Spoilers: 'The Umbrella Academy' Pulled Off A Great Ending (Even If Nobody Likes It)

By Tori Preston | TV | August 19, 2024 |

By Tori Preston | TV | August 19, 2024 |

Two years ago, upon the release of The Umbrella Academy season three, I worried in my review that the season may be the show’s last. At that time Netflix was facing some financial trouble and rethinking their content strategies, and that was on top of their now well-known habit of sending shows to the chopping block after they complete three seasons. This was disappointing not just because The Umbrella Academy has always been a consistently good time but because it had just closed out on a banger of a paradigm shift: The Hargreeves siblings stranded in a new timeline of their father’s design, where he has his wife back and the kids have lost their powers. Well, the good news is: The Umbrella Academy just dropped its fourth and final season! It got the chance to pay off all that delicious potential and come to a proper conclusion. Unfortunately, it really only nailed the conclusion part.

To be fair, I imagine the majority of the issues lay at Netflix’s feet. The streamer giveth, and the streamer taketh away. To wit: Season four runs a paltry six episodes, compared to the 10-episode seasons preceding it. That time constraint smacks of budget cuts, which may also explain why the season felt so lacking in the customary needle drops. The only dance sequence belongs not to the Academy but to villainous newcomers Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman as Jean and Gene Thibodeau, hoofing it to “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.” Otherwise, there’s a fight sequence inside the CIA set to “Secret Agent Man” and an interminable road trip set to “Baby Shark.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted we still got some memorable music cues, but it still seemed like a significant drop-off compared to earlier seasons, and nothing on par with season three’s fabulous “Footloose” dance-off.

jean & gene… & cher = season 4 icons pic.twitter.com/XIeeXWgpQV

— Umbrella Academy (@UmbrellaAcad) August 12, 2024

There’s also the matter of recent accusations that showrunner Steve Blackman contributed to a “toxic and bullying environment” on the show, which may have contributed to Netflix’s decision to tighten the purse strings.

It’s important to acknowledge the constraints the show was clearly operating under, because in many ways it never quite managed to surmount them creatively. Whatever story Blackman may have had in mind coming out of season three, it’s safe to say what we got in season four wasn’t exactly it. Even he admits, in an interview on Netflix’s own Tudum website, that there were storylines he had to drop: Namely, any resolution on the unexplained absence of Luther’s wife, former Sparrow Academy member Sloane, and Allison’s husband Ray. While the audience may not exactly miss those characters, it does point to a lack of emotional resolution for the characters we do care about.

What runtime The Umbrella Academy does have to tell its story is spent barreling toward yet another apocalypse. A six-year time jump finds the siblings entrenched in their new lives as non-powered normies. Victor (Elliot Page) is running a bar in Nova Scotia. Diego (David Castañeda) and Lila (Ritu Arya) are parenting three young kids. Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) is struggling to lift her acting career out of detergent commercials. Ben (Justin H. Min), who is the dickish Sparrow version of Ben, has just gotten out of prison for running a crypto scam. Luther (Tom Hopper) is a stripper, and Five (Aidan Gallagher) has joined the CIA. Klaus (Robert Sheehan) gets perhaps the best makeover of all as he has become, of all things, a safety-obsessed hypochondriac. Losing your immortality will do that to you, I imagine. They reconvene at a kid’s birthday party - or they nearly do but rather, they reconvene at the dry cleaners where Viktor has been kidnapped by a delightful David Cross, playing Inciting Incident #1. Cross begs the Umbrella Academy to find his daughter Jennifer (Victoria Sawal). More importantly, he gives them a box of her things, inside which is a very important jar of Marigold.

What’s Marigold, you ask? It’s, uh, the glowing stuff that gave the siblings their powers apparently. A big reveal this season is the explanation of what Marigold is and how it came to be: Reginald Hargreeves’s dead wife Abigail, who is not dead in this timeline, created it - and in doing so also created its antimatter particle, called Durango. When Marigold and Durango come into contact with each other, it kickstarts a reality-wiping apocalyptic event called “The Cleanse” and so obviously that’s the season’s endgame. Jennifer, by the way, is the sole host of Durango, so it’s kind of a big deal when the Academy locates her and Ben starts crushing on her hard.

BUT FIRST! Ben tricks his siblings into doing shots of Marigold and boom - we’ve got superpowers again, people! Not exactly the same superpowers, mind you (Lila has laser eyes now?!), but close enough. The big change is that Five no longer blips through time and space. Instead, he blips to an abandoned subway system that navigates the multiverse, delivering him to the same moment in time in alternate realities. This results in an episode-long diversion where Five and Lila get stranded in the multiverse for seven years, fall in love, then make it home to the day they left, and Lila chooses her family with Diego over a life of adventure with Five. It’s probably the weirdest pairing in a season that makes a point of pairing the siblings off in new ways (Klaus with Allison and Ben with Luther, while Klaus and Ben barely look at each other). But more than that, Five and Lila’s little multiversal affair takes up a lot of runtime for something that has very little bearing on, you know, the apocalypse. It’s the kind of character development I’d normally welcome, if the show had any remaining runtime left to do the fallout any justice.

Oh jeez, I haven’t even explained Jean and Gene yet! Remember the “Love-ahs” sketch on SNL, with Will Ferrell and Rachel Dratch as an uncomfortably affectionate couple? The Thibodeaus are them, but evil. They run a clandestine group of conspiracy theorists who believe the reality they’re in isn’t the right one, and are seeking ways to reset it. They hunt down proof of the correct reality, and their proof includes evidence of The Umbrella Academy! So basically they’re nutjobs, but they’re also correct - and they believe whole-heartedly in setting “The Cleanse” in motion to set things right.

If this all sounds kind of confusing and messy, well, it is. Or rather, it sounds like about 10 episodes worth of sausage crammed into a six-episode casing! The plot is downright dizzying, and that’s even before characters start ripping off their faces to reveal their true identities and motivations. If you look at the critical reviews for the season, or the abysmal audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, or even the hyperbolic YouTube reaction videos that claim the show “ruined all the characters”, it’s clear that people aren’t satisfied with this season to put it mildly. Which is a shame, because there are two big things The Umbrella Academy still has going for it. For starters, it’s still The Umbrella Academy, which means even when it makes no sense it’s still fun as hell to watch. Viktor gets a chance to self-righteously yell at his family! Klaus ends up buried in a pet graveyard communing with a dog spirit! There’s a mysterious deli literally full of alterna-Fives! Everybody projectile vomits in a van together! There’s a big dumb apocalypse! The season still delivers everything you expect from the show, it just does it at a sort of speed-run and with bonus creepy David Cross. Honestly, I ain’t mad at it.

The second thing working in season four’s favor is the ending - which may be where I differ from a lot of the viewers. Because you see, I happen to think the ending was great. I’ll admit that due to the rushed nature of the season, a lot of the foundation work setting up the climax didn’t quite work (all the Marigold/Durango nonsense), and I could probably write a separate article about the vast gaps in logic that appear if you think about the climax too hard, but what I liked is that the show really, truly ended. Everyone dies! The Hargreeves, plus Lila, sacrifice themselves and their Marigold to The Cleanse in order to restore what should be the proper timeline, which happens to be one in which they never existed. A final scene reveals that their sacrifice worked, and it’s a beautiful day for the people they saved - including a whole lot of people who died along the way (it was so nice to see Kate Walsh again!). It’s the kind of ballsy, absolute conclusion you don’t see in a lot of spandex ‘n superpowers entertainment these days. The kind of ending that doesn’t seem to make room for any chance of resurrection. It’s almost certainly not the climax the long-running graphic novel series is working toward, should creators Gerald Way and Gabriel Bá ever get around to penning one, and that’s fine! In a show known for taking big, unexpected swings, it ended on the biggest most unexpected one yet. I think that’s pretty cool. Fans may argue whether The Umbrella Academy went out with a bang or a whimper, but I’m just impressed that when it went out, it closed the door behind it.