Netflix’s series The Umbrella Academy has ended with season 4, and it all came together climatically, to put it mildly. Pretty much every superhero these days is dealing with the end of the world, and the Hargreeves children are no different.
[Ed. note: As you might expect from a post answering questions about the end of Umbrella Academy season 4, we are about to discuss the end of Umbrella Academy season 4. Spoilers ahead.]
Normally, superheroes rarely die while saving the multiverse. Even fewer lose their whole team by being swallowed up by the weird sibling monster that’s engulfing the whole world. So what exactly went down at the end of the world at the end of The Umbrella Academy? Here are the questions we had, and our best attempts to answer them.
What was up with Abigail?
In the final episode, Abigail (Reginald’s wife in this timeline and others) sits down with Reginald and explains that the giant hulking apocalypse enveloping them was her doing. As she appears to lay it out, this chain reaction caused by Ben and Jennifer’s molecules meeting was similar to something on their own home planet (presumably) that led to both her death and the end of their world.
“Dying was my penance for creating something so deadly,” she says, sounding melancholy. “This cleanse… wasn’t it enough to see our world destroyed? Why would you loose it on this one?”
Photo: Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix
It appears that this confession on the bench is an explanation for a grand design of sorts: Abigail speaks to Reginald’s actions having “consequences far greater than anything” he could imagine, that she felt it was her “duty to set it right.”
Considering how much of the show’s timelines and Time Commission was a means to ensure a correct timeline, it’s possible that Abigail is laying claim as the grand mastermind behind all the events of the series. Read this way, it’s her efforts that kept causing apocalypses to get the right ingredients together to end the world, and stop Reginald from constantly recreating her and the universe. (Indeed, it might even explain why Reginald felt he had to guard her body on the moon.) Season 4 is just when everything finally comes together.
And it’s a good mirror for what the children themselves need to accept in order to let the world finally live in peace — which brings us to…
So… what happened at the end of season 4 exactly?
Photo: Christos Kalohoridis/Netflix
Whuf, OK bear with us. So the things we know happened are: Ben and Jennifer each contained a different type of energy form within them that, if the two of them touched, would start a chain reaction that eventually envelops the world (what the cult sprung up around them calls “The Cleanse”). They touch, it happens.
The Umbrella Academy is left trying to stop it, but Five eventually finds himself at a cafe full of Fives, all from the various timelines that have attempted to stop the apocalypse. He finds out that he and his siblings have tried 145,412 times to stop the end of the world, resulting in a mess of timelines where there should only be one. He returns to his siblings with the answer: The Cleanse isn’t a bad thing, and they should allow themselves to die in order to actually merge the timelines and head off apocalypses once and for all.
Though it takes some bickering (this is the Hargreeves family, after all), they ultimately all fall in line — this is what they signed up for, being superheroes and all, even if this wasn’t how they imagined laying their lives on the line. But with their family tucked away safe from the impending Cronenbergian monster swallowing the world and the promise of a peaceful ever after, they did it.
What does Reginald being an alien have to do with that?
Ultimately, for The Umbrella Academy show, not a ton, beyond establishing that’s where his technological prowess comes from. Him being an extraterrestrial was a bit more of a plot point in the comics, which the Netflix show has already deviated from drastically.
Who were those people at the end?
The final scene of The Umbrella Academy showcases a blissful day in a park, where nothing bad is happening. There’s a callback to the first season, with a cover of “I Think We’re Alone Now” playing. At first, we see Lila’s family, her and Diego’s kids, and Claire all having a picnic, clearly having made it out of the subway totally fine.
But then the camera pans and we see more characters. It’s a bit hard to tell who they are, considering most of the iconic Umbrella Academy characters have very distinct costumes and appearances. Seeing them in comparably normal clothes means taking a second to figure out who they are. We’ve got it covered though!
The three older dudes playing Frisbee are the three Swedish assassins from season 2. The reason they’re old is because season 2 took place in the 1960s, remember? And they’re all still alive! Yay!
The couple pushing their bikes together are Agnes the donut lady and Hazel, the assassin who fell in love with her back in season 1.
The woman pushing the stroller is Grace, the Hargreeves siblings’ mom — a robot modeled after a real woman that Reginald dated in the 1960s. It’s unclear whether this version is a robot or the real woman (who hasn’t aged since the 1960s), but she’s gently pushing a stroller, so she is a mom!
Then there’s the lady stretching in the middle of her run — the Handler! She’s almost unrecognizable without the wig and the extravagant get up. But she’s still getting right down to business. So some things never change.
The person sketching is Gabriel Ba, the actual artist behind the Umbrella Academy comics (#meta).
The two people playing backgammon are Dot and Herb, who worked at the Commission and basically unionized against the Handler when she took over the Board of directors. Now instead of worrying about world ending events, they can just have a lovely day in the sun.
There are other people distantly in the background, but they were too small for us to make out. Showrunner Steve Blackman says that they got a lot of the actors back for this final scene (the exceptions being Mary J. Blige and John Magaro from season 1). He also told us that Dolores the mannequin makes a cameo, so look out for that!
… Wait, how do Diego and Lila’s and Claire’s children exist if their parents don’t exist?
We’re not too sure about that. Don’t think too hard about it and just accept the fact they get a happy ending! <3