On the Eighth Day of the Eighth Month of 2024, The Umbrella Academy Season 4—[EXTREMELY LOUD INCORRECT BUZZER]
The fourth and final installment of the television show The Umbrella Academy, loosely based upon the comic series of the same name written by My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way, was released in early August of this year. Expectations were high, and the consensus has been that this season resulted in many a dashed hope for the fandom.
With the chaotic ending of season three, we’re left to pick up the series around Christmas 2025. Multiple people in the show’s fictional society are suspicious enough to assume everyone has been placed in “the wrong timeline;” and some of them even take this suspicion seriously enough to warrant forming cultish pop-ups around the country, and placing deals to prove “The Umbrella Effect” (a spoof on The Mandela Effect). Elliot Page’s Viktor owns a bar in Nova Scotia; Lila and Diego have three kids and loads of marital deception on their hands; Luther acts as an abysmal astronaut stripper; Ben is bailed out of jail for creating a cryptocurrency scheme; Allison films laundry detergent commercials; Klaus becomes a babysitter; Five is seeking work as a poorly-mustached undercover agent at the CIA. From the very beginning, it’s pretty clear that season three left the Hargreeves family without their powers, and now they’re grappling with lives set far apart from the legacy of The Umbrella Academy. Admittedly, the show does do a good job of showing how heroes too can struggle and flounder.
The stakes of this TV show certainly plummeted over the previous few seasons, and season four proves no exception; the most distinct example of this being that the plot went from “the world’s going to end in eight days” to “let’s help this guy find his daughter”. Reasonably, fans were disappointed with this season’s slow start. However, things finally start to pick up around halfway through, but by then, the main conflict doesn’t make much sense and it leaves the first three episodes looking unnecessary by comparison. For one thing, there isn’t a clear main villain to fight until around the fourth of a meager six episodes when Ben and a new character, Jennifer, become the new vessels for that end-of-the-world threat. The plot of the fourth installment was disorganized, and viewers were continuously misled when it came to distinguishing who the true big bad was. There are even a few plot holes left unaddressed by the time the season ends.
In terms of character arcs, Klaus hasthe most impactful one even though he is killed and resurrected again, which seems to be the showrunners’ signature move whenever the pacing gets a little too sluggish. But, pacing aside, the characters that happened to have exhibited the most disappointing arcs this season were Five and Lila, who were written to pursue an out-of-character and adulterous romance between the two of them. This plotline has faced severe backlash from the show’s fandom for good reason. And yet, the series showrunner has publicly defended this decision despite the controversial age difference between these two characters (and their actors). Aiden Gallagher—who portrays Five—is 20 years old while his costar, Ritu Arya, is 35. Not to mention, their characters’ bodies are also roughly 10 to 15 years apart in age, and they first met when Lila was four years old and Five was in his 50s. This was an unnecessary decision for the season overall, and one might argue an unnecessary decision for these two characters’ personalities too, specifically Five’s.
The fifth Hargreeves sibling began as a character who thrives off of chaos and the uncut caffeine of life—craves it even. His personality once denoted that of a crotchety, irritable, and impulsive old man. But the end of season four absolutely decimates the implicitly asexual Five we’ve come to know. By episode five, he’s someone completely different—someone who takes desperate grasps at a peaceful life as a strawberry farmer in love.
For a show that is known for its soundtrack—and particularly for having tapped into an unlikely type of comedy that arises from using inappropriately upbeat backtracks during viciously violent fight scenes— the sheer amount of overused Christmas songs inserted into this season was disappointing as well.
Overall, it seems that season four of The Umbrella Academy let people down. In my humble opinion, the best thing about this fourth installment is the last scene, which provides a parallel to the series’ opening sequence. However, this last scene is a source of contention within the fandom because it leaves every single one of the main characters dead. On another note, given that there were news articles circulating a mere week before the release date of season four that exposed the showrunner, Steve Blackman, as a sexist, homophobic, transphobic mass manipulator, it seems the show’s final season was destined to fail from its inception.
Rory Gould is a senior year Writing student with a decades-old Netflix account. She can be reached at [email protected].