Not Quite a Happy Ending

In just six episodes, The Umbrella Academy season four has the unenviable task of wrapping up a Netflix series stuffed with complex characters—and an even more complex storyline involving superpowers, aliens, time travel, altered timelines, and multiple apocalypses. And that’s without even getting into the show’s main theme, which is family drama. So much family drama.

As expected, there’s plenty of that packed into all six episodes, with personal angst and long-simmering resentments compounded by the fact that—thanks to the events of season three—the Hargreeves siblings (Robert Sheehan as Klaus, Emmy Raver-Lampman as Allison, Tom Hopper as Luther, Aidan Gallagher as Five, Elliot Page as Viktor, and David Castañeda as Diego—plus non-Umbrella Academy family members Justin H. Min as Ben and Ritu Arya as Lila) have been stripped of their various abilities. While we do get to spend time with the characters in their regular-human states, existing on levels that range from “doing OK actually” to “total sad-sack,” it doesn’t take long before their powers are restored.

Not everyone wishes to be made “special” again; as the show likes to remind us, having superpowers can be a blessing but is far more often a curse. But this is The Umbrella Academy, which structures every season around the characters’ rush to prevent an impending doomsday. Season four is no different, and superpowers do come in handy when the end of the world is at stake.

This review is going to carefully avoid plot specifics or spoilers, but it’s not giving anything away to note that the Hargreeves, last seen scattering in different directions at the end of season three, reluctantly reunite when one of them is in distress. While the team grapples with the awkwardness of regaining their powers, not to mention the awkwardness of having to be in close proximity to each other—especially when it involves a puke-soaked road trip set to the diabolical sounds of “Baby Shark”—The Umbrella Academy also pokes into the version of reality they’re now inhabiting.

Turns out the Hotel Oblivion timeline reset did more damage than just removing the Hargreeves’ superpowers. The glue holding the universe together is so porous, artifacts from other timelines have started popping up—attracting the attention of a conspiracy-theorist group called the Keepers. Sporting tattoos that are inverted versions of The Umbrella Academy logo, the Keepers are led by a folksy husband-wife team named Gene and Jean (real-life husband-wife team Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally). They fill a familiar Umbrella Academy slot: antagonists as quirky as they are deadly.

While Offerman and Mullally are, as always, delightful performers, Gene and Jean are not the only season-four element that feels well-worn. io9’s largely positive review of season three raised a complaint that comes back around here, too: The Umbrella Academy is a show about a family that sets apocalypses in motion, and then has to frantically work to prevent them.

Though the circumstances are different each time—in season four, the crisis has an intriguing tie to a dark moment in Umbrella Academy history—the general thrust of the story again feels repetitive. Maybe too repetitive, even with the understanding that the grand finale might have more permanence than in previous iterations; this is, after all, the final season, and the show does find a bittersweet if abrupt way to address The Umbrella Academy‘s unavoidably cyclical narrative.

But along those lines, it doesn’t help that across pop culture we’ve lately been inundated with stories about sacred timelines and alternate realities and variant characters. The Umbrella Academy‘s been playing around with that since the show hit Netflix in 2019 (the source-material Dark Horse Comics debuted in 2007), and really it’s a long-familiar sandbox for sci-fi in general. But thanks to the inescapable presence of Deadpool and friends, the concept has never quite felt so much in the vein of “oh, this again?”

Fortunately, however, this is still The Umbrella Company, and the show’s much-loved brand of silliness and attention to offbeat detail (though season four is ostensibly set in contemporary times, rotary phones abound, and nobody ever checks Google) gets plenty of time to shine even with a shorter season.

Among the cast, Page’s Viktor gets a particularly satisfying storyline that sees him mending fences with the family’s troublesome patriarch, Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore)—even if it’s not the version of “Reggie” he grew up with. Arya’s Lila is also a standout; though she’s not an original Hargreeves kid, she’s saddled with plenty of her own baggage and gets a heartfelt journey to sift through it all—ditto Min’s Ben, whose season-four arc careens from salty to sweet to monstrous in ways that feel well-earned. (Alas, fan-favorite Klaus gets a bit short-changed this season.)

And as for that trademark Hargreeves goofiness, season four delivers on an Umbrella Academy trademark we’ll never call repetitive: the kick-ass, hilarious fight scene. The fact that the action takes place at Christmas would feel like an afterthought, if not for an outrageous sequence set around a holiday fair (if you’ve seen the trailer, you know a gun-toting Santa is involved)—and thanks to a cleverly spectacular brawl involving Luther and Diego that falls later in the season, you’ll never listen to “Secret Agent Man” the same way again.

The Umbrella Academy season four is now streaming on Netflix.

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