The Umbrella Academy is done saving the world. After four seasons and 36 episodes, the Netflix series based on Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá’s graphic novel has come to an end. The adopted children of Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore) couldn’t keep saving the world from imploding forever and finally found a way to stop the apocalypse from happening across all of the timelines.
The cast wasn’t informed how the show would wrap up until shortly before filming the final episodes, though some of them began to suspect the general ending about halfway through shooting the fourth and final season. The ending may have felt inevitable to some of them, but it was still hard to say goodbye to these characters who have transformed their careers in more ways than one.
Warning: This article contains major spoilers for The Umbrella Academy’s fourth season, including the series finale.
It turns out that the creation of the Umbrella Academy was the problem all along. Abigail Hargreeves (Liisa Repo-Martell) created a synthetic element called Marigold on the Hargreeves’ original planet. It was meant to mimic the essence of the universe, but when Abigail created Marigold, a counter element called Durango was also created. When the two elements interacted, it destroyed the Hargreeves’ world and Abigail along with it. Reginald bottled up her essence and some Marigold and brought it to Earth in hopes of bringing Abigail back to life. In the process, the Umbrella Academy was created (Marigold is what gives them their powers), but those spontaneous births in 1989 created infinite timelines doomed to implode because Abigail was never supposed to be brought back from the dead.
The Umbrella Academy Season 4 sees Abigail secretly lead a group of conspiracy nuts to reunite the Umbrella Academy with Jennifer (Victoria Sawal), a young woman who has Durango in her blood. When Ben (Justin H. Min) meets Jennifer, they unknowingly set off the same chemical reaction, nicknamed “The Cleanse,” that destroyed the Hargreeves’ home planet, By the time the Hargreeves children discover what’s taken place, Ben and Jennifer are too far gone to save and they realize the apocalypse is upon them once more. Five (Aidan Gallagher) informs the group that the only way to stop the apocalypse for good is to allow The Cleanse to take them and wipe them from existence, erasing the timeline fissures created by their births and restoring the world to the one true timeline.
“You don’t see this in the show, but initially there was a whole run of Lila and Five going off to different places and somehow in all of those different universes, the world is ending or they are under attack,” Gallagher told Gamespot and our sister-site TV Guide at the Season 4 press junket. “I think he wants to end a painful loop for the good of humanity because they are always causing these giant messes and just creating pain for people. That’s going to keep happening until someone ends it.”
The Hargreeves had beaten the apocalypse three times and were prepared to face it for a fourth before Five informed them it was never going to stop happening. There were some protests from the group, but inevitably the Hargreeve siblings and Diego’s (David Castañeda) wife Lila (Ritu Arya) decided to sacrifice themselves for the greater good and gave themselves over to The Cleanse. They died being dissolved by molten goo, but they died together as a united group.
“It was withheld from us on purpose by Steve [Blackman], our showrunner, for a while. I think he wanted to save [us] the heartbreak. Almost every season he’s withheld the last couple pages of an episode so we don’t know how the final episodes end until really close to shooting it,” Emmy Raver-Lampman revealed. “This could have gone so many different directions. We were halfway through filming when I was like, ‘I think we’re all going to die. That’s the only way out of this mess is that we aren’t here.’ It makes sense for the show. It feels like the proper ending that they all got to be together.”
“I felt the same. It just made sense,” added co-star Elliot Page. “It was sad, of course, especially now that we’re all back together and talking about the show, reflecting on all the seasons. We don’t get to go back and play these characters but I feel so grateful and lucky getting to have the four seasons that we got to have.”
It’s a bittersweet ending for the show, and it didn’t come without tears. Robert Sheehan admitted that he was one of the weepy actors on set for that final group scene, but he’s also been able to see the poetry in how The Umbrella Academy has ended.
“There’s something quite spiritually freeing about it, going ‘Oh no, we are in fact the problem. In order to set us and everyone else free, we have to sacrifice ourselves.’ It’s quite romantic. I don’t want to use the word trope because that gives it a negative connotation, but there’s a romantic sacrifice in it,” Sheehan said. “I thought it was a brave ending in a way, because I think the dramaturg in Steve Blackman would have been really wanting to leave it on a big crescendo, a dramatic twist or a question mark, as he does so brilliantly, but it’s the opposite of that. It is the complete opposite.”
And the audience does get to see the fruits of this giant sacrifice. The final scenes of the show take viewers to the remaining timeline where departed characters from seasons past including The Handler (Kate Walsh) and Hazel (Cameron Britton) are hanging out in an idyllic park on a sunny day. The closing image is of eight sparkling dandelions, representing the Hargreeves siblings and Lila, popping out of the ground.
The Hargreeves may not have found their rightful place in the space-time continuum, but series actor Tom Hopper still thinks the finale is optimistic about the future.
“That feels right,” he said of the ending. “I always thought that’s the way it would end and it would be final, but we left with a sense of hope and continuation.”
The Umbrella Academy is now streaming on Netflix.
