The Umbrella Academy: Season 4

While it has definitely had its ups and downs during its four season run, for the most part The Umbrella Academy has been one of Netflix's better adaptations. The series that is based on the comics of the same name follows a dysfunctional family of former child superheroes as they are tasked with getting over their petty grievances to save the world, multiple times. It's a tried and tested formula, but where The Umbrella Academy has always differed to its superhero counterparts is in the form of its protagonists' powers, which are random, weird, and if anything a little bit useless. And yet, despite this, the gang manages to utilise them to prevent universal calamity time and time again.

For this final season, it's business as usual. After the events of Season 3 where the crew find themselves in a new timeline and without their powers and living normal lives, they soon re-enter each other's lives for a five-year reunion, where soon after all hell breaks loose and a series of unstoppable events are put into action. If you've seen any of The Umbrella Academy before Season 4, you'll be very familiar with this setup and formula.

You'll also be familiar with the overwhelming sense of confusion that the timeline-hopping and multiversal narrative forces upon the viewer. Frankly, as is the case in Marvel, DC, and literally every project that plays with time, in The Umbrella Academy it once again leads to a convoluted and hard-to-follow story that makes less and less sense as the episodes roll on. Or at least until the final third of the last episode where, as usual, Five uses his big old brain to lay out exactly what's happening. It's a problem for certain, but it's also a common problem in the entertainment sphere today and one that The Umbrella Academy has been facing for seasons.

What is significantly better in this final batch of episodes is the emotional weight and the dynamic between the cast and the core characters. It feels like after three seasons of gradual improvement, the gang have reached their pinnacle this time, where the connections between them, the humour and familiarity, the emotional ties, and the way they all bounce off one another makes for some really gripping and heavy scenes that truly make the core story feel important and relevant. Aidan Gallagher as Five, Elliot Page as Viktor, and Ritu Arya as Lila are the standouts from the main troupe, but David Castaneda as Diego, Tom Hopper as Luther, Robert Sheehan as Klaus, Justin H. Min as Ben, and Emmy Raver-Lampman as Allison all give excellent performances too.

The main antagonists don't quite land in the same way that some of the villains of the former seasons do, as Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally as Dr. Gene and Dr. Jean Thibodeau are quite forgettable as core antagonists, and Colm Feore's Reginald Hargreeves lacks the brutality that made him such an eye-catching force in the past. There is a narrative reason for these scaled-back villains this time, and it's a primary reason as to how the show has come to a fitting and fulfilling conclusion, but it would have been interesting to see the gang actually at risk at least once during this season and not just stumbling their way to success.

The humour is one of the better parts of The Umbrella Academy this season, with some truly hilarious scenes. The moment in the minivan (yep, that one...) will go down as iconic, as will some of Luther's dance numbers and Klaus' coked-up endeavours. This season does a fantastic job at balancing deep emotion with light-hearted humour, not to the point where bathos ruin the moment, but in a way that it breaks up the more heavier elements and presents and more even offering.

There's always room for improvement in the VFX side of the show, as frankly it looks cheap a lot of the time. But then again, this is hardly uncommon for entertainment in 2024, and we see ugly CGI and effects sticking out in expensive Marvel blockbusters and cheaper shows. What I will say in favour of The Umbrella Academy's final season is that in six episodes, it manages to do more, push a story forward in a more meaningful way, present gripping and emotional sequences, and even fittingly and fulfillingly conclude this take on the comic series all in a shorter span than we've seen other TV series of late achieve. There's definitely something very positive to say about how tight this final season feels and how it goes about its business in what comes across as the perfect length. If you cut an episode, it would feel too short, and one more episode would drag it out.

So, while you will probably develop a headache attempting to keep tabs on the timeline-hopping main storyline in the final season of The Umbrella Academy, you'll also remember what makes this cast of characters so special and develop that bittersweet taste that the journey with them has met its conclusion. This is a memorable end to one of Netflix's better series as of late, and definitely worth checking out if you've been following The Umbrella Academy since their arrival in 2019.