When I first watched The Umbrella Academy in February 2019, I was hooked immediately: Interesting world-building; writing that felt sharp and funny while also being dramatic and, at times, heartbreaking. But the stand-out element was the characters; I fell in love with the Hargreeves from first breath, and I often called them “my kids” to anyone I discussed the show with. They were messy and complicated, but relatable. And they also had cool superpowers! What wasn’t there to love?
I think when you sign up to a show like this, with a large cast of characters who are monumentally flawed individuals (I would go so far as to call the Hargreeves siblings “absolute fuck-ups”, lovingly of course), the hope is that even though there will be trials and tribulations, the characters will grow and improve upon themselves. This doesn’t always happen, of course – sometimes characters get worse, or can’t move beyond the circumstances that made them, leading to heartbreaking outcomes. We call these tragedies, and a good tragedy will likely make you feel heartbreak for one of two reasons:
You, dear reader, have already read the title of this article, so you know how I feel about the show’s ending. And in case you don’t, let me be clear: I thought it was bad. However, if one is going to level criticism, one should do the work to dissect why they had a negative reaction. My point here is that TUA may have ended in tragedy, but it wasn’t the good kind. It didn’t do either of the things I mentioned. Because a good tragedy should leave you grieving, but it shouldn’t actively piss you off.
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD – for those who have not finished the series.
TUA ends with us discovering that our heroes’ existence was created due to an experiment that created two new elements – Marigold and Durango – by Reginald Hargreeves and his wife, Abigail, on their home world. This discovery destroyed their planet and basically killed Abigail. At that point, Reginald released Marigold from their home planet onto Earth, creating the spontaneous pregnancies of 43 women in 1989, including the members of The Umbrella Academy. These births caused the timeline to fracture irreparably and meant that the world eventually ended in every timeline because they weren’t meant to exist.
In the show’s final moments, our heroes accept their fates and sacrifice themselves, allowing for “the Cleanse” (the reaction of Marigold and Durango coming back into contact with one another) to take place and the timeline to reset back to the original. The final sequence shows a new, idyllic world where everyone, barring the Hargreeves siblings, is happy and healthy, and eight marigolds bloom underneath a large tree.
Sigh.
Herein lies the rub. To me, in that ending are the bones of a great tragedy; the idea that the Hargreeves could not help the havoc they caused over and over again (by the end of Season 4, they had already ended the world three times both intentionally and unintentionally) and thus deciding to let go of their selfish tendencies at the last moment for the betterment of everyone else is an admirable ending idea. But the trouble comes from the fact that the journey towards that ending resulted in a refusal to honour the journey that everyone had up to this point. Worse, Five – one of the show’s fan favourite characters – is subject to utter character assassination just to… I don’t even know, honestly – make a point?
Five – though massively prideful and arrogant, actively dismissive, and honestly just straight rude a lot of the time (to everyone, but especially his siblings) – had one overall defining motivation throughout the series: he wanted to be with his family. He spent 45 years in the apocalypse, eventually becoming an inter-temporal assassin trying to get home to them. So the decision to have him and Lila, who is in a relationship with and has children with his brother Diego, get together after getting lost in the subway system of timelines was bad enough. Hell, one could even kind of understand why they did it – Five and Lila always did understand each other in a way that the others never really could (or ever really tried to – I’ll get to this), and the circumstances leading up to it suggested that the two of them were never going to get home.
But what really ground my gears was how possessive and entitled Five got when it turned out he found a way home and hid it from Lila to stop her leaving him, and how her rejection of him led to him leaving his siblings to die with no intention to return. This portrayal fails to honor Five’s story, complicating it to the point of viewer frustration. It leads to absolutely no satisfaction when he, Lila, and Diego never get a chance to clear the air before they are eradicated from existence. Our final moments with them are tense, and – since we know this will never be resolved – leave us feeling deeply unsatisfied with how things turned out because we know, metatextually, that nothing will ever come of this. It’s just frustration for frustration’s sake.
The trouble with that frustration was that it was a symptom of a larger problem: the characters were regularly denied the opportunity to communicate, express their negative feelings, or discuss their experiences, which led to character development being constantly stunted.
Miscommunication – or a complete refusal to communicate at all – is probably my biggest bugbear in story-writing, especially when it’s used as a crutch to create drama between characters that can be easily resolved. Time was regularly given to comedic scenes that didn’t progress the plot (why did we need to watch everyone excessively vomit for five minutes while Baby Shark played in the background?) rather than one where our characters could have decided to lean on each other, especially as the thing that united all of the siblings was their shared childhood trauma at the hands of an abusive father.
I could use a dozen examples here to illustrate my point – Allison and Viktor’s conflict in Season 3 being one of the most frustrating – but the worst fallout personally was the treatment of Klaus, who was simultaneously one of the messiest members of the Academy and the one whom I identified in the first season as the most likely to have done the most work in processing his trauma (you can read my post-Season 1 thoughts here).
Klaus was an addict. He had the most obvious coping mechanisms of all the Hargreeves, indulging in hedonism to hide from his fear of death. This was explored partly in previous seasons – most notably in Season 3 when he learned how to control his immortality for the first time – and came up as a theme in Season 4 for him too; his lack of powers post-reset led Klaus to becoming a reclusive germaphobe who was three years sober when we meet him again. When he is shot trying to escape from a small town in Maine, he is forcibly given his Marigold back to save his life, leading him to relapse entirely and go on a side plot where he is, essentially, pushed into forced prostitution to pay an old debt. Oh, and then he’s buried alive. Likely place for Robert Sheehan to be.
This plot has no payoff in the show. By the time Klaus is freed and returns to his family, the Cleanse is in full swing, and he is never given the space to come to any clarity about his destructive tendencies. Instead, Klaus dies with his siblings, lamenting how completely terrible they were, but this moment doesn’t hit as I feel it was likely intended to. I don’t feel sad because “in reality they loved each other and all their potential to grow and love each other better is gone and yada yada yada.” No, the show presents their collective demise as a relief; they were never going to get better, so better they all go. Everyone they love will be actively better off without them. But what kind of catharsis are we meant to get out of that? What kind of message does that send to an audience that cares about these people? It feels almost cruel, as if we were told we were fools for ever wanting better for messed up people who were shown to be innately human. “Don’t be silly, these idiots can’t learn and grow beyond their flaws! Look how much better the world is without them!”
I’m a pretty savvy audience member. I watch my shows critically and with a decent understanding of story mechanics. The final season of TUA is written in such a way that it’s as if they don’t want you to think too hard about how we got to where we are – Diego and Lila are having marital problems because we need them to for the plot to make sense; Luther couldn’t find Sloane, whom he married and then lost in the reboot at the end of Season 3, because… well, the actor playing her wasn’t being brought back. Don’t worry about it. And why did Ray leave Allison? He just did. We aren’t given any reason to buy into any of these realities, so why would we buy into an ending that says it was all fucked from the start? It didn’t have to be.
What breaks my heart the most is that after the season finished, several deleted scenes were made available online that would have at least gone part of the way to repairing some of this damage. One such scene was Klaus going to an AA meeting and, for the first time in the entire show, admitting he is an addict. It adds seriousness back to his character that was sorely lacking, and reminded me why I loved him so much. The fact that this was filmed but subsequently removed says something rather stark about the state of the season overall, especially as Netflix doesn’t limit episode runtime, so who was this for?
The point of a tragedy is to invoke catharsis; we are presented with a narrative that forces us to confront messy, sad, and painful feelings and leads us to a place of release by the end. The Umbrella Academy Season 4 failed in this by forgetting that simple fact; we wanted better for these kids, and instead of showing us a world in which that could have happened – that they were capable of meaningful growth and understanding – we got one that instead reneged on everything that had come up until that point.
And that, rather than the ending itself, is why my heart still breaks.
