Diksha Sundriyal
Klaus Hargreeves has a lot of demons in his life and very few good things, one of which is Dave. Klaus meets Dave when he accidentally jumps back in time and lands himself smack in the middle of the Vietnam War. For the one year that Klaus spends in the past, he spends it falling in love with Dave. However, their love story ends in tragedy when Dave is killed in action. The wheels of time turn back again in the second season, which also makes Klaus hopeful for Dave’s life. Does he succeed in his plan of saving the man he loves or does Dave die all over again? Let’s find out. If you haven’t seen the show yet, head over to Netflix. SPOILERS AHEAD
Is Dave Dead in the Umbrella Academy Season 2?
When Klaus returns to the 60s, he finds himself lost and alone. The only thing that he really looks forward to is meeting Dave, who hasn’t been drafted in the war yet and is still alive. Klaus waits for three years, during which he creates a cult. He leaves it all behind in 1963, the year of Kennedy’s assassination and the year that Dave enlists. He believes that if he convinces Dave not to join the army, he can save him from getting killed in Vietnam.
Klaus shows up at the store where he comes face to face with a young, closeted, and unaware Dave. He tries to dissuade him from enlisting when they meet in a diner. But Dave’s uncle insults Klaus and makes Dave hit him. Klaus is heartbroken by this, and he eventually goes back to his cult. To his surprise, Dave shows up there and apologizes for hitting him. He is confused by what Klaus was trying to tell him at the diner. This is when he discovers that he is supposed to die in Vietnam. Klaus tells him not to go to war, but it turns out that his intervention has only hastened the process. After the scene at the diner, Dave’s uncle pushed him to enlist the very next day, and he is to ship out a week later.
From all this, it looks like Dave’s death is inevitable and Klaus couldn’t have changed it no matter what. However, at the end of Season 2, we discover that the interference of the Umbrella Academy in the 1960s led to the events happening differently from how they had been originally. In this new timeline, both Reginald and Ben Hargreeves are alive, which also brings us back to Dave.
In the original timeline, he was to enlist after the assassination of Kennedy, which would push him on the path that would lead to his meeting with Klaus in Vietnam and then his death. But in the new timeline, the events happened earlier than they were supposed to. In time travel, a difference of even one hour can make a lot of difference. For Dave, the difference is of at least one week, if not more. This means that his path would be very different from how it was initially, which, on a little extrapolation, leads us to believe that he might not have died in Vietnam, after all.
Even if the events happened just as they were to be, Klaus had already told Dave when and where he would die. Knowing that he is going to die, wouldn’t Dave try to avert that possibility? Wouldn’t he find a way to stay alive? Because the season ends with Dave getting on the bus, and not with his dead body in the jungles of Vietnam, we can hold back on declaring him dead just yet.
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