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It actually blows my mind that there isn't a thread on this yet, after five years from its excellent first season...
Based on a comic book series by Gabriel Ba and MCR frontman Gerard Way, The Umbrella Academy follows the story of six children with superpowers adopted by mysterious, wealthy industrialist Sir Reginald Hargreeves. He actually adopts seven children - from 43 born on the same day to mothers who were not pregnant that morning - and doesn't actually bother to give them names, but numbers them instead. However their adoptive mother (Mom/Grace) does later give them names:
- Number One - Luther - is the team leader, and his superpower is strength and endurance. He's nicknamed "Spaceboy" as his UA persona, for unclear reasons, but later does live on the Moon. Handy.
- Number Two - Diego - has the superpower of telekinesis over projectiles, and has the nickname "The Kraken".
- Number Three - Allison - has the superpower of telepathic suggestion, coming into effect when she says the words "I heard a rumour". Her nickname is "The Rumor".
- Number Four - Klaus - can communicate with and corporealise the dead, and is nicknamed "The Seance".
- Number Five has the ability to portal through space and, it turns out, time. He's either never given a name or accepts one, and is for some reason nicknamed "The Boy", but only ever goes by "Five".
- Number Six - Ben - can summon powerful and seemingly almost invulnerable Lovecraftian tentacles from his back, and has the nickname "The Horror".
- Number Seven - Vanya - is not an official member of the UA, presenting with no powers despite being one of the 43 children born at the same instant to women not previously pregnant.
Before the show starts, the UA has fractured. Reginald was in effect an abusive bully, more interested in shaping the group into a superhero collective and scientific study on their abilities than being a father; Grace, who it transpires is an android (gynoid?), and a sentient chimpanzee called Pogo take actual care of the children.
The disappearance of Five in an attempt to time travel and the death of Six/Ben in "The Jennifer Incident" causes all but Luther to drift away - and a subsequent near-fatal accident sees him transformed into a half-ape and then sent to the Moon.
When Reginald unexpectedly dies, the family comes back together for his funeral and that includes Five who - after 45 years stuck in the future - completes the calculations required to travel back in time, ending up in his original 13-year old body due to a glitch and arriving a week before the apocalypse whose aftermath he saw when he first travelled forwards, but the cause of which is unknown to him. The family (less Ben) must therefore combine their abilities to discover what caused the apocalypse and prevent it from coming to pass.
As a quick viewing guide, S1 and S2 are engaging enough and mostly entertaining, but S3 is weak and they were given a six-episode run to wrap up S4 and that totally ruined the whole thing. Like, not even exaggerating - I enjoyed S1/2 but wish I hadn't bothered ever watching it after the S4 finale.
Asked more questions than it answered (how can kids of people who never existed on the true timeline survive to exist on the true timeline?), didn't answer anything across the overarching story (okay, you've "fixed" now, but not the events of 200 years ago on the Reginald/Abigail planet; what about the marigold in the other 35 kids?), nor several things from S3 (Sloane's disappearance; I think it was caused by Allison's interference in the reset, but it's not covered), felt super-rushed but had time to stick in a stupid Five/Lila romance and an even stupider Klaus/prostitute story simply because that was in the first comic, the abuser (Reg) won as the abused kids who always thought (and were brainwashed into thinking after the Jennifer Incident) that they were the problem turned out to actually be the problem, the whole timeline thing smells of the TVA, and the entire climax is ripped off from Dark - which was both devastating and earned, and UA was neither - and frankly the idea of anyone forgiving murderous, rapey, selfish Allison (who got to be comfy in any timeline except for some brief consequences in the first; she even got her 1960s husband back for the reset FFS, although I guess Yusuf Gatewood was too expensive for S4 or read it and noped out) for any of it is ridiculous.
In general it's largely fun through to the end of S2 before getting bogged down in the usual "how do we end it" Netflix rush. Luther is dumbed down so far over the four seasons as to rival Hemsworth in Ghostbusters, Page remains the career-long ineffective screen presence of pained expressions and strained shouting, and I can't decide if Raver-Lampman is doing a great job making Allison intolerable or not acting it. Five (Aiden Gallagher) and Klaus (Robert Sheehan) are definitely the stars, but frankly they get blown away any time Reginald (Colm Feore) is on-screen.
Some storyline/plot spoilers below:
For some reason, Reginald - who it later transpires is both an alien and at least a couple of hundred years old - named the children in reverse order of their potential power and Vanya was in fact the most powerful of them all. Vanya's power revolves around the ability to absorb energy (initially sound, but becoming less defined later on) and redirect it as blasts of force - which sees the angry young child kill a succession of nannies before the construction of Grace.
It transpires that Vanya's power is the cause of the apocalypse, and the family actually bring it about in trying to stop it as the violin-powered energy strikes and shatters the Moon which comes crashing back to Earth. Five attempts to travel back in time with all of his siblings (Ben included, corporealised by Klaus) to "fix" Vanya and prevent the apocalpyse.
It transpires that Vanya's power is the cause of the apocalypse, and the family actually bring it about in trying to stop it as the violin-powered energy strikes and shatters the Moon which comes crashing back to Earth. Five attempts to travel back in time with all of his siblings (Ben included, corporealised by Klaus) to "fix" Vanya and prevent the apocalpyse.
Five's attempt to travel to the past failed, and the family all land in different points of the 1960s in the same back street in Dallas (with Klaus and ghost Ben together still). However Five lands at a point where Russian troops are marching through the streets, fighting US troops and the other Umbrella Academy members before the city is nuked as WW3 kicks off, but is able to travel back further with the help of a time travel briefcase from one of the S1 assassins.
The UA is responsible once again, but heads off the apocalypse this time only to face a battle with a time-keeping organisation called the Temps Commission and another one of the 43, Lila. Lila, who has the power to mirror other superpowers, joins the UA and the family uses a briefcase to return to 2019.
The UA is responsible once again, but heads off the apocalypse this time only to face a battle with a time-keeping organisation called the Temps Commission and another one of the 43, Lila. Lila, who has the power to mirror other superpowers, joins the UA and the family uses a briefcase to return to 2019.
But it's the wrong 2019. Having met Reginald in 1963, he decides against adopting those children and has adopted seven others (though one is another version of Ben, who he didn't meet). Meanwhile the child Vanya cared for in the 1960s accidentally absorbed some of Vanya's powers (through a particle called "marigold") and - blaming Vanya and siblings for abandoning them and his mother - kills their mothers as his dies, right as the children were about to be born.
The paradox of the UA existing in the timeline where their mothers died creates an energy-based black hole ("kugelblitz") which will grow and destroy the universe. Reginald tricks the surviving Umbrellas and Sparrows to use their marigold to power a machine to reset the universe, but Allison kills him and resets it herself. The family appears back in an unknown city with no powers - with Reginald and his resurrected (alien) wife Abigail looking on.
The paradox of the UA existing in the timeline where their mothers died creates an energy-based black hole ("kugelblitz") which will grow and destroy the universe. Reginald tricks the surviving Umbrellas and Sparrows to use their marigold to power a machine to reset the universe, but Allison kills him and resets it herself. The family appears back in an unknown city with no powers - with Reginald and his resurrected (alien) wife Abigail looking on.
After six years living unpowered, the family is largely estranged but comes together when Viktor is kidnapped by a man called Sy to get them find his daughter Jennifer - while Five, now in the CIA, is following a group of strange people called the Keepers who think that the universe is wrong somehow and who appear to be right as they keep finding artefacts depicting the first-season UA universe.
Jennifer turns out to be infected with the marigold anti-particle "durango", accidentally created by Abigail back on their homeworld, and causing its destruction. Five learns that the marigold causes the timeline to fracture into infinite paths which all end in an imminent apocalypse, and after Ben and Jennifer touch they merge into a marigold-consuming beast called The Cleanse. The UA allows themselves to be absorbed by The Cleanse to erase themselves from existence, resetting the timeline to the one true one.
Jennifer turns out to be infected with the marigold anti-particle "durango", accidentally created by Abigail back on their homeworld, and causing its destruction. Five learns that the marigold causes the timeline to fracture into infinite paths which all end in an imminent apocalypse, and after Ben and Jennifer touch they merge into a marigold-consuming beast called The Cleanse. The UA allows themselves to be absorbed by The Cleanse to erase themselves from existence, resetting the timeline to the one true one.
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