The Umbrella Academy Recap: Where Is My Mind?
The Jennifer Incident has bedeviled Umbrella Academy fans for nearly as long as The Umbrella Academy has been around. It was first teased in one of creator Gerard Way’s earliest comics as an inexplicable headline framed on a wall. “I have no idea what it even refers to. I just came up with something that sounded interesting and could be thought-provoking,” he later confessed.
More than 16 years later, the Jennifer Incident seems poised to pay off in a big way. Following a couple more teases in season three — most notably, sketches of a woman found in Ben’s room with the name “Jennifer” written on them — Jennifer herself, who it turns out was hiding in New Grumpson under the name “Rosie” all along, is looking like the key to The Umbrella Academy’s endgame.
“The Squid and the Girl” — a reference to the enigmatic flashback that opens the episode, but also maybe to the bond between Jennifer and the many-tentacled Ben — is your classic filler episode, spending much of its run time moving the pieces around the board to set up bigger things down the road. But that doesn’t make it uninteresting to watch. Following the car crash and the abduction of Jennifer by Jean and Gene in the last episode, the Umbrellas are left without a clear path forward. So they make one up. Five, Diego, and Lila will head to the Keepers’ headquarters and see if they can turn up new information on Jean and Gene; Luther, Allison, and Viktor will confront Reginald Hargreeves and see what he has to say about New Grumpson. (Ben, being Ben, goes his own way. We’ll get to him later.)
As for what each trio learns? The answer, in this episode, is … not much. Lila follows Five into his weird alternate-universe subway. That leads them into a brief, fun detour into season one’s Apocalypse Suite future, where that timeline’s Five tries and fails to kill them. Meanwhile, Diego digs up files revealing Jean and Gene’s obsession with what they call the Cleanse, which is tied to the universe in which Ben died on October 14, 2006.
Meanwhile, Luther, Allison, and Viktor show up at Reginald’s mansion ready for a fight and receive … a warm welcome. Thanks to a détente negotiated by Reginald’s wife, Abigail (who, thanks to the shenanigans in the season-three finale, is alive in this timeline), this half of the family sits down for a relatively civilized conversation in which they realize that they, like us, have no idea what the Jennifer Incident is. They’ve been delivering the same banal platitudes about it for so long — “it was a tragic accident; Ben died because we failed as a team” — that they never realized that none of them even remember how Ben died. Someone’s been playing around in their brains, and the episode ends on a cliffhanger, as most of the Umbrellas strap themselves into a machine designed to restore whatever memories have been stolen.
But Ben doesn’t have time for all this. He feels a deep, emotional connection to Jennifer, but it’s obvious that there’s more to the story. We knew that already, sort of; before this episode, one of the few things that was clear about the Jennifer Incident was that it resulted in Ben’s death. But their bond is apparently physical as well: Throughout the episode, they simultaneously experience the same strange burning effect on their arms and faces.
It’s this charged relationship that inspires Ben to go full Beast Mode, exploding into Jean and Gene’s compound and killing anyone between him and Jennifer. They manage to escape but only because Jean and Gene betray their own guards to let it happen. They’ll do anything, apparently, to get to the timeline they prefer.
And, as new as they are to The Umbrella Academy, it’s Jean and Gene’s side of this story that interests me the most. For all their grandiosity, Jean and Gene are just two losers convinced the universe dealt them a bad hand. They don’t want to be professors at New Mexico’s Golden Mesa Community College; they want Harvard tenures and MacArthur fellowships. It seems to me their lives in this timeline aren’t so bad; they have a loving marriage, a compound with an army of goons, and a solid enough euchre skill set to win some local tournaments. But if there’s one lesson The Umbrella Academy has hammered home, it’s that the knowledge that there’s more out there makes people want more — no matter how much damage they do to themselves or others in the process.
Raindrops
• Meanwhile, Klaus — once again superpowered, once again self-destructive — steals some stuff from Allison’s house, blows up his relationship with her daughter Claire, and reconnects with an embittered former dealer who shoots him in the head. (Klaus, being Klaus, wakes up just fine.) I’m not sold on the idea of stranding Klaus in a story line totally separate from his siblings, especially one that’s so bleak, but I guess we’ll have to see where this is going.
• As was true last season, I’m not entirely sure what to make of what The Umbrella Academy is doing with Allison. In the middle of this episode’s intrafamily squabble, she angrily asks if anyone else needs to get anything off their chests, then snarls “I’m done being the bad guy in this family.” I get why she’d be frustrated by that, but, uh … isn’t she? Much of her arc in season three was about screwing everybody over in ways the show acknowledged (killing Harlan, secretly teaming up with Reginald, gambling her siblings’ future to get Ray and Claire back) and in ways it didn’t (assaulting Luther). Given all that, I’d say the Umbrellas are incredibly trusting and forgiving of her. It’s possible there’s a bigger plan in the works here — Allison as the show’s true final boss would be one interesting way to spin things, especially since we now know Ray is out of the picture — but the show’s grasp on her character feels hazier than any of her siblings, which makes it harder to make an educated guess about whether there’s any real payoff on the horizon.
• What The Umbrella Academy does seem to be doing is teeing up a love triangle between Diego, Lila, and Five. It’s possible that’s a red herring — Lila just laughs at Diego when he mentions the man with the mustache in the diner — but the show is spending an awful lot of time building up Five and Lila’s unique connection if there’s no plan to do anything with it.
• Lots of old faces are briefly glimpsed in this episode, including Five’s postapocalyptic mannequin “girlfriend,” Delores; Pogo, the supersmart chimpanzee; and Grace, the Umbrella Academy’s robot mother.
• There’s a brief shot of Abigail giving a weird look when Reginald says he doesn’t know Sy Grossman. Does she know more than she’s saying? Probably.
• In case the last episode didn’t drill it into your head enough, “The Squid and the Girl” also gives us a “Baby Shark” reprise.
• Other songs in this episode: “Money (That’s What I Want),” by Barrett Strong; “Jump Into the Fire,” by Harry Nilsson; and, unforgettably, “Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves,” by Cher.
• For anyone feeling as adventurous as Jean and Gene, here’s a primer on alpaca milk.