Umbrella Academy: Why Hargreeves Really Made Mother | Screen Rant
Did Sir Reginald Hargreeves have a secret motive for creating Grace in The Umbrella Academy? The misery of the Hargreeves siblings is nothing if not well-documented. After being spontaneously born to unsuspecting mothers, the seven children were selected by Reginald to form a crime-fighting superhero team destined to save the world. Unfortunately, life in the mansion was a depressing existence. Reginald himself had little interest in playing the father, incapable or unwilling (perhaps both) of showing love to these growing youngsters. To provide the basic care he could not, Reginald constructed an android called Grace, who bonded with the children and offered them some semblance of normality.
Flashbacks in The Umbrella Academy season 1 reveal Reginald's practical reasons for creating Grace. He simply needed a nurturing placeholder to perform the duties he couldn't be bothered with. The reason Reginald built a nanny from nuts and bolts was Vanya's overwhelming power. Several human employees were unceremoniously bumped off as a result of Number 7's supreme sound manipulation, and Grace the robot proved a more robust alternative to calling the care agency every week to request a fresh nanny.
But while a mechanical carer was certainly less messy compared to the string of nannies Vanya was going through as a child, Reginald benefited in another sense. As the grown-up Umbrella Academy members unanimously agree, Reginald was an abusive father. Not only did he belittle them, punish them, and fail to love them, but he routinely put the junior superheroes into dangerous and life-threatening situations. Reginald would torture Klaus to bring out his latent clairvoyant power, and drugged Vanya when she became too unruly. Any human nanny working with the Hargreeves family for a reasonable period of time would soon notice Reginald's abuse and report the situation to the relevant authorities. No doubt Sir Hargreeves could use his power and influence to wriggle out of such legal bother, but a busy man like him doesn't need child protective services poking around.
This is where the birth of Grace proves a masterstroke from Reginald's perspective. Instead of paying a nanny to keep quiet, or picking a really nasty one who couldn't care less how the children were treated when she's off the clock, Reginald could simply build a perfectly compliant and controllable nanny who would never betray him. This might not have been his initial intention, but Grace's metallic nature certainly played to Reginald's advantage, as proven by his orchestrated death. In the act of taking his own life (to unite the Umbrella Academy), Reginald Hargreeves manipulates Grace's programming in his favor - something he couldn't have done to a real life mother. This would suggest that even if Vanya hadn't been a nanny-killing machine in The Umbrella Academy's past, Reginald still probably would've built a robotic carer eventually, both to cover his tracks and to ensure his less-than ideal parenting techniques didn't bring unwanted attention.
The Umbrella Academy season 2's revelation that Grace is actually modelled after Reginald's former love serves as further proof that there was more behind the mother's creation than Vanya being a violent brat. On some deep, emotional level, Reginald made Grace look the way she does because he missed his partner from the 1960s, and having her around recreated the idyllic life they might've had. In this sense, Grace's real purpose is to fool both the Hargreeves siblings and Reginald himself. The kids believe they have a mother who loves them, and Reginald believes he has the real Grace still around.