The Umbrella Academy – Season 4 Episode 6, Recap, Ending & Review

End of the Beginning

Episode 6 of Umbrella Academy season 4 starts with the Keepers turning on the radio and preparing for the inevitable. The song plays through radios across the US, as numerous men and women take up arms and prepare to strike.

Jean and Gene talk to their Keepers, rallying the troops. Of course, Gene is actually Abigail but we’ll have to wait and see what her part to play is here. Hargreeves and Viktor show up in the area with armed guards. Viktor believes they should negotiate with Jean and Gene, at least buying themselves some time if all else fails. Hargreeves reluctantly agrees.

Gene spews some rhetoric about Hargreeves never listening and Jean immediately cottons on to what’s happening. For her troubles, Gene kills her, claiming Jean is a traitor to their cause. Viktor infiltrates the group by marking his wrist with the Keeper symbol, and it seems to do the trick. Even though he was literally out in front of everyone talking to Jean and Gene moments before, but there we go.

Five and Lila eventually show back up at home, but although its been 7 years for them, its only been a few hours for Diego and Luther, who high-five over their victory against the CIA last episode. Diego hugs his wife warmly and promises that things are going to change now.

Does Viktor save Ben and Jennifer?

Viktor eventually breaks inside the mall, where he finds Ben has turned into a monstrous mass. While he tries to help his friend, it all falls apart for the rest of the family. Diego quickly figures out that Five and Lila has been having an affair. She explains why she did it, and she dodges the question about whether she loves Five or not.

Word breaks about Ben and Jennifer on the news and it interrupts the family as they’re forced to head out and try to help. However, their van breaks down right in front of the Keepers, who open fire on them. Lila and Five combine their efforts and manage to amplify Five’s powers so they teleport themselves inside the mall.

There, they find Ben and Jennifer together struggling to control their powers. The Sniper Team Hargreeves has up on the rooftop are instructed to fire, just as Viktor touches Ben’s arm to take on the Durango herself.

Ben notices the bullet and pushes Viktor out the way. He takes the bullet himself, right in the heart, just as Jennifer touches his arm. The pair combine together, and their efforts to try and kill this creature fails. Diego and Five end up fighting each other, until Lila makes her choice and decides that “it’s over” between her and Five. She’s chosen Diego.

What is the Cleanse?

Five blinks out of view, back to the subway, where he decides to head off to parts unknown. The rest of the family find Allison collapsed on the ground and take off with her. Outside, Abigail reveals herself to Hargreeves. She explains that dying is her penance for creating something deadly, and this cleanse will undo all of that. She’s not happy that Hargreeves chose to bring her back to life, and tells him his actions have consequences. She’s been thwarting his plans to keep Jennifer and Ben apart all this time. He accepts that the world is lost and lets this creature take over and destroy the universe.

Meanwhile, Five gets off the subway when he notices himself heading into a diner. In fact, the place is full of other Fives; some working, some sitting around and others chilling. He sits and talks to one of the Fives, who points out that they’re all alternate versions of him from other timelines. Most have given up trying to fix the problem of the broken timeline and are just chilling in this in-between space.

Given there’s only supposed to be one timeline, all these others have collapsed under the weight of the Umbrella Academy. The original timeline shattered because they’ve been trying to save the world.

The commission was created to try and fix the problem they themselves created but it always fails because the family are the problem. Just like what Hargreeves said before, him releasing the marigold into the atmosphere and creating the family have basically caused their own destruction.

The timelines are bleeding into each other now and that’s how the Keepers were able to find the artifacts. So they need to go back to the original timeline and this also reinforces what Viktor saw when he touched Ben and saw the perfect world.

How do the Umbrella Academy save the world?

The idea here is that if Five and the family can join with the durango in the cleanse, they’ll cancel out the effects. It also means that they’ll all be erased from history. None of them will have any memories of anything, and there will be no alternate timelines either. Basically, a great reset.

After bidding goodbye to their family members, the Umbrella Academy join together hand in hand as they let the Cleanse consume them. As it does, we get a lovely little montage while depicting the timeline as subway routes, all the way back to the original timeline. Reginald Hargreeves returns with narration, but this time pointing out that nothing extraordinary happened. They successfully save the world from repeatedly ending.

During a post-credit sequence though, flowers blossom up that appear to be marigold (although I may be wrong here) and 8 flowers happen to be at the foot of the tree.

The Episode Review

So Umbrella Academy season 4 ends with realistically the worst sort of ending. It’s the “it was all a dream” trope after embracing the “girl who’s the key to everything” cliché all season long.

Netflix Originals do have a habit of ending with a poor season finales to close out a show, or at least one that’s quite unsatisfactory. But on the flip side, at least we actually do get an ending here rather than the show just abruptly cancelled outright.

The problems with The Umbrella Academy this season are two-fold. First, we get less episodes to let everything breathe so character development feels rushed, and the screentime we do get is reserved for characters whose arcs this year have been really poor. And the ones we do focus on are absolutely butchered. The less said about the Five and Lila romance the better.

It’s completely out of character for Five to suddenly not care about his family, despite spending seasons trying to get back to them, but for Lila to go the same way and betray Diego, just feels hollow.

Even worse, the writers decide that Five should be the one Lila comforts when she says goodbye to her family in the subway, despite telling him she chooses Diego literally moments earlier. The whole story is a complete mess.

Allison is another that’s been wasted this year and given this is the final season, I can’t help but feel she should have been killed off way before the ending to really ramp up the stakes. 

Klaus basically does nothing all season long except for side quest material too and he really should have died as well if this is all they were going to do with him. I mean, he spends two episodes inside a coffin. He’s been dying (no pun intended) to be killed so why not give him the ultimate send-off and sacrifice himself to save the others at the end?

Meanwhile, Luther and Diego are just made out to be laughing stocks, with tiny moments of redemption thrown in but even during the ending they don’t get their good moment with the family because it’s overshadowed by the love triangle arc.

The humour has always been in The Umbrella Academy but it feels overbearing this year, like someone watched Thor: Love and Thunder and thought that would be a good direction to take everything. It’s a shame because when you compare this to season 1, Umbrella Academy has fallen off in a big way.