Let's Go Hunt: Umbrella Academy Season 4

This started out as a Friday Grab-Bag but the very first topic ran to more than two thousands words so now it's a post just about that. I guess I'll get to the rest tomorrow. Or next Friday. Or never.

I watched all six episodes of Umbrella Academy Season 4 this week. One a night, the way I do. It was a ride, let me tell you. A bumpy one. The final episode left me feeling a bit like the family must have felt when Gene and Jean t-boned Diego's minivan in Episode 2 - shaken and shocked, dazed and defeated.

It's tempting to concentrate on that really very bad indeed ending, both to the season and the series. A lot of people are doing just that, which is why Season 4 has an audience score on Rotten Tomatoes of just 17% as I write this. 

There's a good overview of the wider audience response to the way the show ended on Screen Rant but the tl:dr is it just wasn't anything like as good as the other three. It felt rushed and cramped and incoherent and that's because it was. 

After the first episode, which sure took its time with the set-up, it always felt like we were skipping stuff we needed to know, always running to the next incursion point, never stopping to explain why we were in such a rush to get there.

Netflix is getting the blame for most of that. Apparently they only wanted to pay for six episodes where the previous three seasons each had ten. Of course, back then people were complaining there was too much padding. TV executives clearly can't catch a break with audiences these days...

The shortened season may explain the lack of space to tell the story but when it comes to the complaints about lack of coherency, that has to be down to the writers. I get the impression the show wasn't suddenly truncated mid-season, leaving them to scramble an ending of sorts. They always knew it was going to be six episodes so they had ample opportunity to pace things accordingly. They just didn't.

But then, for me, the plots in Umbrella Academy never made all that much sense. They weren't particularly memorable, either. It is without doubt one of my favorite shows of the last few years but I couldn't tell you the plotlines of any of the seasons. I could barely follow them, if I'm honest, not even while I was watching. I certainly can't remember any of them in much detail now.

And that's fine. I always thought the whole USP of the show was that it revolved around mysteries that couldn't be unraveled to anyone's satisfaction, neither the characters' nor the audience's. The reality in which the show existed was ineffably fractal, recursive, self-inflected and just flat out weird. I'm pretty sure no-one was expecting or even asking for it all to be tied up with a neat bow at the end but even if they were, the way that was done would surely not have been what anyone had in mind.

So far, other than to say the ending wasn't very good, I haven't let slip any spoilers. Oh, wait, there was the thing about the car crash but I think I got away with that one. Let's not draw attention to it.

From here on in there will be spoilers aplenty so if you haven't watched the show and plan to and you care about keeping the snow pristine and all that, probably best skip the rest and come back when you're as pissed off as I am. 

Warning duly given. Here's a video to break up the flow and give you a chance to leave before you see something you'll regret.

Everyone on board? Okay, here we go ...

Here are just a few of the problems with the ending. It's dramatically inert. It's dull to look at. It goes against much of the character development in the previous thirty-five episodes. It would not happen within the internal logic of the show. It's stupid, basically.

All of that can be argued against. What can't is the way the ending entirely invalidates everything that came before. Literally.

Here's the way it goes: the Academy face another existential threat, a fourth consecutive ending of the world. Instead of finding a way to prevent it or failing to do so, as in the previous three series, they instead discover (Or rather Five tells himself, in a disorienting scene set in a delicatessen, where he is all the customers and all the staff.) that the family themselves are the proximate cause of all the apocalypses and only their annihilation will put an end to the eternal cascade of destruction.

In short, if there had never been an Umbrella Academy there would never have been the need for an Umbrella Academy because there would have been only one thread of existence and it would have gone on, undisturbed and unbroken into eternity, instead of shattering into a myriad diverging timelines, every one of which ends in global catastrophe. 

All the family needs to do is accept that and allow the current apocalyptic threat to overwhelm and assimilate them, so they not only cease to exist but cease ever to have existed. Then everything will be just peachy. So peachy, in fact, that there's both a vision before they agree to self-negation and a confirmatory coda after it happens showing them and us how the timeline is restored to the most anodyne of peaceful existences.

It looks fucking awful. Like an Edwardian nanny's daydream, frankly. It's impossible to imagine any of the crew having a reaction to it that doesn't involve contempt, disdain or despair. They're a bunch of borderline sociopaths with a multiplicity of attitudinal disorders, not one of which involves wanting to live the kind of life usually only found in picture-books for the under-fives. 

And yet they unanimously agree to unalive themselves to bring that vision of the future to life - for everyone, but mainly for their children, who won't miss them at all because they will never know they existed. 

And apparently neither will anyone else, although the explanations are so vague and hand-wavey it's impossible to be sure. How Lila's family, who get the unenviable job of bringing up the four orphaned children, are going to explain their origins to the kids when they start asking questions is left unmentioned, as is how they'll square the whole "We have four more kids and we can't explain were we got them from" thing with the authorities but never mind. I'm sure it'll all be fine.

Seriously, you can pull on any one of a hundred threads in this tapestry of twaddle and the whole thing will fall apart. And not just in the cold rationality of post-season analysis, either. I was yelling this stuff at the screen as I was watching. It's that bloody obvious! No wonder almost everyone hates it.

Apart from making absolutely no sense in terms of diagetic logic, on a metafictional level the ending renders the entire series completely purposeless from the point of view of the audience. Why did we waste our time with these people if they never even existed? What were all those emotions we felt for them worth? I bet you feel stupid now for caring.

Yeah, not really. I hate the ending but it doesn't mar the previous three seasons, each of which can be treated as a standalone story. What can't so easily be shrugged off is the way it makes Season 4 itself totally meaningless. As a conclusion, it's a whisker away from "It was all just a dream.", and that hasn't carried since The Wizard of Oz.

Apart from the ending, though, how did you like the play, Mr Lincoln? Well, I can't say it didn't have its moments. 

I loved the use of popular music, which was satisfyingly sparing for once and which gave a very amusing sense of being trolled by whoever picked the tunes. It was jarring enough in the first episode, when a scene went by to the boneheaded sleaze of the Bloodhound Gang doing The Bad Touch, (A song I always thought was called "Mammals" until I looked it up on YouTube just now...) but when Baby Shark blasted out of the speakers during the road trip and wouldn't fucking stop I literally laughed with joy.

I could do a whole post just based on those music choices but we'd better move on. Another thing I was largely okay with was the romance between Five and Lila, something that seems to have raised hackles right across the fandom. I think the problem with that storyline was the execution not the concept. 

I don't find it too much of a stretch to believe that two people forced to spend seven whole years alone together would end up leaning into each other for emotional support or that if they were of suitable orientation that support wouldn't become physical and/or romantic. Seven years is a long time to live through and even more so if you have to spend most of it in a deserted subway. 

The trouble is, jamming seven years into a five minute montage is just not going to convey the grinding weight of time passing as experienced by the characters. It looks more like they're having a bad holiday than an existential crisis. 

That said, I didn't believe anything much about the entire subway subplot to begin with. It's riven with internal contradictions and almost nothing about it that ought to be explained ever is. It's nonsense, frankly, and the wonder isn't so much that Five and Lila end up sleeping together as that it takes them so long.

Then there are the powers. It's easy to forget sometimes that The Umbrella Academy is, at its core, a superhero show. It's based on a comic book and the characters have a team name and costumes so it should be hard to miss and yet somehow it still isn't always obvious.

For the first three series, in great part that's because the individual powers are so specific and odd, when they're even defined at all. Victor's power always seemed to be getting angry and having to be calmed down, for example, while Klaus may be functionally immortal but he's totally useless in any conceivable super-heroic situation. Alison's rumor is chilling and charismatic but frequently impractical, Luther is a basic strong guy, Five is Nightcrawler in a suit, Diego is good with knives and Ben is mostly dead until Season 3.

All of that changes radically in Season 4, when the gang get dosed by Ben and get their powers back, only they don't. They all get upgrades except Five, who gets stiffed with a subway pass to the multiverse but no map to go with it. 

The changes to the power sets make all the Academy proper superheroes at last and I can't say it isn't fun to watch but it erodes much of what made the team and the show so unusual in the first place.

Alison doesn't rumor any more, she does mind control at a distance and somehow telekenesis, too. She's Jean Grey, basically. Luther's still strong but now he's invulnerable, too, so the rest can use him as a shield when they get shot at, which happens a lot. He's Colossus. Half the team are X-Men, now. 

Diego goes from having super-high dexterity to somehow being able to gather up bullets in flight and send them back to where they came from. I guess he's Gambit, now I think of it. Maybe they're all X-Men and that's the gag...

Klaus summons spirits and lets them use his body for rental sex, which admittedly seems completely in character, but Victor now fires force blasts from his hands, like a few dozen superheroes I could name.  Ben keeps his very dodgy CGI tentacles that make him look like a low-rent Dr. Octopus but also loses any lingering sense of humanity he might have had. 

Best of all is what happens to Lila, who just happens to be there when Ben hands the spiked shots around. She gets fricken' eye lasers! The more I think about this X-Men thing...

Granted, all of this leads to some pretty decent fight scenes but we can get those anywhere. The sheer ordinariness of the new powers smacks of lack of imagination but also of an attempt to put some oomph into a show that otherwise would mostly consist of siblings bickering. 

The thing is, siblings bickering is what The Umbrella Academy is all about. By far the best moments in the show are the ones where two or more of the team are trying to work something out between themselves. All the rest is window-dressing.

Season Three does have a good deal of what made the show so involving in the first place. The party scenes and particularly the episode where the entire team spends most of it jammed together in the minivan are lots of fun. There are some solid starts at sub-plots, too, particularly Lila, Five and Diego trying to navigate their complex feelings towards and against each other, Alison, Klaus and Claire working out how to be a kind of family and everyone coming to terms with being "normal" for the first time in their lives. 

Unfortunately, none of these themes is allowed the space or time it needs to develop. Things begin and then either get left on the sidewalk or wrapped up in a rush. 

As for tying up any of the dangling plotlines from the three previous seasons you can forget about it. Most of them aren't even mentioned in passing, something exemplified by the absolute absence of Sloane, a major character from the preceding season, last seen at the end of the final episode of Season 3 but never once mentioned in the entirety of Season 4.

I could, as must be all too painfully apparent, go on but I'll stop there. Despite all my cavils, complaints and misgivings, I did still enjoy the final season. It mostly rocks along with lots of action and plenty of good lines. It's the plot that falls over and plot is generally the thing I care least about.

If nothing else, it has determined me to go back and watch the first three seasons all over again. I think I'll stop when it gets to the last one, though. Or maybe I won't. By then I won't remember what happened so I'll have the chance to get angry about it all over again.