginald that breaks the silence, but rather one of the Sparrows instead. Carla, Five recalls vaguely.

‘‘I don’t believe you.’‘

(and I’ve seen it before, and I’ll see it again)

Aw thank you anon 🥺

and yes!! Okay, so I agree, Five would never betray his family. He’s pretty much ride or die and I don’t think that would ever happen. However, I do think that what you’re saying has some serious viability (plus I’d love to see it as long as everything turned out okay in the end lol).

Let’s look at it this way. As many other smarter and super talented tua people have observed, it’s that Five tried switching up his tactics this season- which didnt really work out for him. in the first season, he basically tried to stop the apocalypse all by himself- which really didn’t work out at all. in the second season, he tried getting his family to help him… and that didn’t work out either. In fact the only person who did truly help him and in fact saved him along with his entire family was, unfortunately, ol veggie tales. His advice was critical for Five in figuring out how to reverse time. And as many others have stated this might have an impact on him. Which might make Five more willing to lean on and take advice from Veggie. so that’s point number one.

point number two is on the topic of abuse. the umbrella academy was most certainly abused. all of them know it. However, Five definitely seems to look back on those days with a huge measure of fondness. which, of course makes sense. The next forty-five years of his life is spent stuck in the apocalypse trying to survive and then selling his soul to basically what might as well be the devil to escape in exchange for brutally murdering innocent people for awhile. So point number two is, he's feels like he’s not as angry at hedgeinald as his siblings are and in fact isn't all that bitter about his childhood. After all, hasn’t ol Hedgie always been right up to this point? At least, for him?

Lol I’m going to be honest, I wasn’t sure at first what pin people kept referencing because it wasn’t on the character posters or any of the other promo posted on Instagram. But yeah, I found it. 🤣

Personally? I think it’s a nice touch but I don’t know that it necessarily is meant to hint at sparrow five...idk, I’m not *personally* sold lol

The thing is, the promotional department is not the writer's room, and while they usually do a pretty good job at making meaningful promo material, some of the material for S2 was kind of all over the place and didn’t really have much significance. And I’ll be honest, this poster feels kind of all over the place as well and like there isn’t much symbolism 😅

I think what they were trying to do here was sorta incorporate all the elements of S2 (in a big umbrella) and group alike things together.

So like Lila, the Swedes, and the Handler (the commission) are all at the bottom with the briefcase. Reginald, Grace, and Pogo are all grouped together. All the new characters (Ray, Sissy, and Elliot) are grouped together and not near anyone they actually have significance to in the plot.

The scenes in the background aren’t near the people they have relevance to.

The closest thing to foreshadowing is Vanya by the Soviet flag and the newspaper article, but again that could just be all the apocalypse things grouped together.

As for the sparrow symbol, Five is the only character with an academy symbol/uniform so it’s possible they just wanted to group the Sparrow symbol with the Umbrella symbol because of their relevance to each other.

The other thing is, if they were gonna foreshadow, I personally think it would seem a little odd to foreshadow Five when S3 wasn’t written or confirmed yet, but not foreshadow Ben when he was a confirmed Sparrow Academy member by the end of the season.

they say the next big thing is here, that the revolution’s near, but to me it seems quite clear: it’s all just a little bit of history repeating — history repeating - the propellerheads + shirley bassey