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Oct 20, 2024

The Umbrella Academy’s ending makes no sense. Somehow it works.

This post contains spoilers for the final season of The Umbrella Academy. The Umbrella Academy, Netflix’s hit series about a family of superpowered misfits constantly tasked with preventing the world

This post contains spoilers for the final season of The Umbrella Academy.

The Umbrella Academy, Netflix’s hit series about a family of superpowered misfits constantly tasked with preventing the world from ending, ends with everything hurtling toward yet another apocalypse—only this time, nobody makes it out alive.

In the final season of the show, based on the comics by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, the siblings pull out one last save, but none of them will be around to experience it because, as it turns out, they were the whole reason the world kept ending to begin with. The powers they all received at birth were essential for diverting disaster, but, as the short run of six episodes explains, the sci-fi magic that made them superhuman was never meant to exist. Meaning: They weren’t ever meant to exist either. Meaning: Erasing them from the universe was the only real solution to it all.

It’s messy and confusing, and giving any thought to how we got to this conclusion isn’t recommended. The previous season sees the members of the team divert their third apocalypse in as many seasons, after which they’re plopped into a reset universe where none of them are plagued by their pesky powers or by their eccentric and ruthless adoptive father Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore). Picking up six years later, Season 4 finds the siblings in varying states of powerless mediocrity, enduring mundanities they’d never had the chance to experience before. Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) stars in detergent commercials instead of the blockbuster movies she was used to; Luther (Tom Hopper) works as an exotic dancer in a run-down strip club; Viktor (Elliot Page) runs a bar in Canada; and Diego (David Castañeda) is a delivery driver, while his wife, Lila (Ritu Arya), also formerly superpowered, is a stay-at-home mom with three kids.

Everybody seems unhappy but resigned to their boring lives, except for Five (Aidan Gallagher), who works for the CIA, investigating a group called the Keepers, who are trying to end the world because they’re convinced that something’s hinky about the current timeline. They’re on the hunt for a woman named Jennifer (Victoria Sawal), who was found inside a giant squid at 6 years old and is somehow connected to the world’s end. As the siblings reunite and regain wonky versions of their powers in their quest to stop the Keepers and prevent this looming doomsday, they find themselves splitting off on personal journeys that help heal their childhood traumas and accept each other more deeply, yet do nothing to stop the inevitability of the show’s cataclysmic endgame.

And this is where things start to get a little off-kilter. While the other siblings are off on their own side quests, Five gains the ability to teleport to a subway station that connects to all the different timelines; there, he and fellow time traveler Lila start riding this train system in search of their original timeline to stop all the bad things happening in the present. This seems like a smart solve, at least until you start thinking too hard about its implications: If Five and Lila pull off fixing the problems created before the events of Season 1, then nothing that followed would’ve happened either.

This season is pocked with plot holes that could easily suck the viewer in and destroy the world prematurely if lingered on too long. We never find out how the Keepers know anything or how Reginald is connected to these kids if he never adopted them in this timeline. Even a sense of place is impossible to establish with a collection of cities and towns that feel as incomprehensibly unmappable as the timelines Five and Lila get lost in. It can feel sloppy, the lack of precision that generates this tangle of questions and contradictions. This is what often happens with time-travel stories: either applying so much structure to the affair that it’s simultaneously boring and headache-inducing or abandoning any semblance of organization and relying on a vague driving force of vibes.

Watching a show like this and not finding any solid ground to grab onto should be frustrating, but The Umbrella Academy—both the series and the comic—isn’t interested in that solid ground; it has always been a sea of chaos, a haphazard venture that is more style than substance. That’s where it derives most of its charm. Its elastic reality of sci-fi and fantasy wants us to feel our way through the show, not think it. We’re here to experience the family’s emotional journeys, witnessing Luther’s realization that he’s more than just a meatheaded leader, and Klaus (Robert Sheehan) and Allison’s recognition that the anger and frustration they’d generated toward each other these past six years exists only because of the deep love underneath those feelings.

Five and Lila’s unsuccessful timeline-hopping journey on the subway, which spans more than six years on the show, is not meant to lead to the solution they want, but it’s not totally fruitless either. It grounds them in earnest and painful emotions as they develop an intimacy that colors in their characters’ edges and creates a palpable hurt when they finally return to the family and face Diego, Lila’s husband and Five’s brother. It’s what allows Diego to finally see his wife, understanding how much he has missed with her.

During the final scenes of the series, the siblings see the end coming and say their goodbyes, but it’s not maudlin; when Luther suggests they all go around and share their favorite memories, everybody rightly reacts with eye rolls and disgust. It feels true to the characters—after all, most of them didn’t really like each other very much, but they all loved each other the most. From there, we get the final apocalypse, followed by a snapshot of the new world created after the siblings’ destruction. It seems a little too perfect to actually exist, with Lila’s family, Allison’s daughter, and all the series’ side players who have fallen along the way, together in the park, enjoying an idyllic summer day. It’s a scene that makes no sense at all, except that it feels like it does.

If I had spent this final run of episodes on a hunt for rationality, it would’ve been an unsatisfying chore, irritating me when I couldn’t figure out where we were, how things had come to be, or what had ensued beyond the margins of the screen. But all those answers would’ve been just excess set dressing to the show that The Umbrella Academy never shied away from being, cluttering my view with the stuff that never mattered, making me miss out on everything that did. This was always a zany ball of discord that reveled in poking its characters and its viewers with hefty doses of snark and cynicism and tumultuous stories full of trauma, sadness, and pain. But underneath all that beats a soft heart, warm and full.