2024-08-14 14:57:50
Netflix’s comedy fantasy series about a family of time-traveling superheroes who save the world over and over again has come to an end.
As reported by Day.Az with reference to Izvestia, the fourth, final season was released in its entirety. We watched it and tell you what exactly is happening there and whether this “farewell” (if it really is a farewell and not a marketing ploy) will be able to satisfy and touch the fans.
The end of the world will not happen
As expected, at the very beginning of the fourth season, viewers are reminded of how the previous one ended. But, by and large, this turns out not to be particularly necessary. All that is worth knowing: the cheerful team from the “Umbrella Academy”, students of the rich alien Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore), ended up in a parallel reality, where they lost all their superpowers. The new season, like all the previous ones, becomes a reason for a kind of reboot. Not only has more than two years passed since the end of the previous one, but in the reality of the series, the heroes have become six years older, so the first episode of the fourth season is devoted to getting to know the heroes and their new “normal” lives.
Luther (Tom Hopper) became a stripper in a shady bar. Alison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) stars in air freshener commercials. Klaus (Robert Sheehan) has become a mysophobe. Victor (Elliott Page) owns a bar and breaks the hearts of lonely ladies. Ben (Justin H. Ming) has just been released from prison, where he served time for a cryptocurrency scam. Diego (David Castaneda) works as a courier and has three children with Lila. The only exception to the general normality is Number Five (Aidan Gallagher), who is the least human: he has become an undercover CIA agent. All the heroes have matured, but, surprisingly, have not become much smarter and remain the same charming losers. However, their intelligence is enough to once again save the world from the apocalypse, as they have already done three times.
The Hardgreeves’ enemies are now a married couple of villainous scientists with identical names – Gene and Jean Thibodeau (the colorful Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally – husband and wife in real life). In the first episode of the final season, they find artifacts proving the existence of parallel time, and organize a cult of Guardians who believe in the “Umbrella effect” (by analogy with the “Mandella effect”). They are all visited by phantom memories of a gang of superhero children in short pants, and the cultists believe that the transition to this parallel reality they dream of will lead either to a general “cleansing” or to the end of the world. Gene and Jean are satisfied with either of these two options.
Meanwhile, laundry owner Sy Grossman (stand-up comedian David Cross, who voiced Master Crane in Kung Fu Panda) kidnaps Victor solely to attract the attention of the rest of the Hargreeves – his daughter Jennifer has become a member of a cult, and from a newspaper clipping he found about the kids from the Umbrella Academy who saved the Eiffel Tower, the inconsolable father realized who could help him. Naturally, for such an occasion, their superhuman abilities return to them.
While the flowers are growing in the garden
The screen version of the comic book of the same name, created and written by My Chemical Romance vocalist Gerard Way and drawn by artist Gabriel Ba, has always focused on masterfully staged bloody fights accompanied by the cheerful songs of Queen and The Stranglers. In the last season, there was less action, although its quality is still beyond question. Emotions came to the forefront – the usual teenage humor with jokes about vomiting now coexists with sentimentality. How else to say goodbye to your favorite characters if not with tears in your eyes?
The farewell, by the way, turned out to be shorter than expected. The fourth season has only six episodes instead of the usual ten, and this has its obvious pros and cons. On the one hand, there is less unnecessary serial ballast and plot branches, which are necessary only to stretch the running time. On the other hand, this compactness brought a feeling of some plot crumpling, and the abundance of indoor scenes and careless CGI suggest a limited budget.
Perhaps the main reason for such a lackluster finale is the scandal surrounding showrunner Steve Blackman, who also worked on the series Fargo, Legion and Altered Carbon. Earlier this year, 12 writers and film industry workers accused him of “toxic, aggressive and demeaning behavior.” Accusations of sexist and homophobic remarks also surfaced, including those directed at the series’ star Elliot Page. Blackman himself denied everything, but Universal Content Production, the company that produced the show, conducted an investigation and found that some of the accusations were substantiated. In any case, those concerning “inappropriate and unprofessional remarks” and “obscene and derogatory remarks.” It is logical to assume that these facts were enough for Netflix to decide to end the hit series as soon as possible and seriously cut its funding.
Now, major spoiler alert: in the final episode, the heroes sacrifice themselves and agree to erase themselves from history in order to stop the cleansing process and merge all the parallel timelines into one. It all ends on a perfect sunny day in the park with Tommy Jones and The Shondells’ “I Think We’re Alone Now,” which was featured in the very first episode of Season 1. But as Nick Cave sang, “Just remember, death is not the end.” After the final credits, the camera stops on eight marigolds growing at the foot of a tree. That is, the very flowers whose pollen fertilized the earthly women and gave birth to the children of the Umbrella Academy.
Blackman declined to comment (“what the flowers represent is up to the fans to decide”). There’s a chance that Edison’s final words, “maybe we’ll see each other again,” weren’t without meaning. But it’s unlikely that the Academy students will return to the screen in human form – except perhaps in some parallel reality.
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