‘The Umbrella Academy’ Addresses Elliot Page’s Coming Out With Warmth and Emotion (Column)

variety.com:

Daniel D'Addario Chief TV CriticWhen “The Umbrella Academy” last aired new episodes, in July 2020, its star occupied a different place in the culture, under a different name.Elliot Page, the Academy Award-nominated performer, is by far the highest-profile member of the show’s cast — all playing a family of superheroes perennially trying to thwart apocalypse.

And his public disclosure that he is a trans man in late 2020 presented the series with a conundrum as it looked ahead to a third season.

How could “The Umbrella Academy” best leverage Page’s talent and honor the work he’d already put in on the show, while accounting for the fact that his character, known to this point as Vanya, had for two seasons presented as a woman?

The answer, with a new season that launched June 22, is with a strikingly, even movingly low-key approach. “The Umbrella Academy” often expresses its stakes with a sort of post-Quentin Tarantino every-reference-at-once mania — indeed, its new season begins, after a flashback sequence, with the show’s central characters taking part in a hallucinated dance battle to Kenny Loggins’ “Footloose” — but it doesn’t put similar pressure on Page’s character’s coming out.