Spoiler Warning: The Umbrella Academy Series

The trailer for the long-awaited Netflix series The Umbrella Academy season 3 dropped last week, and those two and a half minutes were everything we hoped for and more. The second season of this series ended on a massive cliffhanger. We see a big change in the timeline due to all the actions by the Hagreeves’ in the 1960s. What resulted was the creation of the Sparrow Academy instead of the Umbrella Academy.

In the trailer, we also saw that the previously deceased Hargreeves’ brother, Ben, played by Justin H. Min, and the adoptive father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves, played by Colm Feore, were alive in this new altered reality.

In the previous seasons, Ben was portrayed as the amazingly sweet brother who passed away and returned as a ghost to hang out with Klaus, played by Robert Sheehan. In the second season finale, we saw him sacrificing his ghost self to save the world and the departed to the afterlife. However, in the trailer, we see his sweet nature completely wiped off in the altered timeline, and now he seems to be plain obnoxious.

But that wasn’t even what stumped us when we watched the trailer. The season 3 trailer for The Umbrella Academy sheds light on a rather curious phenomenon because of the time traveling. Five concludes that going back to the future resulted in this time paradox that’s essentially swallowing certain parts of reality. According to his assumption, the Umbrellas’ meddling with time causes something called the “kugelblitz.”

Like the remaining in the show, no one really understands this foreign concept, and we have Viktor even asking the obvious question of what kugelblitz means in simple English. To this, his brother gives a plain and rather scary response, “essentially, we’re screwed.” Obviously, a two-and-a-half-minute trailer won’t explain what exactly is phenomenon is. That’s where we’ve got you covered. Here’s what you need to know about the kugelblitz.

Related: The Umbrella Academy Season 3: Cast, Plot, Release Date, and Everything Else We Know

What Is the Kugelblitz?

The term “kugelblitz” is an actual phenomenon and not something made up for the series. The term was coined in 1955 by John Archibald Wheeler, which translates to “ball lightning.” A Schwarzschild Kugelblitz is an intense concentration of light, heat, or radiation in theoretical physics. A kugelblitz’s intensity can be so great that it can form a boundary around itself so much that even light cannot escape from it.

There are theories that if we aim ample radiation at the kugelblitz, it can possibly create a full-fledged black hole that can warp space and time. However, humans do not possess the necessary technology to test whether it is possible to create a kugelblitz, nor do these super-powerful black holes appear out of thin air.

What Does This Mean for The Umbrella Academy?

Humanity may not possess the technology, but we also don’t possess six super-powered siblings jumping through time and leaping from one apocalypse to another. From what we see in the trailer, the Hargreeves have managed to create a kugelblitz on our planet, and there’s a high possibility that it could turn into a black hole. For those who don’t understand the severity of this, let us consider how terribly bad this will be. A black hole with a nickel radius carries far more mass than our planet. This tiny-sized black home would completely wipe off life and destroy Earth.

Related: The Umbrella Academy Cast: Other Roles You’ve Seen the Actors Play

Apocalypses aren’t anything new on The Umbrella Academy. In season one, it was Viktor’s violin playing, while in season two, it was Viktor getting tortured by the agents who assumed he was a spy. Though everyone’s blaming seven, the kugelblitz, The Umbrella Academy’s brand-new apocalypse, is a joint effort from all the six siblings because they arrived in a timeline that is not their own, thus tearing the entire fabric of spacetime.

According to the trailer, Five states that they have only less than a week before this kugelblitz chews through everything. Now the question arises whether the Hargreeves siblings will be able to stop this doom in time or not.

What to Expect from The Umbrella Academy Season 3

As reported by Netflix, the new season will drop on the platform on June 22, 2022. The official synopsis for this season goes as follows:

“After putting a stop to 1963’s doomsday, the Umbrella Academy return home to the present, convinced they prevented the initial apocalypse and fixed this godforsaken timeline once and for all. But after a brief moment of celebration, they realize things aren’t exactly (okay, not at all) how they left them. Enter the Sparrow Academy. Smart, stylish, and about as warm as a sea of icebergs, the Sparrows immediately clash with the Umbrellas in a violent face-off that turns out to be the least of everyone’s concerns.”Navigating challenges, losses, and surprises of their own—and dealing with an unidentified destructive entity wreaking havoc in the Universe (something they may have caused) — now all they need to do is convince Dad’s new and possibly better family to help them put right what their arrival made wrong. Will they find a way back to their pre-apocalyptic lives? Or is this new world about to reveal more than just a hiccup in the timeline?”

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