The hit, darkly comedic Netflix series about a dysfunctional superhero family, “The Umbrella Academy,” released its fourth and final season on August 8.
The show followed the misadventures of the Hargreeves, adoptive siblings raised to be superheroes. Though they rarely got along as adults, they worked together to avert the apocalypse. Time-traveling shenanigans ensued.
The fourth season saw the main cast reprising their roles, including Elliot Page as Viktor Hargreeves. The show was created by Steve Blackman who also served as a showrunner. It was based on the eponymous comic series by Gerard Way (yes, as in the lead singer of the rock band, My Chemical Romance).
Highs
There were moments when the show had what made previous seasons good. There were a couple of emotional character moments that dealt with their strained relationships. There was also memorable strangeness that was often dark and humorous. The cast remained as strong as previous seasons, infusing life into the wacky premise.
Lows
If the quality of the previous seasons was a cliff, the final season jumped off said cliff and immediately greeted rock bottom.
Part of this was irony poisoning. Though previous seasons were often ironic and snarky, they stood strong because they knew when to be genuine, making these often messy characters shine. The best example being a scene from season one where all Hargreeves danced alone, but in the same house, to the song “I Think We’re Alone Now” by Tiffany.
Season four was often too hesitant to be genuine, even in what should have been impactful final moments, the show did not allow the audience to actually sit with the emotions. The aforementioned few good moments were few and far between.
The plot was also poorly done. Character arcs went in bizarre directions, often flattening what had been set up in previous seasons. Some characters barely even had plots in the final season. The plot was boring, going through the motions of an “Umbrella Academy” season. The world-building went from nonsensical in a creative way to nonsensical in a frustrating way, introducing random pieces of crucial information too late and reducing the whimsy element. This all led to the ending coming out of the blue.
The themes were flattened the most. Another strength of earlier seasons was that it was a show about a complicated family dynamic. These characters had been hurt and hurt each other on such deep levels, that there were always questions of how far a family bond goes and what was forgivable. This final season completely disregarded that for a more cliche message that took all of this complexity out, pretending the series had always simply been about family. No, it wasn’t, it was specifically about familial trauma. Quite frankly, the writers were wrong.
Verdict
“The Umbrella Academy” was a uniquely charming show in its previous seasons. The humor was macabre and the world was deeply strange and mysterious. The final season remembered that, albeit clumsily. But it forgot that earlier seasons also had heart. At its core, the show was about a group of deeply traumatized people, reckoning with their childhoods and complex feelings toward each other. The final season lost the plot and its heart, utterly failing the story.
Rating: 3 out of 10.
