Review: ‘The Umbrella Academy’ Season 4 reminds you why you fell in love with the show, before throwing it all away

After three relatively consistent seasons, season 4 of Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy has the challenge of giving its beloved cast a proper farewell. Sadly, the divisive series finale undermines these characters’ growth to the point it becomes irrelevant.

At the end of Season 3, the Hargreeves siblings found themselves in a new timeline where they were stripped of their powers, and Sir Reginald (Colm Feore) is the mightiest man on the planet. Since then, fans have anticipated season 4 to be a race against the clock for the siblings to regain their abilities and overthrow their tyrant father. Surprisingly, season 4 of The Umbrella Academy chooses a completely different path, taking fans six years into the future.

The six-year jump allows each Hargreeves to come to terms with their mediocrity and accept that life is much less thrilling when superpowers are no longer part of the equation. Most importantly, the immediate tension of Allison’s (Emmy Raver-Lampman) turn into villainy (the weakest point of season 3) has faded with time. That means right off the bat, season 4 can return to the dysfunctional siblings’ dynamics instead of lingering on the season 3 elements that didn’t quite work. Sure, there’s still bad blood between Allison and Viktor (Elliot Page) – and between Ben (Justin H. Min) and everyone else. Still, these conflicts are framed through the lens of family affairs, the show’s biggest strength since its first season.

It’s delightful to see the life each Hargreeves built for themselves without the great responsibility that comes with great powers or the imminent threat of an apocalypse. They are just people trying to navigate their past traumas and the taxing interactions at the core of a broken family. Of course, peace can’t last forever, and the Hargreeves are pulled into yet another end-of-the-world conspiracy.

For its first half, season 4 of The Umbrella Academy does a marvelous job of balancing its fantastic plot with the character-focused journey each sibling must undertake before the credits roll one last time. The bickering between the siblings reaches new comedic levels, and the series reminds fans why they love this show so much. 

Beyond the complex dynamics of multiple timelines, The Umbrella Academy is a drama with incredibly relatable characters, each filled to the brink with flaws and contradictions. Following their lives for the past five years has been a pleasure because this is not a show about superheroes saving the day. Instead, it’s about a found family willing to sacrifice everything for each other, regardless of how much their mutual love gets tested by the twists and turns of fate.

The first stretch of season 4 is not only great. It delivers some of the best episodes in the entire show. That only makes it more painful when the show returns to its old vices, splitting the party too thin and juggling too many side stories simultaneously.

As the show’s finale, The Umbrella Academy season 4 should allow every Hargreeves sibling to shine one last time. That doesn’t happen. After a couple of brilliant episodes, Diego (David Castañeda), Luther (Tom Hopper), and Allison get stuck in minor conflicts that only tangentially connect to the season’s main plot. Ben, while at the core of season 4’s big issue, doesn’t have a single opportunity to do something relevant in the final episodes. As for Viktor, he gets stuck with the same daddy issues we all thought had been left behind in season 3. These are the lucky characters.

Despite being a fan-favorite, Klaus (Robert Sheehan) is demoted to a personal adventure that drags until the final episode and doesn’t add anything to himself or the family. As for Five (Aidan Gallagher) and Lila (Ritu Arya), season 4 dares to give them the most emotionally devastating development they have had so far, building up the dramatic tension to heartbreaking levels. The payoff? Zero. None. Nada. That stings all the more considering how Gallagher evolved his craft since the first season, boasting his best Five performance in scenes which are thrown in the trash in the name of a hasty ending.

Calling The Umbrella Academy finale sloppy would be a compliment. While the season’s final events would be controversial in themselves, their lack of coherence adds insult to injury. 

The Umbrella Academy has always dealt with tricky concepts such as time travel, paradoxes, and even quantum physics to some extent. Nevertheless, the writers have done a wonderful job of keeping things together and relatively impervious to plot holes, at least until now. Season 4’s finale trades story integrity for spectacle and cheap thrills, opening a multiversal can of worms that wiggly uncomfortable within the mind the more you think about the senselessness of it all. 

For clarity’s sake, it’s important to underline the series could have ended exactly as it did and still be satisfying. Not everyone would be happy with the fate of the Hargreeves siblings, and that’s part of television. However, the journey is as important as the end, if not more. So, it’s appalling that The Umbrella Academy finale introduces a hail mary at the final minutes to end this season’s convoluted story, with half-baked explanations that don’t stand two minutes of questioning. Even worse, this last-minute solution renders the entire season pointless, as all the side quests become useless, and the dramatic potential of almost the whole cast is swiped under the rug.

To be fair, showrunner Steve Blackman and his creative team only had six episodes to end the show instead of the usual ten from previous seasons. The new episodes get their runtime stretch to make the most of it. Yet, there’s only so much you can tackle in six hours of television. However, while it would be better to have a few more episodes so that the ending wouldn’t feel as rushed and botched as it does, the fault also lies with the writer’s room. The constraints of the fourth and final season should have served as a warning to keep ambitions in check and focus on the essentials. Instead, season 4 creates a narrative monster it can’t properly contain.

There are still things to love about The Umbrella Academy season 4. The cast is wonderful as always, and when the family works together, the season is as cozy as a warm embrace. Plus, Netflix loosened the budget for special effects, as the season has some of the most impressive set pieces of the show. Still, it might be better to tone down the flashy lights and invest in an ending that gives the cast the departure they deserve, turning rewatches into a pleasant future activity instead of an exercise of slow agony as the ending nears.

Who knew?! After all this time, the apocalypse that finally got the Hargreeves siblings was bad writing.

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