The Grandfather Paradox in ‘The Umbrella Academy’ Season 3, Explained

The Umbrella Academy season 3 came back with even more superpowered characters, time travel, and another apocalypse. Time travel has always been a key component of the show, as Number Five (Aiden Gallagher) developed the power of time travel. Plus, the Commission has those wonderful little briefcases that can easily catapult any user through time. Yet, this season, the time travel seems to get even more nuanced than before.

At the end of season one, the Hargreeves siblings stopped a world-ending event. However, they sent themselves back in time to the 1960s. By being there, they messed with the existing timeline and triggered another apocalypse. After fixing their mistakes and covering their tracks, they thought they could return to their own time. However, when they arrived, nothing seemed normal. What did they do wrong now?

A New Timeline

When the Hargreeves siblings go back to their childhood home, they think everything should be just as they left it. Instead, they find an entirely different group of siblings called the Sparrow Academy in their places. Although the timeline was obviously not their own, the siblings thought they could settle into the new world. There was no apocalypse going on, so at least that was going for them.

It wasn’t until episode three that they realized their mistake. Klaus (Robert Sheehan) searched for his birth mother to see what kind of life he could have had if Reginald Hargreeves hadn’t adopted him. Instead of finding her, he uncovered that all the original Umbrella Academy’s mothers died before giving birth to them on October 1, 1989 (except for Ben). In the timeline, they never existed. But since they were living and breathing in this reality, that meant they created a Grandfather Paradox.

Time Travel and the Grandfather Paradox

Whenever I think about time travel, I feel like that conspiracy meme of Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but here goes. The episode breaks the Grandfather Paradox down like a training video from the Commission. A boy named Elmer hates his grandfather and blames him for all of their family’s troubles. So he invents the time machine and goes back to kill his grandpa to prevent any suffering the man may have caused.

However, Elmer kills his grandfather before Elmer’s mother or Elmer himself were born. But if Elmer was not born, how could he go back in time to kill his grandfather? Thus, a paradox formed. The situation is hypothetical and a warning not to mess with things that happened in the past. The Commission manual does state that if the situation ever happened, reality could collapse.

When the Hargeeves came to what they thought was home, they actually entered a timeline where they had never been born. They created a real-life scenario of the Grandfather Paradox. With this new development, the Umbrella Academy couldn’t just set up new identities or try to make new lives for themselves. The paradox also unleashed the Kugelblitz, a kind of energy black hole that consumes all life in the universe. Those kids just can’t stay away from an apocalypse.

All three seasons of The Umbrella Academy are streaming on Netflix.

(feature image: Netflix)