‘The Umbrella Academy’ Series-Finale Recap, S 4, Ep. 6

From the very beginning, the heroes of The Umbrella Academy have spent every season finale fending off the apocalypse. What “The End of the Beginning” presupposes is … what if they didn’t?

I’ve covered The Umbrella Academy from the beginning and complained, at times, that the show’s universally high stakes have had a deadening effect on its ability to generate actual drama. If the world is always ending, how worried can you really be when someone tells you it’s ending again?

Cleverly, “The End of the Beginning” leans right into those complaints. The world, we’re told midway through the episode, has been on the brink of apocalypse exactly 145,412 times. The existence of the Umbrella Academy is both the cause of and solution to that problem; if Netflix renewed the series for 145,412 seasons, we’d see some version of this cycle play out exactly 145,412 times. But we live in the timeline in which The Umbrella Academy is ending after a mere four seasons. Which raises the question: How, at last, does this cycle end?

This time, the engine of the apocalypse is Ben and Jennifer, whose combustible blend of marigold and durango is turning them into a monster that’s somewhere between a so-so Godzilla kaiju and the final boss from one of the lesser Resident Evil games. Viktor, who knows better than most of his siblings what it’s like to be the Umbrella everyone fears, is committed to his belief that Ben can be redeemed. Reginald is skeptical but willing to give Viktor’s strategy a chance before he sends the snipers in.

To this powder keg, The Umbrella Academy has added an additional spark: Abigail, Reginald’s long-lost wife, who has secretly engineered much of the action in season four and is now wearing Gene’s skin. The Keepers have been cheering for the Cleanse all along, but it’s now clear that the Cleanse isn’t an event: It’s a monster that will stomp through a city, growing and devouring and devouring and growing until the entire timeline has been obliterated. Abigail is here to make sure that happens.

And so, like so many idiots before them, the Keepers enthusiastically cheer for the same forces that will ensure their own miserable end. Abigail, who is absolutely terrible at pretending to be Gene — to be fair, she’s both a dead woman and an alien — lets the mask slip almost instantly, killing Jean and revealing herself to Reginald. As the woman he loves tells him that the end of the world is a good thing, something seems to shift in Reginald; having fought so hard to bring Abigail back, he acknowledges that accepting oblivion for herself and everything else was probably the right move all along.

That leaves us with the Umbrellas, who are hardly a unanimous vote. Ben is losing himself to the Cleanse but pops through just often enough to stop Allison from delivering a killing blow. Diego, having learned of Five and Lila’s love affair, is more interested in fighting Five. Viktor is still looking for the needle-in-a-haystack solution that will somehow save everyone.

I’ll be honest: So was I. It wouldn’t be the first time The Umbrella Academy has pulled a rabbit out of a hat, distracting the viewer with apocalyptic stakes before knocking all the pieces off the board and resetting the game with a totally different set of rules.

The finale’s version of that dynamic comes when Five, reeling after losing Lila to Diego, heads back into the subway and wanders into a deli populated with alternate versions of himself. All this chaos, another Five tells him, was caused by the mere existence of the Umbrella Academy. And it won’t stop unless all of them are gone.

And so begins the melancholy conclusion of this series, as each of the Umbrellas accepts that the fate of the world rests on them not being around anymore. It’s not just their deaths that will save the world, Five reminds everyone; it’s their nonexistence, in the past, present, or future, that ensures the world can exist at all.

There’s a meta-referential quality to the storytelling here: What The Umbrella Academy is pitching, basically, is a world without The Umbrella Academy. That might be a tough pill to swallow for this show’s most devoted fans, but they do get a parting gift in the lengthy, emotional sequence in which the Umbrellas clasp hands and let the Cleanse absorb them.

In retrospect, Viktor spoke the line that reveals the heart of the series a few episodes ago: “We drive each other crazy, we bicker constantly, but when things go to hell — which they inevitably do — they’re there for me.” We’ve seen a lot of bad blood pass between these siblings over the course of The Umbrella Academy, but underneath all that pain is a lot of affection — even if the final bit of dialogue before the Cleanse absorbs everyone is “fuck you” not “I love you.” Fair enough: For this family, the line between the two sentiments has always been very thin.

This final sequence is set, appropriately enough, to Tommy James and the Shondells’ “I Think We’re Alone Now” — the original version of the Tiffany song and viral dance sequence that helped propel season one of The Umbrella Academy into megapopularity in the first place. After a brief montage reminding us of all the timelines we’ve already seen, we cut to a park full of familiar faces from the show’s previous seasons — the Swedes, Grace, the Handler, and more — all apparently free to enjoy a nice, sunny day without the Umbrellas there to cast any shade on it. “On the twelfth hour of the eighth day of August 2024, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary occurred,” says Reginald in the voice-over monologue that concludes the series. “You might say it was just a normal day.”

But that’s not quite true. After the credits roll, we get a brief shot of a gardening miracle: a patch of marigolds — one for each Umbrella — suddenly sprouting out of the ground under a tree. Those flowers feel like a fitting closing image for this series about a group of mismatched siblings raised under unforgivingly difficult conditions: fragile, bright, and, above all, growing together.

• I found this ending broadly satisfying, but circumstantial evidence suggests The Umbrella Academy had a lot of false starts before landing here. In addition to the never-addressed season-three cliffhanger featuring Ben on a train in Seoul, pre-release material from Netflix indicated that Luther’s season-four arc would be built around finding Sloane. In the season we got, Sloane is barely even mentioned.

• Another annoying lingering question left dangling by the show’s end: Who were the other superpowered children? We were told, in the series premiere, that 43 women suddenly gave birth at the same time on October 1, 1989; in practice, we didn’t even meet half of the kids who were born on that day.

• A partial list of the alternate Fives encountered by Five at Max’s Delicatessen: Booth Five, Drunk Five, Newspaper Five, Waiter Five, Brisket Five.

• The subtitles describe Muse’s “Map of the Problematique” as “entrancing prog-rock” — which, yeah, that’s about right.

• A nice, subtle musical callback: The song when Five returns to the subway is “Dead to the World” by Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds — the same group that memorably scored an earlier Five scene with “In the Heat of the Moment” back in season one.

• One last round of “Baby Shark,” which somehow remains funny.

• The image quality in my screener wasn’t good enough for a clear look, but in case your TV is higher definition than mine: Did anyone spot any Easter eggs in the gallery of highlights from the 145,412 previous apocalypses at Max’s Delicatessen? Sound off in the comments below.