The Umbrella Academy, the unique Netflix superhero series based on the comic book by musician and singer Gerard Way and illustrator Gabriel Bá, has ended. Although the series has been more or less faithful to its printed roots, this finale has distanced itself from the original story, partly because Netflix has expanded it beyond what the comics told. This ending is entirely the responsibility of producer and showrunner Steve Blackman, who has worked hard to bring the Hargreeves’ adventure to a coherent conclusion.
How do we get to this final episode? Number Five reveals the big secret the show has been hiding since the beginning: the origin of the apocalypse. Contrary to popular belief, Viktor’s powers aren’t the main cause of the world’s end because all the siblings were responsible for the apocalypse. In other words, and getting into multiverse stuff, the apocalypse is a fixed point that repeats itself in every one of the timelines because, in reality, none of them should exist. They were all created because Reginald Hargreeves released Marigold to resurrect his beloved Abigail and create this dysfunctional family of superheroes.
However, there’s a substance opposite to Ben’s Marigold, which brings a new character, Jennifer: the Durango, created simultaneously as the Marigold. After the reunion of the Hargreeves, they must face, not entirely successfully, the monster created by Jennifer and Ben when the Durango and the Marigold react. Unable to stop the apocalypse, Number Five flees to the train network of the multiverse. There, he finds a coffee shop with many clones of himself, who explain to him the true origin of the apocalypse, its inevitability, and how the Hargreeves have tried 145,412 times to stop it without success.
If the group of heroes allows this matter to react with the Marigold in their bodies, it'll disappear, and so will they. But they avoid the apocalypse. After an emotional farewell, they allow the Durango to devour the Marigold they carry. The end of the series confirms that only the primitive universe remains after its disappearance. Characters we've met throughout the series (some of them already dead, like the Swedes, hired to kill Number Five) have quite different fates.
Oh, and the post-credits sequence. It’s remarkably simple but leaves the doors open to the continuation of the series: We see eighth flowers, the same number as the siblings, growing from the melted Marigold. In other words, there’s hope that the Hargreeves will be reborn. Of course, it won’t be on Netflix, which has already given up on the series.
The big unknown with this ending is how characters like Diego, Lila, or Allison’s daughter would have been born if the Hargreeves never existed. This is one of the series’ unknowns, which seems to mean that death, a sacrifice, isn’t the same as non-existence, which sets the universe on a different course. Is it possible to be a hero without ever having existed? That is the conclusion of this fourth and final season of The Umbrella Academy.
This article was written by John Tones and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.
Image | Netflix
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