The Umbrella Academy showrunner calls that ending ‘the most heroic thing a superhero could do’

WARNING: This article contains spoilers for The Umbrella Academy season 4.

Well, The Umbrella Academy certainly ended with a bang. The Netflix superhero series concluded its run with season 4, in which the superpowered Hargreeves siblings came together one last time to stop one more apocalypse from threatening the world. 

Each season so far has climaxed with some kind of apocalyptic crisis. The characters failed to prevent the Earth from exploding in the season 1 finale, but were able to fix it by going back in time for season 2. Then they ended up in an alternate-universe present populated by the Sparrow Academy in season 3, which eventually created another apocalypse (“the Kugelblitz”) that could only be stopped by depriving the heroes of their superpowers. They get better in season 4, just in time to face yet another disaster. 

At this point, the members of the Umbrella Academy — Luther (Tom Hopper), Diego (David Castañeda), Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman), Klaus (Robert Sheehan), Number Five (Aidan Gallagher), Ben (Justin H. Min), Victor (Elliot Page), and Lila (Ritu Arya) — realize that no matter what they do, if they all get together, it inevitably results in some kind of apocalypse. This time, it’s caused by Ben coming back to life. But if it wasn’t that, it would be something else. 

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“I like the idea that they were the ones that really made chaos in the timelines,” showrunner Steve Blackman tells Entertainment Weekly. “It was their very existence, which is the last thing you'd think — that the superheroes themselves are what causes everything to go wrong. In a really weird way, they are also the fix, and the way they fix it is by ceasing to exist. It’s not death, it’s just never being, and that’s a different way to look at things. Can you really be a superhero if you never existed?” 

The Umbrella Academy performs one last act of time travel in order to protect the world forever: They go back in time and prevent their own miraculous births. The final scene of the series shows their various mothers having a picnic in the park. So the characters may still exist in some form, but they won’t be the super-powered misfits known as the Umbrella Academy who constantly create problems through their combined presence. 

“Their family survived, and we show that with the scene of the park,” Blackman says. “But I think it was an unexpected way to be heroic as a superhero, to allow yourself to cease to exist. That was something I haven’t seen before. I mean, superheroes sacrifice themselves all the time, but what does it mean when no one will know they ever did it? They could have tried to live or tried to sneak away in the subway, but no, they made the ultimate sacrifice. Choosing to never be known is, to me, the most heroic thing a superhero could do.” 

But while the characters have erased themselves from history, the show itself will continue to exist – both on Netflix and in the memories of the people who made it. 

“I feel so lucky that we got to make something that was so full of emotion and depth and so fulfilling as an actor to do,” star Elliot Page tells EW. “And also it was such a fun spectacle and was so weird and took risks. I'm just going to remember how grateful and lucky I feel to have worked with such incredible people, to have made something that connected with fans in such a special way, and to have gotten to go on this journey with this character. I mean, there's really not much more you can ask for.”