Note: This story contains spoilers from The Umbrella Academy, Season 4.
The Umbrella Academy ended this week with the fourth season finale, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few final storylines that deserve to be explained.
The shortened final season still packed a lot into just six episodes, and the finale in particular was packed to the brim. The story was about the Hargreeves siblings taking on the Keepers once and for all to stop The Cleanse from destroying the universe. The Keepers hoped that The Cleanse would end the many broken timelines once and for all and ensure that the main timeline was restored.
In the finale, Five (Aidan Gallagher) learns – in a diner full of his variants – that the Marigold that came to Earth with Reginald (Colm Feore) and gave the Hargreeves siblings their powers branched the main timeline into the multiverse. Five learns from his variants that the Marigold-infused children have destroyed worlds across the entire multiverse, whether they wanted to or not.
The purification – triggered by the contact between the Marigold-infused Ben (Justin H. Min) and the Durango-infused Jennifer (Victoria Sawal) – would wipe out all the Marigolds and the Hargreeves clan. It wouldn’t be death, it would be as if it had never existed.
While the Keepers did all the dirty work, it turns out Reginald’s no-longer-dead wife Abigail (Liisa Repo-Martell) was behind it all. The two share a final moment on a park bench, where Abigail tries to explain why she deleted the marigold they brought from their planet behind her husband’s back—remember, Reggie is an alien—and repaired the timelines.
“I think she knows Reginald so well that I don’t think explaining it to him would have worked,” showrunner Steve Blackman told TheWrap. “She didn’t ask to be brought back from the dead, she felt like her penance for her bad deed of creating the Marigold Durango and destroying her own world was basically ‘I lose my life.'”
He continued, “So when she was brought back and saw how much Hargreeves loved her, that wasn’t the right reason to bring her back and start the whole thing again. She knew that trying to walk him through it and explain it to him would never have gotten him there. So she said, I just have to do this myself.”
As the Purge rages on, Lila (Ritu Arya) and Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) take their children to the multiversal subway and make sure they make it to the main timeline before rejoining Viktor (Elliot Page), Luther (Tom Hopper), Klaus (Robert Sheehan), Diego (David Castañeda) and Five at the old Umbrella Academy mansion and being ravaged by the Purge and wiped out. Blackman said he was confident their ending was the right one.
“Everyone has to interpret whether they were really killed,” Blackman said. “Ceasing to exist and being killed — I know it’s nuanced, but in my eyes, they cease to exist. I knew I wanted to do that ending probably in the first year, the first season. I knew I wanted to do something special with the ending.”
“I love our fans and we have the most supportive fans, so I hope they like it,” he added. “I know not everyone is going to like it, but I think it’s the right ending for the show. They make a certain sacrifice that I think is the right sacrifice, and it really makes them superheroes.”
Blackman also told TheWrap that the ending answers — or at least attempts to answer — the question that has been on his mind since the series debuted on Netflix in 2019.
“I wanted to ask the philosophical questions, and they’re not that deep: ‘Can a superhero be a superhero if nobody knows he exists?'” he said. “If nobody knows he ever existed and he no longer exists, what does it mean to be a superhero? They make a sacrifice, knowing that nobody will ever know who they were, that they never did anything except that this time they did everything they could to save the world. I wanted to play with that idea. Superheroes are superheroes because we know they exist. If you can’t have those elements of being a superhero, are you a superhero?”
The family’s fate was far from the only loose thread. In the lead-up to The Cleanse, Five and Lila spent years hopping around the multiverse and fell in love despite losing just one day at home. Diego finds out and spends most of the episode arguing with Five and apologizing for being Lila’s absentee husband. Those hatchets are never quite buried when the Hargreeves are wiped out, but Blackman has thoughts on how it would have turned out.
“I think Diego has realized that he failed Lila in the marriage and in this relationship,” he explained. “I think Five is absolutely in love with her and they are much more alike than anyone would admit. It makes sense for them to be together.”
Blackman further noted, “If things had continued like that, I don’t know who she would have been with. If I had to choose, she probably would have stayed with Five. She loved both men for different reasons, but I didn’t believe she and Diego would get back together. Things got worse.”
After the Hargreeves are erased from existence, we cut to a park in the main timeline and see that Lila and Allison’s families have made it there safely. We also see a number of familiar faces from the show’s past living healthy, normal lives. Blackman said putting this scene together required a lot of phone calls and begging.
“They were all great, but Kate Walsh was in Australia and some of the Swedes were elsewhere,” he recalled. “They all had a great time on the show, so I didn’t have to persuade anyone. I couldn’t get Mary J. Blige to come back with her tour. She would have if we could have got it done in time, but we just couldn’t do it because of scheduling. In the end, I got everyone I wanted.”
The park is a sufficient ending, but the finale had one last surprise in the form of a scene during the credits. We see a row of marigolds blooming under a tree in the park – one flower for each of the Hargreeves. Blackman was reticent to give a definitive explanation, preferring to leave it open to interpretation.
“I’ll leave it up to you and the fans to interpret that scene. I don’t want to say anything about it. Sometimes it’s nice to leave the show up for a little interpretation and hope. Every fan can decide what that means,” he said.
All four seasons of The Umbrella Academy are now available to stream on Netflix.