Not a Happy Ending

In only six episodes, The Umbrella Academy season four has the unenviable task of wrapping up a Netflix series full of complex characters—and an even more complex story involving superpowers, aliens, time travel, altered timelines, and multiple apocalypses. And that’s without even getting into the main theme of the show, which is a family game. A lot family drama.

As expected, there’s plenty of that packed into all six episodes, with personal resentments and lingering anger compounded by the fact that—thanks to the events of season three—the Hargreeves siblings (Robert Sheehan as Klaus, Emmy Raver-Lampman as Allison). , Tom Hopper as Luther, Aidan Gallagher as Five, Elliot Page as Viktor, and David Castañeda as Diego—and non-Umbrella Academy family members Justin H. Min as Ben and Ritu Arya as Lila) are stripped of their various abilities. Although we get to spend time with the characters in their normal situations, which exist in levels ranging from “actually doing OK” to “complete sack,” it doesn’t take long before their powers are restored.

Not everyone wants to be made “special” either; as the show likes to remind us, having superpowers can be a blessing but often a curse. But this The Umbrella Academy, which organizes each season with characters scrambling to prevent the impending doomsday. Season four is no different, and superpowers come to the rescue when the end of the world is at stake.

This review will carefully avoid plot details or spoilers, but it does not give anything to note that the Hargreeves, who were last seen scattered in different places at the end of the third season, meet reluctantly when one of them is in distress. While the group struggles to regain their strength, not to mention the difficulty of being close to each other—especially when it involves a dusty road trip accompanied by the haunting sounds of “Baby Shark”—The Umbrella Academy and enters the version of reality they live in now.

It turns out that the resetting of Hotel Oblivion’s timeline did more damage than just removing the Hargreeves’ superpowers. The glue that holds the universe together is seriously porous, artifacts from other timelines have begun to appear—attracting the attention of a conspiracy group called the Guardians. Sports tattoos are inverted versions of The Umbrella Academy logo, the Guardians are led by a husband-and-wife team called Gene and Jean (real-life husband-and-wife team Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally). They fill the usual Umbrella Academy slot: opponents as quirky as deadly.

While Offerman and Mullally are great actors, as always, Gene and Jean aren’t the only elements of season four that feel well-worn. io9’s positive review of the third season raised the appeal that comes back here, too: The Umbrella Academy a show about a family that starts apocalypses, and then has to work hard to prevent them.

Although the circumstances are different each time—in season four, the crisis coincides with a dark time in the history of the Umbrella Academy—the core of the story feels repetitive. Perhaps it is more repetitive, even with the understanding that the good ending may be more permanent than in previous iterations; This is, after all, the final season, and the show is getting bittersweet when you talk about it The Umbrella AcademyThe inevitable spiraling narrative.

But along those lines, it doesn’t help that in all of pop culture lately we’re inundated with stories about sacred times and other realities and unique characters. The Umbrella AcademyHe’s been playing with that since the show hit Netflix in 2019 (the source of Dark Horse Comics that was released in 2007), and it’s actually a long-known sandbox of sci-fi as a whole. But thanks to the inevitable presence of Deadpool and friends, this concept never felt so much in the vein of “oh, this again?”

However, fortunately this is still the case Umbrella Companyand the show’s much-loved silliness and attention to offbeat details (even though season four is set in modern times, cell phones abound, and no one ever checks Google) get plenty of time to shine even in a short season.

Among the cast, Page’s Viktor gets a satisfying storyline that sees him mend fences with the family’s troubled patriarch, Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore)—even if it’s not the version of “Reggie” he grew up with. Arya’s Lila is also a standout; while he’s not the original Hargreeves kid, he’s saddled with a lot of his baggage and gets a heartfelt journey to sort through it all—ditto Min’s Ben, whose fourth season careens from salty to sweet to ugly in ways that feel well-earned. . (Alas, fan favorite Klaus gets short shrift this season.)

And about that trademark Hargreeves goofiness, season four delivers with Umbrella Academy trademark we won’t call it repetitive: a kick-ass, exciting fight scene. The fact that the action takes place at Christmas would feel like an afterthought, if it weren’t for the annoying sequence placed next to the holiday show (if you’ve seen the trailer, you know that a gun-toting Santa is involved)—and thanks to the clever confrontation involving Luther and Diego that will take place later in the season, you never will. and listen to “Secret Agent Man” the same way again.

The Umbrella Academy season four is now streaming on Netflix.

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