‘Umbrella Academy’ Series Finale: Ending Explained, Possible Spinoffs

[This story contains spoilers from the fourth and final season of The Umbrella Academy.]

On Thursday, The Umbrella Academy revealed its final timeline to audiences.

One in which the Hargreeve siblings finally, actually, save the day. For those who have been with the show the last five years — and the various crew and creative team members who have been with it for nearly twice as long — it’s a bittersweet ending for one of TV’s favorite dysfunctional (and lovable) families. 

As one of Netflix’s most popular genre series, Steve Blackman’s adaptation of Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá’s graphic novel managed to carve out a distinctive corner within the superhero space. That’s due, in part, to its colorful cast of “oddball” characters, as Blackman described them at this week’s premiere, including leads Elliot Page (Viktor), Justin Min (Ben), Tom Hopper (Luther), Emmy Raver-Lampman (Allison), Robert Sheehan (Klaus), David Castañeda (Diego), Aidan Gallagher (Number Five), Ritu Arya (Lila Pitts), and Colm Feore (Sir Reginald). 

Part of that success is also due to four seasons of grand world-building, all supported by the show’s sharp writers, directors and production teams who have elevated its comedy and action, sets, costumes, music, vfx, cinematography and more. That refreshing spin on the genre garnered the show its rabid following, an audience that Blackman hopes will feel satisfied by the series’ final six episodes and ultimately, the show’s legacy. 

Ahead of the final season’s premiere, The Hollywood Reporter spoke to Blackman about the meaning behind that ending, the final days on set and growing alongside his cast and crew for more than half a decade. In the chat below, he also addresses the toxic workplace allegations made by former writers, potential spinoffs, what he’s most proud of about The Umbrella Academy’s run, and where he thinks there were missed storytelling opportunities.

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Did you discuss with the comics creators, Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, how you planned to end the series and did they have any questions or conditions? 

They were so lovely, Gerard and Gabriel, from the very beginning. Every year I’ve talked to them, we’ve discussed things. Very early on, Gerard was very gracious and said, “Look, the TV show and the graphic novel are going to be different.” They’re going to continue with the graphic novel long after us. But every year I’ve run things by them, they’ve told me things that they’re going to do later on. So it’s always been wonderfully collaborative. They have such a generosity of spirit. And yes, I ran everything by them in the end, and they just thought it was a great ending for the TV show. They may go somewhere else, but they’ve been lovely from start to finish. I couldn’t get luckier with two great creative people.

This season only featured six episodes, a departure from the 10-episode arcs of the past. How did that impact how you told the story?

The decision was made at a certain point that Netflix wanted six episodes. That was fine with me. I could have been happy with eight, but it really worked out well. Some of the things we wanted to do, I think, got jettisoned along the way. I wanted to tell a little bit more story with Viktor and Hargreeves. I wanted to do a little bit more with [Luther] and what happened to Sloane. But at the end of the day, when you’re forced to do a certain amount, it forces you to say, what’s the most important? What are the things that really matter in the storytelling? So sometimes when you don’t get the luxury of 10, you really get to titrate it down to the things that are really important — not just to us as writers, producers, but to the fans. I hope we did justice to that for the fans.

Each season you’ve managed to bring in a familiar face as a recurring or guest character. This time it was David Cross, Megan a and Nick Offerman. How did those castings come together? 

It was an amazing bit of luck. I will say that I had read that Megan and Nick liked working together as husband and wife, and I thought, “I’ll take a chance.” But I didn’t think I had any hope of getting them. So I reached out, we did a Zoom together, and it turns out that they’re superfans of the show. They knew every episode, every character. They were so excited to meet the cast. I’m like, this just might work. They said, “We want to do this. We want to work together as husband and wife. We want to meet the cast.” One of the best days was when they showed up on set. Our cast ran over, they ran to the cast. They were all so excited to see each other. David came along, just because I wanted to work with David. He wasn’t familiar with the show, but has become a superfan of the show. Having three comic geniuses together, the crew and I laughed so much because they did so many things unscripted. They would just riff and sometimes it was just hard to keep the camera steady with all of us just laughing.

You do a lot of callbacks to previous seasons with the characters, items and powers. What were things you wanted to put in season four that felt maybe like a mirror to where this story started?

I’m not sure if I thought of it that way. I think what I wanted to do is moreso tie up a lot of the loose ends. I felt like we’ve had such great fans over the years and they’re so loyal, I wanted to make sure I answered some of the big questions. Some of them I wanted to leave unanswered, to subjectively let you decide on your own what happens and what this is. But the Jennifer [Victoria Sawal] incident was important to close that loop, and a few other things. So I was really looking at it that way: What things do I want to answer that the fans deserve to know? If I was a fan, what would I hate to leave unanswered? 

The soundtrack has been a defining element of this show from the beginning, with each season feeling like there’s at least one song that really defines it. For season four, what was the song you were most excited to have? 

I’ve been trying to get “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves” by Cher for years and she has said no to me many, many times. I’m just a big fan. I think she’s just phenomenal. Culturally, she’s everywhere in the zeitgeist for four decades now, and this time she said yes. I was like, “Are you sure we could have the song?” She’s like, “Yes, go for it.” So it was so exciting to get that song, and it worked really well in the moment with Jean and Gene [Offerman and Mullally].

Was there any song you had wished you had gotten but didn’t? 

There were quite a few. There were some songs — I don’t want to give specifics — from the seventies. We thought for sure these artists would say yes. They said, “No, we don’t allow use of the songs.” There were a few things by other famous people and they said no, too. I didn’t realize until I got much more into it that it is a thing. A lot of people are very specific about where they want their songs used or not used. I was very respectful of that. But even Adele, getting her to do “Hello” in season three, the Swedish version, was a hard get. It was only when I explained to her that this young woman from Sweden who’s trying to get a career who sang it that she changed her mind and said we can use it. They don’t say no automatically, so you have to work for it sometimes. We got lucky with a few songs this year.

Each season you’ve grappled with time travel, and this time around, you add the underground train system to the bit. Was there a subway system that inspired it? 

Yes, the Tokyo subway system was very confusing to me when I looked at it, and I thought, “let’s take that to the extreme.” Ultimately, Five [Aidan Gallagher] finds the cipher in episode five, which explains how that works, but without the cipher, it’s just impossible — although Lila [Ritu Arya] thinks she can figure it out. But it’s taken to the absurd of what a subway system could be like. If you have unlimited timelines, I suppose that’s what the subway system looks like, right?

At the start of top of the season, after the world has been reset again, audiences see the Hargreeves as regular people without powers. Aspects of their day jobs and personal lives are all sort of reminiscent of their past powers or things they’ve done in other timelines. How did you decide who they would be and what they would do? 

It was a lot of fun. I sat down with the writers and we joked about where would they be. We knew Luther [Tom Hopper] would not be able to have a stable job, because he’s a bit of a manchild. We always thought that Viktor [Elliot Page] would be the one who would probably be most OK with living an “ordinary life,” despite unresolved issues with dad. Then with Diego [David Castañeda] and Lila, it made sense that they were going to try being a domesticated thing. How would that work for them? Children is a complication, so it just fell into place quite easily and we all agreed on those things as writers, and they all played out really well. I have no regrets about what each of them ended up doing.

When Ben has the family drink Marigold, some of those powers come back a little differently. It feels like this very subtle illustration of their personal evolutions through reimagined powers. How did you approach conceiving their returned abilities? 

I gave us a lot of leeway on that. We wanted just for the fans to show some really interesting extensions of power so it wouldn’t feel too derivative. The logic was they never took Marigold that fast. That shot of Marigold was like an overdose of Marigold, so things were not going to happen the way they expected. I wanted to have fun with the storytelling, so I think it evolved from the storytelling what their powers would be.

You spent three seasons with the Hargreeves successfully escaping the world’s end. This time they don’t. They stay, fight and die together. Can you talk about when you knew that was going to be the ending and why you wanted the series to finish on that mutual sacrifice?

I knew very early on, almost in season one, how I wanted to end the show — and I didn’t see it as killing them. I thought there was an interesting idea of ceasing to exist, to never have been known. What is a superhero if no one knows you exist? That was the philosophical question. Can you be a superhero if no one ever knew you were a superhero? What does it mean to them? And I also thought it was an incredible sacrifice. I hate to say it, but maybe it’s worse than being dead. If you never existed, what does that mean? Does anything in your life have any meaning? It’s not that you lived and died — you never lived. I thought it was a very powerful concept to play with non-existence as opposed to just dying. So in my mind, they never existed. They didn’t die. They just ceased to exist. They never were. And, what does that mean?

You allow them to save their families. Why did you want those characters to live?  

It didn’t seem right for them to bring their families down that road with them. I felt the families had to survive, because they were good parents and they all loved their kids; those aunts and uncles and moms and dads and everything else. I didn’t want them to die. Then we had this device of the subway, which allowed them within the logic of the show to exist. Now, I don’t give away whether or not in that very final scene they remember the families that they were. I just know that they’re alive, and the fans can decide whether or not they remembered everything from the past. Are they the only people remembering these people ever existing or not? 

That penultimate sequence is the clearest example of them as a fractured family finally coming together. What did you want audiences to take away from them choosing each other despite everything else?

I think if you juxtapose from season one where they’re so immature with each other, I don’t think they quite love each other in season one when they regroup after the trauma of their father’s death. I think they truly love each other at this point. They really are a family. They’re family and now love each other, and want to be together in this final moment. They don’t want to be going off [alone]. This is how they want to be. The love is real, the camaraderie, the loyalty is real. I think that’s the journey for them. By the end, they truly are a family.

Speaking of, Reginald (Colm Feore) has a very complicated relationship with his children across timelines. Some of that is resolved this season. By the end, how much did you want people to see Reginald as a villain versus someone simply growing alongside his children?

Not to complicate it, but this is the Hargreeves of the Sparrow Academy timeline, so it’s not the Hargreeves that raised them. Similar, but not the dad who made the mistakes, though he probably would have. I don’t see him as a villain in the end. I see him as making choices that he did — some hubris, but some out of love. He wanted to be back with his wife again and the consequences of that he wasn’t thinking through. I like that it took his wife Abigail to say, “What you’re doing is wrong and someone had to stop you, and I was the one who did it.” But I never saw Hargreeves necessarily as the villain, per se. I think he’s a deeply dysfunctional person who’s trying to make it through the day like everyone else.

While the family ends in an actual place of love, their romantic relationships — this season’s love triangle with Five, Lila and Diego, Viktor’s dating, Ben and Jennifer — aren’t as clean. That also applies to relationships in seasons past: Viktor and Sissy, Allison and Ray, Allison and Luther, Luther and Sloane, Klaus and David, Reginald and his wife. Did you mean for all the romantic relationships to end in a sort of tragedy or unresolved?

I think it changed throughout the seasons depending on what the storylines were doing. I wanted it to always feel organic, as much as it could be. [With Allison, played by Emmy Raver-Lampman, and Luther], yes, they’re not biological siblings, but they’re siblings. So there’s only so far we could go with certain things. But I wanted to do more with it. I would’ve liked to have seen some more long-term ongoing relationships, but by virtue of jumping through time and all the complications, we didn’t get to see it. One of the relationships we never got to see play out was Luther and Sloane [Genesis Rodriguez]. That would’ve been a lovely one. He finally found love and we rip it away from him. I love Viktor’s relationships. I thought season two was a lovely relationship, but again, that person didn’t exist anymore in the future. 

That was one of the harder truths about being a time traveling superhero. You don’t get everything you want. But I love what [Viktor and Sissy, played by Marin Ireland] found with each other, and we talked about whether Sissy could come into the timeline and be in the future. It just didn’t work for the actor’s schedule. I think what we did with Five and Lila was really interesting. They are very similar — I think the most similar siblings. I think they made the most sense to be together. But again, seven years lost in time together, they grew close, and what would that have meant? If they didn’t end the way they ended, would she have gone back to Diego, stayed with Five? The fans can figure that out. 

So we did romances, but in the sort of way the show would do them. We weren’t that show that would take them too far. We always wanted to see how people’s relationships would evolve with each other. 

The final sequence is a timeline where the Hargreeves don’t exist but all these characters from past seasons do, and they appear to have different lives. How did you decide who was going to appear in that — and did you try to get Mary J. Blige?

I did. (Laughs) I tried to get everybody and the only people I couldn’t get were Mary J., because I think she was in concert somewhere, and I couldn’t get John Magaro who played our bad guy from season one. But everyone else is there. Some of them are obvious if you look carefully, some of them are more hidden than the others. There’s some people hidden in the bushes. But we got everyone we wanted to get. Even Kate Walsh, who I think was shooting in Australia and flew in for that. It was nice. It was such a beautiful day. It was our first sunny day in a while. We were all just hugging it out. It was such fun to see all of them together in one place from all the seasons. 

You’ve previously mentioned having interest in doing spinoffs. Are you still interested and, what are some of the stories you’re considering? 

It is really up to Netflix at the end of the day — and we’ve talked about it and it’s a lot of variables in play — but I think there’s a great story in young Hazel [Cameron Britton] and Cha-Cha [Blige] down the road. There’s obviously the Commission. I think there’s wonderful stories also with some other secondary characters. Then what’s wonderful about our world is we could crossover with our main characters anytime we want to because in a wonderful time-traveling world, you can end up with anyone anytime you want. There are ideas, there’s things I’ve talked about, and if Netflix decides down the road, I’d love to do it. But ultimately Netflix will make that decision. I hope this isn’t the end of Umbrella Academy. I hope there’s another iteration somewhere down the road.

The last table reads and days on set are often described as emotional. What were those like on season four? 

We didn’t do a last table read. We didn’t have time. The first two episodes, I believe, we did table reads, which was great. We didn’t have time to do any other ones, but the last day of filming was very emotional, because the last scene you saw when they’re all together in the very end, that was the last scene we shot, and then we blew up The Academy. We literally blew it up. The actors were exhausted, they were ready to go off on a holiday, but then I reminded them, “This is the last time you guys will ever be together as a family. This is our last, both on the show and together.” Then I think it hit them all like bricks in the head, and I think the emotion you’re seeing on screen is a lot about how they felt in that moment. It was a long day of 13 hours staying in that circle. But they were so kind to each other, giving with each scene — even when they weren’t on camera, even when it wasn’t their closeup — full emotion. They gave to each other full-heartedly. Then at the end of the night, I think as everyone was going to the cars, they told me afterwards, it hit them that this is it and there was a lot of sadness. They’ve gotten to see the show and I think it’s a very emotional ending for all of them as well.

Most of these actors were in different places in their lives, personally and professionally, when they started on this show. One literally grew up on your set, one transitioned, some became parents, and everyone had creative and career growth. Can you talk about that initial decision to cast them and what it has been like to grow with them over the last four years? 

I feel very fortunate for all of them. Elliot Page’s journey has been a remarkable journey to witness — to be a very small part of that, to see his life and how happy he is and his growth. But also, like you said, Aidan grew up in the show. He was a little boy when I met him. He auditioned at 12, he’s 20 now, playing in a rock band. Tom Hopper had children. Emmy had a child. Everyone has changed. We spent a lot of years together. Like Tom always said, “I spent my thirties on this show,” and they got to see changes in my life. So I feel like it was a wonderful thing that we got to spend this much time together and I feel very lucky that we got to spend four seasons, which is a lot of time for a lot of shows these days. Not a lot of shows get to a fourth season, and we did. So it ended exactly where I think it had to end in terms of how long we were together. I think if we pushed a fifth season, it might’ve been too long for all of us. It was just the right time.

When you initially cast this group of talent, you diverged from the comics in terms of many of their identities, from race to sexuality to gender. It became a blueprint of sorts for other shows about inclusive family casting in genre. Beyond casting for who was best for the role, can you talk about how you feel that diversity helped make this adaptation its own?

I think I always wanted to make it more diverse than the graphic novel, and to be honest, I think Gerard, who’s told me this, wishes in retrospect that he had written it a bit more diverse. At the time he wrote it, it was quite a long time ago, and I think he was the first to say to me, “Please cast this more diverse. Don’t make it like I did.” So from the get-go, we were going to do a much more diverse cast, and it just seemed right from the beginning. I wanted these actors. I wasn’t looking for anything for one role, I just wanted to get the best actors, and we got great people. From the very beginning, they fit the roles. I don’t think with anyone I cast I had any moment of regret saying, “Oh, I made the wrong choice there.” The very first person I wanted to cast was obviously Elliot Page, and [he and] Tom Hopper were the two people I already pictured in my head. Then there was Robert. As we went along, I basically got everyone I wanted and I got very lucky with that. We continued with that, with all the guest stars and everyone else we could along the way.

Onscreen representation has been a central tenet of the show’s storytelling, but last month allegations were published about production conduct, including that you made inappropriate remarks or used derogatory language about specific groups, something that was ultimately addressed with you through HR. Looking back, what do you want people to know about those statements? Do you have any regrets about making them? 

The statements weren’t accurate. They simply weren’t accurate. They weren’t correct. And I have to be honest with you, I’m very, very proud of my 21 years in this business, my reputation, what I’ve done, and especially through Umbrella Academy. So the truth is, I don’t accept those statements because I didn’t say them, and it’s just disappointing. But I’m very proud of the journey for Umbrella Academy. I stand by all these people, I’ve worked very hard with these people, and I have great respect for all of them.

You’ve praised the work of various members of the show’s team online and the press, but the allegations from writers, including a co-showrunner, expressed a disconnect in how their treatment, work and voice on the show had been respected and properly credited. What is your response to people who feel like they weren’t treated equitably in your writers room?

Everyone has their own perception, but my perception is I did treat everybody equally. I went out of my way to make sure everyone felt heard and respected. A writers room is a tough place and you’re not always going to get your version of the thing through or whatever. Some days you get what you want in the writers room and sometimes you don’t. And it’s hard, writers rooms are tricky places, but I do feel that I respected all the writers and I’m proud of what I did on that show and how I treated everybody.

It’s been a nearly decade-long journey with this show. What are you most proud of with The Umbrella Academy and what do you hope people walk away with now that it’s done? 

I think there’s a few things. We love our fans and the fact that the fans have stayed with us for so many years. Those young adults are now new adults, if you think about how much time has [passed], and they’re still watching the show. Then younger people are watching the show. I’m also very proud of the crew, that we had the same people who worked with us year after year because it was so collaborative. I care about those people as my family and I think they feel the same about me. So the fact that not only was the cast a family, but the crew was very much a family for many years, and I’m proud that we all got to stay together for so long, which is rare in this industry. 

And I’m proud of the stories we told. We did some challenging stories. Some of them were harder to do, some of them were easier to do. But I think at the end of the day, I will look back and say the team, myself, the writers, producers, everyone, we did a good job on the show. We stayed as true as we could to Gerard and Gabriel’s work, but we made a show that was different, our own way, a little orbit away from all the other superhero shows, and hopefully it will stand the test of time.

Umbrella Academy is now streaming all episodes on Netflix.