Breaking Down The Umbrella Academy‘s Bittersweet Apocalyptic Finale
After four seasons, the Netflix series ties everything together with an impossible choice by the Hargreeves siblings.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for the series finale of The Umbrella Academy.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]How do you wrap up a show that’s jumped multiple timelines, killed and then resurrected all of its lead characters more than once and ended the world at least three times? Well, you do it all over again.
Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy, loosely adapted from the comic-book series of the same name by My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way, premiered in 2019 to acclaim from critics and fans alike, introducing the world to the Hargreeves clan, the textbook definition of a dysfunctional family. Immediately, it launched a thousand Reddit threads as its plot was rife for dissection. The show opened with the intriguing premise detailed in the opening narration: “On the 12th hour of the first day of October 1989, 43 women around the world gave birth. This was unusual only in the fact that none of these women had been pregnant when the day first began.”
The show follows seven of those children after they were adopted by an eccentric billionaire and turned into a super-powered group of crime-fighting youngsters known as The Umbrella Academy. As the kids age into adulthood, with their older counterparts played by Elliot Page, Tom Hopper, Robert Sheehan, Emmy Raver-Lampman, David Castañeda, Aidan Gallagher, and Justin H. Min, the trauma of their weird childhood causes a rift. But when an impending apocalypse threatens to collapse the universe as they know it, they’re forced back together to save the world one last time. Or so they thought.
The fourth and final season has finally arrived on the streamer, two years after its last outing. That first initial apocalypse turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg, and with its explosive finale, viewers received closure on a series that evolved into a time-hopping, parallel universe-jumping, paradoxical web of chaos.
At the end of Season 3, the Hargreeves had landed in yet another timeline, but now without their powers. Despite reluctant hope about finally being able to live a normal life, there were simply too many unanswered questions left. How did their brother Ben die? What is the “Jennifer Incident?” And what was going to happen now that Reginald had created a world where his dead wife, Abigail, was seemingly alive and well? With four fewer episodes to work with than previous seasons, here’s how Season 4 of The Umbrella Academy managed to tie it all together.
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Everything is not well in this new timeline
When we rejoin the Hargreeves at the start of the new season, they’re chugging along in their new, superpowerless lives (with varying degrees of happiness about the whole thing). But while every trace of their past lives has been wiped from existence, the ripples of their previous versions are felt and exposed thanks to a new foe: the Keepers.
Headed up by Gene (Nick Offerman) and Jean (Megan Mullally), the Keepers believe in “The Umbrella Effect,” which has fractured the universe into multiple timelines that occasionally bleed into each other and create temporal paradoxes. They then introduce the idea of “the Cleanse,” which will wipe everything and restore the one true correct timeline. Keep that one in your suitcase for later.
The mystery around Ben’s death and the “Jennifer Incident” is finally explained
Viktor (Elliot Page) is kidnapped by a mysterious new character named Sy (David Cross) as a way to rope the gang into helping find his daughter, Jennifer (alarm bells should be ringing now!), who he believes is being held hostage by the Keepers. In the trunk of Jennifer’s car, Viktor found a box of timeline artefacts, including a jar of Marigold, the glowing substance that initially gave the Umbrella Academy their powers.
After Ben (Justin H. Min) spikes the siblings’ drinks that night with the Marigold, the once-again superpowered gang heads to a small town where they believe Jennifer is being held. When Ben meets the owner of a diner, Rosie, the whole population starts to turn on them, and it’s revealed the entire town is a Truman Show-style orchestration built around protecting Rosie, whose real name is Jennifer (Victoria Sawal).
When it comes to Ben’s original death, everything is shrouded in mystery. But it’s revealed that Reginald shot Ben and Jennifer and wiped it from the siblings’ memories. The “Jennifer Incident” refers to a mission where the gang were told to blow up a container with a girl trapped inside. But after Ben opened it to free who we now know is Jennifer, they were both killed with the justification being that it would somehow save the world.
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Marigold has a more dangerous counterpart
In this new timeline, Reginald’s dead wife Abigail, whom he mourned to the point of fracturing the universe into a million strands, is still alive. She reveals to the siblings that she created Marigold, the source of all existence, but, as every action has an equal and opposite reaction, another substance was birthed at the same time—Durango.
While the Umbrella Academy was infected with Marigold, Jennifer was spiked with Durango, and it’s imperative that neither ever touch, or else the end of the world is imminent. The problem is that Ben has already cozied up to Jennifer multiple times and is currently holed up in a motel with her on the run.
Fives in different area codes (and timelines!)
Because there is nothing linear about The Umbrella Academy, while all this is going on, Five (Aidan Gallagher) and Lila (Ritu Arya), Diego’s (David Castañeda) similarly-superpowered wife, have found themselves trapped on a subway system that takes them to alternate versions of the same moment in time. While they’re barely gone an hour in their world, the pair end up riding the rails for seven years in their time just trying to find a way home. Eventually, they do, but things got messy down there and lines were blurred, so Five ends up heading back underground to decompress.
There, he encounters a deli full of alternate Fives from alternate timelines. One of them reveals that there is only supposed to be one timeline, and until the Cleanse happens, the infinite cycle of splintering apocalypses will keep spreading (turns out they’ve tried to save the world 140,000 times already!). The birth of the siblings is what caused the initial fracture, so the only way to make sure the world restores itself is to wipe themselves entirely from the map of the universe.
What happens at the end of Season 4?
We reach Episode 6 of the final season of The Umbrella Academy with an uncomfortable but obvious truth: the only way this series can end is if the siblings never even existed in the first place.
After hooking up in the motel, Ben and Jennifer experience the worst case of post-coital regret ever as they start to break out into bulbous, pulsating, glowing rashes. They’re cornered into an abandoned department store while the many different factions of the Keepers mobilize around them to bring on the Cleanse. The pair continue to morph and deform into monstrous creatures, as the siblings try and find a way to save them from being killed by Reginald and the Keepers.
Outside, it’s revealed that Sy was actually Abigail in an extremely realistic disguise made of his own skin (think Buffalo Bill’s skin suit from Silence of the Lambs but with a much cleaner removal process). She later adopts Gene’s body as a way to hurry along the pressure from the Keepers. Abigail wanted to bring upon the Cleanse as final penance for creating Marigold and Durango and wipe it all from existence forever.
Despite the siblings doing everything in their superpowers to try and save Ben and Jennifer from morphing even further, the two merge when Ben is hit by a sniper shot orchestrated by Reginald. Together, they evolve into something even more beastly, an ever-expanding blob of destruction that makes Stranger Things’ Vecna look like a puppy dog.
The siblings learn from Five that the only way to rid the world of a never-ending string of alternate timelines filled with apocalypses and destruction is to destroy all the Marigold left in the universe. That means sacrificing themselves, as they’re the ones incubating it. It’s not an easy decision, as both Lila and Diego and Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) have families in this timeline that they’ll have to say goodbye to. The plan is to put their families on the subway, which will take them to the one true timeline once they allow themselves to merge with Jennifer and Ben’s Durango and bring about the Cleanse. There, they’ll be safe.
The remaining six siblings and Lila form a circle and power up the Marigold within them. Ben and Jennifer’s colossal evolution bursts through the house and envelops them, subsuming them from the ground up. The group hold hands and says their final farewells. Through tears, Klaus (Robert Sheehan) says, “I love you guys, but you’re all assholes,” as all they laugh themselves out of the universe.
The screen cuts to this exact day in 2024. Everyone we’ve seen throughout the series—from Kate Walsh’s icy Handler to Cameron Britton’s Commission assassin Hazel—is seen living happy, ordinary lives in almost parody-like bliss. Just as the series began, Reginald’s voiceover booms, saying, “On the 12th hour of the eighth day of August 2024, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary occurred. You might say, it was just a normal day.”
And there The Umbrella Academy ends, five years after it originally burst forth—although, in the world of the series, there are millions of years woven within that time. It’s poignant that the only way the series can exist is for it to erase itself entirely by the end, a fitting paradox that only this show could make work. The series starts with six siblings estranged from one another’s lives, reluctantly forced to try and heal wounds that were never their fault, and it closes with them all together, bound by love for each other and the world they’ve decided to sacrifice themselves for. It might just be the saddest happy ending of all time.