Before The Umbrella Academy reopens, catch up on season 1 with The A.V. Club’s character guide

Allison’s power of suggestion, in which she prefaces a command with “I heard a rumor,” let her fight crime without getting her hands as dirty as, say, Diego or Ben. But as the season unfolded, we learned just how selfishly she used those abilities after leaving the Umbrella Academy: Her husband caught her manipulating their daughter with her abilities, which led to her divorce. It’s also implied that Allison “rumored” her way into a highly successful (though now waning) career as an actor, as well as the same marriage that’s now in ruins. She’s clearly made mistakes, but Allison shows more faith in her siblings than most. Being under the same roof again with her adopted brother Luther rekindles a romantic spark, which makes things alternately weird and sweet. And as hurt as she and her brothers are by Vanya’s tell-all book, Allison still tries in earnest to reconnect with her sister. She even warns Vanya about Leonard Peabody, a.k.a. Harold Jenkins, who’s manipulating Vanya to get revenge on the Umbrella Academy. That’s not the only revelation she has to share: Allison also admits she “rumored” Vanya into believing she was “ordinary,” thereby subconsciously suppressing her powers. The confession doesn’t go over well, as an overwrought Vanya lashes out at Allison for lying to her, slashing her vocal cords and leaving her bleeding on the floor. Allison’s rescued by Luther, Diego, and Five, who are willing to kill Vanya to prevent further harm. Though she can’t speak, Allison still holds out hope for her sister in their big confrontation, discharging a weapon to break her concentration after she goes all White Violin on everyone.

The black sheep in the family, Klaus (Robert Sheehan) is a drug addict and hedonist, refusing responsibility and his upbringing as a hero. However, his lack of sobriety stems from his powers: Klaus can see and communicate with the spirits of the dead, and sometimes even manifest them in the real world. Drinking and drugging is the only thing that silences the nightmarish voices and ceases the horrific visions, a realization he discovered at 13 years old; he has since rarely been clean long enough for his powers to resurface. The only spirit he can still commune with while intoxicated is his long-dead adopted brother, Ben (Justin H. Min). Shortly after learning about the impending apocalypse from his brother Five, Klaus is kidnapped by Hazel (Cameron Britton) and Cha-Cha (Mary J. Blige), the agents tasked with neutralizing Five to ensure the end of the world proceeds as scheduled. However, when Klaus escapes by stealing their suitcase, he is transports back to the Vietnam War for 10 months, where he cleans up, serves in the military, and falls in love with a man named Dave. When he returns to the present after Dave’s death, he maintains his sobriety in an effort to reconnect with his beloved’s spirit, though his siblings largely refuse to accept that he’s any different. But by the final confrontation, Klaus not only joins the team in their fight to stop Vanya, he manifests Ben’s spirit, unleashing his brother’s ability of summoning eldritch monsters to take down the entire team of soldiers trying to gun them down—just to leap backward in time with the rest of his family right as the world ends.

As a young boy, Ben Hargreeves (Justin H. Min) was able to summon eldritch creatures at will from a portal… in his stomach. But he never seemed that thrilled to be in possession of such a power, which might be why, despite his—we repeat—ability to control tentacled monsters, he was only Number Six in the original team (Reginald, ever the loving chap, ranked his adopted children by usefulness). When the series begins, Ben has been dead for some time, though we don’t know exactly how or when; the fact that he appears as an adult in a great leather jacket to Klaus suggests it happened when he was already an adult. But whether or not it was on a mission, Ben’s death was one of the reasons the Umbrella Academy disbanded, so it clearly weighs on the group—especially Klaus, who, despite having trouble early on communing with any spirits, has had Ben as his psychic friend for a while. Ben has experienced much of what Klaus has been through, even his brother’s time in Vietnam. By the end of season one, they’ve strengthened their bond so much that Klaus now serves as a kind of conduit for Ben’s powers, which is how they’re able to fend off The Commission’s death squad (though the end of the world still comes about). Ben’s is not the most extensive backstory, but promotional art and trailers suggest we’ll get inside of Ben’s head a bit more in season two.

Despite being one of the seven children taken in by Reginald Hargreeves as part of his plan to train a team of superheroes to save the world, Vanya Hargreeves (Ellen Page) spent her youth being repeatedly told she had no powers, and was therefore less important than the other children. She became a violin virtuoso, trying to find her own way while living in the shadow of her siblings, and even wrote a book about what it was like to be the “normal” one in the family. Unfortunately, her life turned out to be a lie. When Vanya’s new student Leonard Peabody (John Magaro) convinces her that she doesn’t need the medication she’s been taking since childhood, she discovers awe-inspiring abilities: She can transform the sound around her into powerful energy. It turns out, Reginald had suppressed her abilities as a child, and then used young sibling Allison’s power of suggestion to make Vanya forget she ever had them. After killing Leonard when she learns he secretly knew about her abilities all along (and severing Allison’s vocal cords in an impulsive rage), Vanya is imprisoned by her worried family, though she quickly escapes, destroying the mansion in the process. The season ends with everyone confronting Vanya at her violin performance, where a potentially world-destroying beam of energy she creates is diverted into space and hits the moon instead—sending chunks crashing down into earth and destroying the planet anyway. But her brother Number Five uses his time-travel powers to take the now-unconscious Vanya and the rest of the clan into the past, in an effort to save both her and the planet.