This article reveals spoilers for Season 4 of The Umbrella Academy.
Who would’ve thought the apocalypse could be this… mundane? The Umbrella Academy, Netflix’s beloved series about a dysfunctional family of super-powered misfits, has reached its final destination and it’s a wild one. The show’s last season left some fans with a bad taste in their mouths as they tried to make sense of the odd choices, shortened episode count, and confusing finale. The six-episode arc tries to bring everything full circle, revealing that the Hargreeves siblings were never meant to exist in the first place, and in the end, they don’t. If you were hoping for a happy ending, you might want to look elsewhere.
When Season 4 kicks off, the Hargreeves siblings find themselves in a world that’s suspiciously normal. After averting their third apocalypse, they’re sent into a reset universe where none of them have their powers and life is depressingly ordinary. Alison is not a detergent commercial star, Luther has taken up a gig as a strip club dancer, and Viktor runs a bar in Canada. The once mighty heroes are now stuck in a kind of mediocrity they’d always managed to avoid, and it only gets more strange from there. Fan reactions are piling up quickly, with The Independent collecting these two painful posts:
Another added: “
Absolutely horrendous, wish I hadn’t bothered watching. Commits total character assassination
on characters that I’ve loved for years. Disgusted and disappointed.” One fan said that the final season “will go down as
one of the most disappointing show endings in history
.”
What Are the Fans Saying?
The season had its ups and downs, but if the show could pull it together in the finale, fans might have let it slide. The final episode comes and reaches its conclusion of… the siblings fading from existence? They sacrifice themselves to save the world and it’s over. Fans have been very vocal about their disappointment, with some of them saying,
Meanwhile, @docniner writes on X, “I’ve always believed that Dexter Season 8 was the worst finale on Television but I just finished watching Umbrella Academy’s finale and oh boy.” While The Umbrella Academy managed to have a 59% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, the audience score has fallen to an embarrassing 17%, reflecting the reception to the actual finale once everyone had caught up.
Related
The Umbrella Academy Season 4 Review: The Series Deserves a Better Send-Off
The truncated final seasons spins too many creative plates, but guest stars Nick Offerman and Megan Mullally are one of the best bright spots.
The Umbrella Academy Team Is Proud of Season 4
Gerard Way, the co-creator of the comics that the show is based off of, seems to be proud of what the Netflix team has put together over the years, saying in an interview with Tudum,
“Honestly, I really loved just all their enthusiasm. It’s a great group of people and they have fun. And because I was never standing in the way of that — on purpose, it was a choice — it got to grow into this beautiful thing that was its own thing.”
As the experience of this comic adaption of The Umbrella Academy ends, it’s clear that the show will be remembered as much for its wild antics and great storytelling as it is for it’s disliked ending, not unlike Game of Thrones, before it.