This review will have major spoilers for the final season of The Umbrella Academy because I desperately need you to affirm I wasn’t the only one who didn’t love it.
This is the way The Umbrella Academy ends, not with a bang, but a whimper. That is to say, I found the fourth and final season of this show a bit of a disappointment. It felt disjointed and rushed, and I thought the ending was, at best, confusing, at worst, anticlimactic. And I felt like Viktor was sidelined in a way he didn’t have to be.
I’m not going to lie, while I enjoyed season one, and I liked season two even better, when it got to season three, I hardly ever fully understood what the hell was happening on The Umbrella Academy. But that didn’t stop me from enjoying watching an eclectic group of adoptive siblings use their powers to…well, not save the world, so much as try not to destroy it. The more timey wimey things got, the less I followed; but such is always the case with multiple timelines and alternate realities. (I also felt lost for most of Loki.) And yet, the siblings’ relationships is what kept me coming back, time and time (and time) again. Except for the two that were weirdly hooking up for a while, I found the “antagonistic but also ride-or-die” sibling vibes very relatable. My brother can be my best friend or my worst enemy, depending on the day. I also enjoyed watching them evolve, unpack their lives, and realize the abuse they endured that they sometimes took out on each other. Unfortunately, the end of this season seemed to undo some of that work.
But it wasn’t all bad. I did like the fact that all of the siblings actually spent more time together this season. I enjoyed watching Klaus use his medium powers a little more, much to his chagrin. And, in general, Klaus’s tendency to crack jokes when things are metaphorically or literally blowing up in their faces always has delighted me. I enjoyed the brief moment a wild Elise Bauman appeared. I enjoyed seeing trans actor Zack Binder in a small role as Derek at the CIA. I did also like one of Viktor’s scenes, too, but I’ll talk more on that in a minute.
And also, what maybe was my favorite part of this season, was the introduction of Drs. Jean and Gene Thibedeau. You just really never know where the married comedy duo of Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman are going to show up — and they’ve been showing up together for quite some time now — and it delights me every single time. They play a couple who is convinced they are in the wrong timeline and have gathered a group of zealots determined to get back to their correct timeline. And while they do act like wild conspiracy theorists with too many guns at their disposal, in the Thibedeau’s case, they actually are correct.
Before we get to Viktor, I want to discuss some specific things I didn’t like, or didn’t understand, about this season. First was the whole deal with Five. I don’t think they sufficiently explained that he was no longer in a 13-year-old’s body before making him romance his brother’s adult wife. I know that during the montage they very specifically showed him shaving to show he was aging but I still didn’t love it. Also Five’s whole backstory is that he spent too long alone in an apocalypse, fighting tooth and nail to get back to his timeline and his siblings, and you want me to believe he was willing to stay in a two-person apocalypse indefinitely just because he finally got laid? I don’t think so. The whole unlikely-love-in-a-hopeless-pocket-of-time was only cute when The Magicians did it.
I don’t even know how to really put into words some of the other things I didn’t understand or enjoy. Like, what was the deal with the giant squid? I don’t feel like we got enough answers about that squid, or why Jennifer was found inside of it. Why were there so many fat jokes about Diego when he didn’t have his powers, and why was he magically ripped again when his powers came back? Also, why was it sometimes Christmas in the background?
Those are questions I don’t anticipate ever actually knowing the answers to, so let’s move on to the Viktor of it all.
When the season begins and all the siblings are off living their separate, powerless lives, we find Viktor in Nova Scotia, working at a bar. A woman storms in looking for him, tells him to call her when he “grows up” and storms back out. A man in the bar jokes that Viktor has “blown through” all the women in town. And my question is…what? The only relationship we’ve seen Viktor in was his sweet and tender relationship with Sissy that he only left to go back to his own correct time period with his siblings. As Klaus mentions later, Viktor no doubt has daddy issues, but we weren’t given enough context as to how that is playing out in these relationships with the women of Nova Scotia to understand what was going on. Why portray Viktor as a bit of a womanizer, only to never mention it again? Was it just to give him more of a reason to go back to his siblings when they called, because he’s…out of women to date? It struck me as an odd detail that didn’t feel followed up on is all. Based on the later conversation with his father, I think it would have made more sense for us to have seen Viktor breaking up with someone while saying things like, “I can’t be what you need, you deserve better.”
As for that conversation with his father, it’s a great scene. The Hargreeves he’s unloading on isn’t technically the man who raised and abused him, because of timeline nonsense, but it was cathartic for Viktor to let out a lifetime of built-up resentment. Viktor tells him that Hargreeves made him feel broken his whole life and that he didn’t deserve that. In the end, this Hargreeves admits he was wrong, and that Viktor deserves to wear the Umbrella Academy uniform as much, if not more, than any of his siblings.
I’m glad they included that scene in this chaotic final half-season, though I do wish there had been more interaction between Viktor and Allison. Their relationship has always been one of the more interesting between the siblings, and it was hardly explored this season aside from a brief conversation about how, despite making up at the end of season three, they weren’t in contact at all during their time apart. The show did such a good job handling Viktor’s relationship with Sissy in season two, and Viktor coming out as trans in season three. I love that his transness wasn’t his only character development or storyline. It’s great to see a show adapt with its trans actor’s identity, and in general it’s great to see a trans actor in a lead role. But I felt like Viktor was unnecessarily sidelined for season four, despite previously supposedly having a power strong enough to end the world. Also, you have Academy Award nominee ELLIOT PAGE!! Use him!!
I don’t even know how to begin talking about the ending. It went against everything they had been working toward the entire series. I didn’t read the comics, so maybe they had the same ending, but I think they could have made a better, more satisfying choice for the series. All in all, the season felt a little like it was written to be ten episodes like the rest of them, but then shortened to six at the last minute. It felt rushed and chaotic (but not in the fun way the show usually is) and I wanted more from the show’s series finale.
That said, I have been enjoying the sneak peeks Buzzfeed has been giving us for the Puppy Interview the cast is doing. I haven’t seen Elliot Page smile that much in an interview in a while, so I’ll be enjoying that and pretending the series ended with the Hargreeves siblings playing with puppies together. All in all, I’d call this show a net win for LGBTQ+ representation, and these days I’ll take all the wins we can get.
The Umbrella Academy season four is now streaming on Netflix.
