Why did the ending of The Umbrella Academy suck so much?

So! The Umbrella Academy ended, huh?

And judging by reactions across social media, that ending… sure was something. To put it lightly, it wasn’t very fulfilling. To put it a little more strongly, fans are putting it on par with the ending of Game of Thrones.

It’s a controversial ending, but not just because of how shocking it was — the ending felt abrupt, unsatisfying, and left a lot of us wanting. And ultimately, the finale basically undermined everything the show tried to do and what made it appealing to fans in the first place.

[Ed. note: This post contains major spoilers for the ending of The Umbrella Academy.]

The problem starts with the supposed solution: Five (Aidan Gallagher) learned from other versions of himself that the Hargreeves siblings’ very existence was what caused the splintered timelines and the recurrent apocalypses. So, in order to return everything to one main timeline, the Hargreeves siblings have to let themselves be consumed by the Cleanse. They need to not just die but be totally eradicated from existence. No one would ever remember them, but the world would be safe from certain doom!

A big heroic self-sacrifice isn’t exactly unheard of in superhero stories. In fact, it’s a pretty common trope. Just look at Tony Stark at the end of Avengers: Endgame, going out in a bang with everyone in the entire world mourning him. Or The Iron Giant! And in certain stories, it can be a very fulfilling ending; in both of these examples, the hero works to stop a bigger threat and understands that they must use their powers for the greater good, to save the world and people they care about. But in The Umbrella Academy, a self-sacrificial ending is antithetical to the core themes of the show.

From the very first season, the big world-ending stakes in The Umbrella Academy weren’t just apocalyptic harbingers, they were basically physical manifestations of the trauma the Hargreeves siblings experienced as kids. And every time, the family circumvented the end of the world by coming together in some capacity, putting aside their differences and the wedges their father drove between them, in order to avoid a grim fate. Each season presented them with a new set of challenges — and in the face of those, sometimes they regressed. It was the cycle of abuse repeating itself, with the siblings reacting to it in different ways each time. But, in the end, the Hargreeves siblings opened their arms to one another and somehow always managed to escape the metaphorical trauma consuming them.

A cathartic series ending would ideally revolve around the Hargreeves siblings finally conquering that baggage once and for all, in some way. That metaphor is foundational to why the show was so appealing in the first place: The superpowered family had real, tangible relationships with one another and the threats they faced were basically the worst versions of those internal struggles. It was refreshing to see a superhero story where the doom had personal stakes.

The ending of the show completely shafts all the work that the family did to overcome their trauma and rebuild their bonds with one another. In fact, a lot of them regress in this season — just not in any meaningful or interesting ways. Klaus (Robert Sheehan), for instance, finally manages to get sober, and his relationship with Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) and her daughter in the first few episodes is extremely compelling and highlights a new direction for the character. But then he falls back into his old ways and habits, in a kooky side plot that doesn’t make any sense in the greater scheme of the season. And then they all come together, and it’s over.

And that’s not even mentioning what the fuck happened with Five and Lila. Their romance was very out of left field and also just very strange considering everything about their relationship. But however you ultimately feel about the pairing, it feels odd that it’s all built up just so Five could be the one to convince Lila to come back and join the Hargreeves in their slow, painful group death.

It was all a bit of a mess, so by the time the family came together at the end, it felt like nothing had progressed at all. The revelation that they basically had to kill themselves in order to save the world came so quickly, it barely gave the audience time to fully process why it felt so damn weird. The thing is, the way the show was going there was a clear cathartic ending for the family: finally break the cycle of trauma or, as it manifests in the show, finally overcome the repeating world-ending threats. It almost seems like Ben and Jennifer do this at first, reaching out to defy Reginald as they find solace in one another. But as it turns out, apparently Reginald was right for shooting the two of them in their heads when they were kids!

Instead, though, the siblings let that trauma consume them. That’s what a big sacrificial ending reads as, when those apocalyptic threats are blatant metaphors. They don’t grow past the hardships they endure; it swallows their very existence. The world is better off without them. Even though we’ve watched them try and fail for three seasons to break this cycle, apparently the solution is for them to never get better at all.

The Umbrella Academy is now streaming on Netflix.