Season four of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy premiered on August 8 to mixed, leaning negative reviews. With only six episodes, this fourth season managed a sharp decline in both quality and quantity.
The series follows the seven super-powered siblings adopted and raised by Reginald Hargreeves to fight crime. Their vigilante group—the Umbrella Academy—was separated by adulthood before the beginning of season one, but the threat of armageddon brings them back together. Throughout the show, the siblings travel through time and across parallel universes, constantly faced with a looming apocalypse.
The first three seasons each contained ten episodes, but the shorter final season adheres to a pattern that streaming services seem to insist on. According to Netflix, brevity truly is the soul of wit, but can brevity tell a good story? Let’s discuss.
When Both the Characters and Writers Have Abandonment Issues
At the beginning of season four, the siblings are once again separated but are now powerless. Each character struggles to adjust after years of trauma and reunite uneasily in the first episode.
This tumultuous beginning reintroduces a familiar theme: familial love and dysfunction. Part of the success of The Umbrella Academy as a show is its raw and honest exploration of an abused family. Since childhood, they all had to behave as weapons rather than real people. This includes Lila, who’d been raised by the Handler to defeat the Umbrella Academy. They’ve all struggled to define their personhood in relation to their powers—especially Viktor, who grew up believing he had no powers at all.
However, the season offers little opportunity for the characters or the audience to question what the loss of powers would actually mean for them. The only person who experiences the impact of this question is Klaus. When he had the ability to speak to the dead and survive death itself, the distress of it all drove him to alcoholism. Today, he is sober and more cautious than ever.
When Ben secretly gives them all back their powers so he can regain his monstrous tentacles, there is some brief conflict involving Klaus, who had refused to take the power-granting marigold, and Viktor, who wants to remain separate from the family drama. But with only six episodes, the focus immediately shifts to the overarching conflict of the season, meaning the main characters experience little emotional changes.
Allison, who’d used her powers of mind control last season for rather terrible things, has no journey after the dosage. In fact, her powers have completely changed to some strange telekinesis that she only uses once or twice. Lila, for whatever reason, has laser eyes (that she uses only once) on top of her ability to mimic other powers. Viktor, whose powers almost caused an apocalypse, seems to now have full control over them. Never mind that it’s been six years, and he’s the most volatile.
The ‘Jennifer Incident’
The main plotline follows the mysterious ‘Jennifer incident’ which the previous seasons vaguely alluded to. This season reveals that the incident is connected to Ben’s untimely death in the original timeline. While our main characters get their powers from marigold, Jennifer was a girl formed of marigold’s opposite substance: durango. On a mission, Ben had found and saved Jennifer, but their physical contact would have destroyed the universe. Reginald killed the two children and wiped the Academy’s memories.
Here’s the kicker: at six years old, fishermen discovered young Jennifer inside the body of a squid. And this never gets explained. The narrative purpose of this is to justify the immediate connection and subsequent romance between squid-girl Jennifer and tentacle-boy Ben. But this relationship is underdeveloped, so the squid plot point just takes up space in an already cramped season.
Additionally, their relationship makes the finale quite lackluster. Due to their, er, prolonged physical contact, this timeline’s Ben and Jennifer bring about “the cleanse.” Yet another apocalypse the Umbrella Academy has to stop. This time, they choose to let it consume them, realizing that they cause every armageddon. The series ends with a scene of a peaceful universe, the siblings reincarnated into actual marigold flowers.
While I don’t mind this ending in theory, the effectiveness of it hinges on the alleged “inevitability” of Jennifer and Ben meeting and joining their inner essences. But with the bland romance, the rushed reveal of the very existence of durango, and the dumb squid, the only thing that felt inevitable was the writers wanting to leave the set as quickly as possible.
Breaking the Themes for Drama
Let’s discuss the elephant in the room. Episode five.
Five’s teleportation can now only take him to a mysterious subway station. The train there travels between parallel universes at the same point in time. Lila convinces him to use it to stop the impending apocalypse, but they instead get lost traveling between universes for seven years.
They ultimately “fall in love,” with Five wishing to stay with her rather than return to his own siblings. Keep in mind that Lila is married to Diego with three children, Five once spent 45 years in an apocalyptic wasteland with a mannequin for a wife, and the two of them have always had a history of platonic bickering.
Also keep in mind that Aidan Gallagher, who portrays Five, had freshly turned 18, while Ritu Arya has been a grown woman throughout the course of the show.
When they eventually return home, no time has passed for the other characters. Diego discovers the truth, creating an unnecessary rift between the brothers that does not properly resolve itself by the end. What this means beyond the uncomfortable adultery and age gap is that the writers invented this interesting set piece with ample promise for the overall lore solely to manufacture conflict in the second-to-last episode of the entire show.
It hurts even more considering that Diego had suspected Lila of cheating before this happened, and she’d laughed hysterically at the prospect.
So what was the point of it all? Why have your siblings reunite and rediscover the importance of family despite their shared trauma when you are about to drop in a love triangle? Why waste space and budgeting when you know your season is only six episodes? When there were already plot points and characters abandoned for the sake of time?
Five and Lila: Worse Than Incest?
The Umbrella Academy has by no means been perfect in terms of its romance sub-plots. The first season delved uncomfortably into the pseudo-incestuous relationship between Allison and Luther. However, viewers have found this relationship somewhat palatable (relatively), given that Reginald was hardly a father figure and the siblings were largely isolated from society. Additionally, Allison and Luther ended their romance soon enough.
What makes Five-and-Lila much more frustrating is that if it hadn’t happened at all, whether or not the subway station ended up relevant, the season would have opened up for more significant plot development rather than feeling rushed and contrived.
Falling in love is also completely out of character for them both. Five had fallen in love with Delores the mannequin in a half-comedic, half-sincere element of his character. No mention of her this season, of course. Five also prioritized his siblings above all else in previous seasons, though he hardly expressed this affection. He would absolutely never betray or abandon them.
Lila, on her part, has shown extreme devotion to Diego and the strength of the siblings’ bonds. After discovering the affair and a bracelet that Five gave Lila during the seven years, Diego remarks that Lila once hated a bracelet he tried to gift her. This directly contradicts a previous season where Lila consistently wore a bracelet Diego made until she had to remove it. Though it’s a small detail, it proves how ultimately artificial the adultery is and feels.
Did the Season Do Anything Right?
Kind of. As always, the chosen soundtrack matches the atmosphere of the show very well. Despite the terrible scene, the song chosen for the subway adventure—”Ahead by a Century” by The Tragically Hip—fits. Unfortunately, once again the soundtrack loses points for the length of the season. Playing “Baby Shark” five times might be funny if it didn’t take up so much proportionate space in the narrative.
Additionally, this season was missing a dance sequence with the siblings. This might sound silly, but the consistent dance numbers played a large part in the absurdity of the show. They also manifested the chemistry between the siblings, even in the hallucinated number in season 3. There was somewhat of a number between the seasons’ antagonists, Gene and Jean, but viewers found it difficult to get attached to the pair in comparison to a prior villain duo, Cha Cha and Hazel.
The action was also lacking. I already mentioned the strange changes to the characters’ powers. Not one single “I heard a rumor…” from Allison. Nor a teleportation-enhanced bloody battle from Five.
Without good music, wild dance moves, and gripping action, what happens to the season? It becomes boring. The opposite of The Umbrella Academy.
The Problem With Today’s Streaming
This loss of length damages the potential for multiple storylines and makes this season feel less like what The Umbrella Academy has tried to be. This is a problem we’ve found in other modern television shows like Bridgerton, where viewers had to wait two whole years for a frankly inadequate eight-episode season.
Streaming services chose shorter seasons—typically with longer episodes—for purposes of convenience and safety. If the season is received poorly, neither the studio nor the platform would lose as much money than if they’d invested in a 22-episode season. And with these high-production shows, they simply don’t have the money to sustain 22 episodes.
This isn’t always a detriment. Shows like Stranger Things benefit from shorter seasons to preserve the intrigue and chapter-like structure of each individual season. The Last of Us took full advantage of its live-action medium to tell its story with care rather than waste time with the game’s prolonged action sequences.
But this trend can very easily become problematic when writers no longer use the runtime properly. The Umbrella Academy season 4 feels less like the unnecessary filler got cut during the process and more like the unnecessary filler became the process. There’s no longer an advantage when the writers are willing to waste time, ruin their characters, and fabricate drama.
And here’s the thing: filler is not a bad thing. While characters and relationships can build during major plot developments, many narratives can benefit from slowing down and allowing scenes to play out for the sole purpose of paying attention to characters.
The Umbrella Academy and Lost Potential
We could have learned more about Lila and Diego’s struggles with domesticity and watched them rebuild their love. We could have seen Allison grapple with her lack of control in her career and linked that with her powers of literal mind control.
Instead, nothing. A fantastic show deteriorated. Unique character concepts, like an old man in a teenager’s body, wasted. Some have been able to enjoy this season (apart from Five and Lila), which I am glad for—but even they can’t deny that the earlier seasons are much, much better.
Given that this is the finale, there is no hope for future rectification. If anything, I’ve come to appreciate the quality of the first two seasons much more now. I hope others can as well.
The Umbrella Academy, we’ll remember you fondly.
