The Umbrella Academy season 2 brought back some characters from season 1, among those Pogo, who wasn’t the talking chimpanzee viewers met in the previous season, but he did more exciting things as he went to space, just like a real-life chimpanzee – here’s who the real baby Pogo was and what happened to him. Based on the comic book series by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, The Umbrella Academy made its debut on Netflix in February 2019, and it was a big hit with critics and viewers. It’s not surprising, then, that it was renewed for a second season a few weeks later.
The Umbrella Academy follows the superhero team of adopted siblings, the Hargreeves, who were among the 43 babies that were born on the same day, at the same time, and to women who weren’t pregnant when the day began. Seven of those kids were adopted by scientist and billionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves, who trained them and formed the superhero team “The Umbrella Academy” after they began to develop unique sets of superpowers. The siblings parted ways and reunited years later for Reginald’s funeral and to stop the apocalypse, but were unsuccessful and had to jump to a safer place in time to escape the end of the world. In the process, viewers met Pogo, an advanced chimpanzee and Reginald’s assistant.
In season 1, Pogo was the master of the house and continued working closely with Reginald, to the point where he helped his master plan his suicide. Pogo was also aware of what happened to Vanya, and never told the siblings that she wasn’t powerless. Pogo was killed by Vanya when she impaled him on a mounted set of antlers. As season 2 is set in 1963, viewers reunited with Pogo, though not the sapient version of him. The series showed a bit of his backstory, where baby Pogo was taken to a lab by Grace and Reginald and trained to be launched into space in a rocket. Sadly, the rocket exploded, and Pogo returned gravely injured. To save him, Reginald injected him with a serum that turned him into the Pogo seen in season 1. Pogo’s story mirrors that of real-life chimpanzee Ham, the first hominid launched into space, whose life was a bit less tragic than Pogo’s.
Ham was born in Cameroon in 1957 and was sent to Florida after being captured by animal trappers. In 1959, he was purchased by the United States Air Force and taken to Holloman Air Force Base. There, along with over 30 other chimpanzees, Ham went through various evaluations before being the chosen one for the space mission. Aside from both being chimpanzees in training to go to space, there’s another interesting parallel between Ham and The Umbrella Academy: just like the Hargreeves were numbered, Ham was originally named No. 65, and was only given a proper name after his successful return to Earth, while the Hargreeves got their names thanks to (robot) Grace. It’s worth noting that in season 2, Reginald was shown interacting with Pogo in ways he never did with his children, which only shows that he saw the siblings as weapons and not as his sons and daughters, whereas with Pogo was the opposite.
Unlike Pogo, Ham survived the mission with just a bruised nose and lived for 17 years in the National Zoo in Washington D.C. before joining the North Carolina Zoo. His remains are buried at the International Space Hall of Fame, but his skeleton is part of the collection of the National Museum of Health and Medicine. It’s interesting yet sad how both Ham and baby Pogo were treated better than the Hargreeves, but that says a lot about Reginald Hargreeves and how the events in his life impacted his interactions with other people, mostly his children.
