This is the moment I suspected ‘The Umbrella Academy’ was going off the rails
So we’re all agreed that the final season of The Umbrella Academy was not good, right? For a start, there was the universally unpopular Five-Lila-Diego love triangle, and then there was that ending. There could hardly have been a worse one.
This article contains major spoilers for season four of The Umbrella Academy.
Who thought (look away now if you don’t want to see the biggest spoiler of all) that the main characters erasing themselves from existence would trigger anything in the audience other than anger?
I actually liked the first couple of episodes of the season, but I can pinpoint the exact moment when I first felt a stab of concern. It was at the beginning of the second episode, “Jean and Gene.” All the Hargreeves siblings suddenly have their powers back thanks to Ben spiking their sake with marigold, and they’re shocked to discover what’s happened. Luther’s realization about his powers is played for laughs, since he’s become a space-themed stripper.
Luther gets his super-strength back during a dance routine, and then he rips his clothes off to reveal an ape body, much to the shock of the strip club patrons. But here’s the thing … Luther shouldn’t have that ape body, because it has nothing to do with his actual powers!
It’s all explained in the season one episode “Man on the Moon.” A flashback shows that Luther got seriously injured while on a mission for his terrible father Reginald Hargreeves, so Reginald injected him with a serum that saved his life, but also turned him into a half-ape. So after Luther lost his ape body when the universe was reset at the end of season three, it should have taken more than the marigold to bring it back. But the writers just … kinda forgot, I guess?
Why did Luther’s ape body return?
Luther actor Tom Hopper addressed this a little during an interview with Digital Spy, basically saying that everyone involved wanted to return to the look that they believed was better “from a visual standpoint.”
Hopper seems to be a bit confused about it as well, and I don’t blame him. The thing is, taken on its own, the reappearing ape body isn’t a dealbreaker. You can hand-wave it away. But taken with the rest of the season, it just seems to be emblematic of how shoddy the writing was. Luther especially seemed to lose out in season four, because there was no closure whatsoever in his romantic plot with Sloane.
But really, none of the Umbrella Academy emerge from the season unscathed—there was seemingly no time for character development in between the Five/Lila plot and the constant repetition of “Baby Shark.” And now these characters we came to love are all erased from existence. What even was the point, then?
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