The Umbrella Academy: Full Final Season
August 10, 2024 12:39 AM - Season 4 (Full Season) - Subscribe
Six years have passed, the siblings have adjusted and settled into to life without super powers until...
while attending a birthday party for Diego and Lila's daughter, they are approached by a man (David Cross) who wants them to find his missing daughter. Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally also feature prominently this season.
Very brief season (only 6 episodes) to wrap up the series.
while attending a birthday party for Diego and Lila's daughter, they are approached by a man (David Cross) who wants them to find his missing daughter. Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally also feature prominently this season.
Very brief season (only 6 episodes) to wrap up the series.
I have not watched this yet, but everything I’ve heard so far indicates to me that I should pretend it ended with season 3. And that’s with two of my fave actors (Offerman and Mullally) in it. I would love to hear if anyone recommends differently.
posted by rednikki at 11:25 AM on August 10 [2 favorites]
posted by rednikki at 11:25 AM on August 10 [2 favorites]
Yeah I kinda wish I hadn't gone in blind. I think if I went in with VERY low expectations, it might have been ok. Even the way they envisioned how these characters would live depowered really didn't resonate with me, and just letting myself imagine these characters out in the world being their weird glorious selves without the benefits of their powers would have been a nice way to end things. They deserve better as do we.
posted by miss-lapin at 11:40 AM on August 10 [3 favorites]
posted by miss-lapin at 11:40 AM on August 10 [3 favorites]
I was and wasn't satisfied. The season felt very rushed (because it was only 6 episodes) and our core group spent too much time a part. That's always been somewhat a feature of the show but everyone was off mostly doing their own things.
The overall plot was a bit weak.
There were still some lovely moments and some weirdness but not enough.
This show has meant a lot to me and I'm sorry to see it go. It wasn't the final season I wanted but I'm mostly OK with what I got in the end.
posted by edencosmic at 2:03 PM on August 10 [2 favorites]
The overall plot was a bit weak.
There were still some lovely moments and some weirdness but not enough.
This show has meant a lot to me and I'm sorry to see it go. It wasn't the final season I wanted but I'm mostly OK with what I got in the end.
posted by edencosmic at 2:03 PM on August 10 [2 favorites]
So I realize what my issue with the ending. As a "gifted" kid born to distant and abusive parents with perfectionistic expectations, I really identified with their experiences and how that shaped them. A lot of the show grapples with those issues. This is why the "You don't belong here so you must be unmade" solution with the prim little marigolds at the end sits so poorly with me.
posted by miss-lapin at 7:56 PM on August 10 [10 favorites]
posted by miss-lapin at 7:56 PM on August 10 [10 favorites]
The ending was, well we cannot think of anything better. Hero sacrifice out of nowhere.
posted by KaizenSoze at 12:44 PM on August 11 [1 favorite]
posted by KaizenSoze at 12:44 PM on August 11 [1 favorite]
Yeah, the Donnie Darko ending was a little weird. It needed more time to set up. I think everything in the season needed more time. Understanding how the Two's came to that decision, Two and Lila, and Jennifer and Ben, all felt like the middle was cut out of that story. And Klaus and Luther felt like they were about to have a plot, but it never really happened. They needed the full 10 episodes to pull it off. That said, I enjoyed watching it.
posted by Garm at 2:16 PM on August 11 [1 favorite]
posted by Garm at 2:16 PM on August 11 [1 favorite]
You mean Five. Five was the one trapped with Lila and who eventually realized the solution was to unmake themselves.
posted by miss-lapin at 4:06 PM on August 11 [1 favorite]
posted by miss-lapin at 4:06 PM on August 11 [1 favorite]
I agree it was a bit rushed, and the threads could have used more time to breathe and develop, but I enjoyed it.
My charitable reading of the final sequence with everyone playing frisbee in ageing makeup, is that they were unmade as perma-child superheros and allowed a life where they could grow up, and grow old and content as regular people, free of the yoke of Hargreaves' abuse. Which is a fair bit of heavy lifting for a wordless couple of shots, but I like it better than '... and they went to heaven as old people' or whatever.
That's how I want the story to end at least - these poor abused people getting some peace, and maybe it's a timeline where they never even knew Reggie. Which sure, if you poke at it they seem to have been conceived by the Marigold so by that logic they wouldn't exist in a timeline without his intervention, but it's fantasy so I'm going to let that be the resolution in my head because maybe they were destined to exist regardless in some weird Star Trek mirror-universe kind of way.
Bye bye X-Men-but-Royal-Tenenbaums, you were one of my favourite concepts for a show in a long while.
posted by threecheesetrees at 4:35 PM on August 11 [2 favorites]
My charitable reading of the final sequence with everyone playing frisbee in ageing makeup, is that they were unmade as perma-child superheros and allowed a life where they could grow up, and grow old and content as regular people, free of the yoke of Hargreaves' abuse. Which is a fair bit of heavy lifting for a wordless couple of shots, but I like it better than '... and they went to heaven as old people' or whatever.
That's how I want the story to end at least - these poor abused people getting some peace, and maybe it's a timeline where they never even knew Reggie. Which sure, if you poke at it they seem to have been conceived by the Marigold so by that logic they wouldn't exist in a timeline without his intervention, but it's fantasy so I'm going to let that be the resolution in my head because maybe they were destined to exist regardless in some weird Star Trek mirror-universe kind of way.
Bye bye X-Men-but-Royal-Tenenbaums, you were one of my favourite concepts for a show in a long while.
posted by threecheesetrees at 4:35 PM on August 11 [2 favorites]
Oh, and 5 stars for selecting an Akira-style apocalypse as the world-ender this season. My favourite kind of apocalypse.
posted by threecheesetrees at 4:37 PM on August 11
posted by threecheesetrees at 4:37 PM on August 11
Yeah, I honestly didn't mind the shortened season, so much of the previous seasons ended up wandering around the back lot for 2-3 episodes just because they had time to kill, while 6 episodes felt tighter. I still don't quite get how Five's plan was supposed to work through. So, Mrs. Hargreeves makes marigold which caused the heroes to be born and have powers, huzzah. But it also made durango, and when marigold and durango mix, it'll cause The Cleanse and end the world.
Ok, gotcha. So in the original timeline Mr. Hargreeves sends the kids out to kill the girl who has durango in her, except Ben hears her and lets her out so Hargreeves kills the both of them, preventing The Cleanse in the OG timeline. Then timeline madness ensues and Ben and Jennifer come back to life, oh no! So Hargreeves hides Jennifer away in a small set town so the team won't find her and cause the Cleanse accidentally. So Abigail takes over Sy's flesh suit and sends the team off to rescue her and Season 4 happens. Eventually Ben and Jennifer get their freak on and merge to form the Cleanse, because the marigold and durango were mixed - as Abigail planned. So how does adding more marigold to this apocalypse end things? Like I could see if they hopped back in time and used Vik's power to extract the marigold again, but as it was they just sorta let the blob wash over them and that was it?
Anyway, I didn't mind it up until the last, I dunno, 15 minutes or so, but that ending felt like they ran out of time and just sort of pulled a "and then the story ended" out of a hat.
posted by Kyol at 6:59 AM on August 15
Ok, gotcha. So in the original timeline Mr. Hargreeves sends the kids out to kill the girl who has durango in her, except Ben hears her and lets her out so Hargreeves kills the both of them, preventing The Cleanse in the OG timeline. Then timeline madness ensues and Ben and Jennifer come back to life, oh no! So Hargreeves hides Jennifer away in a small set town so the team won't find her and cause the Cleanse accidentally. So Abigail takes over Sy's flesh suit and sends the team off to rescue her and Season 4 happens. Eventually Ben and Jennifer get their freak on and merge to form the Cleanse, because the marigold and durango were mixed - as Abigail planned. So how does adding more marigold to this apocalypse end things? Like I could see if they hopped back in time and used Vik's power to extract the marigold again, but as it was they just sorta let the blob wash over them and that was it?
Anyway, I didn't mind it up until the last, I dunno, 15 minutes or so, but that ending felt like they ran out of time and just sort of pulled a "and then the story ended" out of a hat.
posted by Kyol at 6:59 AM on August 15
I watched the whole thing last weekend and was not happy with the way it ended. I checked out the sentiment here and agreed with it, but didn’t post myself, mainly because i was too annoyed to marshall my thoughts into a cohesive comment. Fortunately, Petrana Radulovic of Polygon distilled my nebulous feelings perfectly:
Why did the ending of The Umbrella Academy suck so much?
Funnily enough, even though I found season 4 lacking, it made me want to rewatch the earlier seasons. Along with Doom Patrol, another favorite show about a fucked-up superhero family that started incredibly strong but lost some juice with each following season.
posted by ejs at 9:25 PM on August 15 [3 favorites]
Why did the ending of The Umbrella Academy suck so much?
Funnily enough, even though I found season 4 lacking, it made me want to rewatch the earlier seasons. Along with Doom Patrol, another favorite show about a fucked-up superhero family that started incredibly strong but lost some juice with each following season.
posted by ejs at 9:25 PM on August 15 [3 favorites]
Finally finished the season. The first five episodes weren't bad but they failed to stick the landing. Not GoT or Killing Eve failed, but still failed. It feels like a better ending would have been Viktor draining all the Umbrellas and Ben & Jennifer before they went all Tetsuo and then poofing out of existence. He would have saved the world instead ending it.
I don't think it was as bad as a lot of the critiques I've seen, but the whole season was a weird shift for only having 6 episodes.
posted by kokaku at 6:36 PM on August 19
I don't think it was as bad as a lot of the critiques I've seen, but the whole season was a weird shift for only having 6 episodes.
posted by kokaku at 6:36 PM on August 19
There were times this season where the CGI looked rushed to me and I would have enjoyed a crowd reaction shot to show horror instead.
I think trying to do fewer characters and stories would have made room for a script that hit harder emotionally.
Like, if you cut Sy and Jennifer, reduce the screen time of Ben being a mopey jerk, drop the Lila and Five side story (which no one wants or needs), remove Reg's love interest being crucial without earning it, and dear god drop Baby Shark, and then …
Keep the family dysfunction, the Keepers, Luther's pole dancing, and Klaus's seance hell, and maybe now there's time for the characters to be more real with each other.
posted by zippy at 10:08 PM on August 19 [1 favorite]
I think trying to do fewer characters and stories would have made room for a script that hit harder emotionally.
Like, if you cut Sy and Jennifer, reduce the screen time of Ben being a mopey jerk, drop the Lila and Five side story (which no one wants or needs), remove Reg's love interest being crucial without earning it, and dear god drop Baby Shark, and then …
Keep the family dysfunction, the Keepers, Luther's pole dancing, and Klaus's seance hell, and maybe now there's time for the characters to be more real with each other.
posted by zippy at 10:08 PM on August 19 [1 favorite]
ejs, that Radulovic at Polygon link is great: From the very first season, the big world-ending stakes in The Umbrella Academy weren’t just apocalyptic harbingers, they were basically physical manifestations of the trauma the Hargreeves siblings experienced as kids. And every time, the family circumvented the end of the world by coming together in some capacity, putting aside their differences and the wedges their father drove between them, in order to avoid a grim fate. Each season presented them with a new set of challenges — and in the face of those, sometimes they regressed. It was the cycle of abuse repeating itself, with the siblings reacting to it in different ways each time. But, in the end, the Hargreeves siblings opened their arms to one another and somehow always managed to escape the metaphorical trauma consuming them.
A cathartic series ending would ideally revolve around the Hargreeves siblings finally conquering that baggage once and for all, in some way. That metaphor is foundational to why the show was so appealing in the first place: The superpowered family had real, tangible relationships with one another and the threats they faced were basically the worst versions of those internal struggles. It was refreshing to see a superhero story where the doom had personal stakes.
The ending of the show completely shafts all the work that the family did to overcome their trauma and rebuild their bonds with one another. [...]
Instead, though, the siblings let that trauma consume them. That’s what a big sacrificial ending reads as, when those apocalyptic threats are blatant metaphors. They don’t grow past the hardships they endure; it swallows their very existence. The world is better off without them. Even though we’ve watched them try and fail for three seasons to break this cycle, apparently the solution is for them to never get better at all. -- Why did the ending of The Umbrella Academy suck so much? Yes, it’s really that bad.
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:57 AM on August 25 [2 favorites]
A cathartic series ending would ideally revolve around the Hargreeves siblings finally conquering that baggage once and for all, in some way. That metaphor is foundational to why the show was so appealing in the first place: The superpowered family had real, tangible relationships with one another and the threats they faced were basically the worst versions of those internal struggles. It was refreshing to see a superhero story where the doom had personal stakes.
The ending of the show completely shafts all the work that the family did to overcome their trauma and rebuild their bonds with one another. [...]
Instead, though, the siblings let that trauma consume them. That’s what a big sacrificial ending reads as, when those apocalyptic threats are blatant metaphors. They don’t grow past the hardships they endure; it swallows their very existence. The world is better off without them. Even though we’ve watched them try and fail for three seasons to break this cycle, apparently the solution is for them to never get better at all. -- Why did the ending of The Umbrella Academy suck so much? Yes, it’s really that bad.
posted by Iris Gambol at 1:57 AM on August 25 [2 favorites]
The plot was more gibberish than usual even. But there were lots of laughs, until there weren't.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:18 PM on September 18
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:18 PM on September 18
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And the absolute end just pissed me off. I like the world better with them in it, even if it means that timelines will bleed into each other.
I am sad and will miss these characters.
posted by miss-lapin at 12:45 AM on August 10 [2 favorites]