When The Umbrella Academy returned to Netflix on 8 August 2024 for its fourth and final season, it carried the accumulated weight of three seasons of goodwill – a reputation for marrying comic-book spectacle with the bruised emotional intimacy of a family therapist’s waiting room. Gerard Way’s ragtag band of superpowered misfits, adapted for television by showrunner Steve Blackman, had established itself as one of the streamer’s most distinctive properties. The question was whether it could stick the landing. Measured against a 55% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes and a devastating 19% audience score, the answer extended far beyond the screen.
The Powerless Premise That Deserved More Room to Breathe
The closing moments of season three had delivered a genuinely audacious narrative pivot: the Hargreeves siblings, stripped of their extraordinary abilities by Reginald Hargreeves’ machinations, found themselves adrift in an unfamiliar timeline. It was a premise brimming with dramatic potential – what happens when the extraordinary is taken from those defined by it?
Blackman understood the philosophical promise of this setup. Speaking to TheWrap ahead of the premiere, he framed the season’s central question with characteristic directness: “It’s very hard being ordinary when you were extraordinary, and the fun of the beginning of the season is: how do you go from being a superhero to being just a typical person.” The opening episode, aptly titled “The Unbearable Tragedy of Getting What You Want”, leaned into this discomfort. Six years after the reset, Diego works as a postman, Viktor tends bar in Canada, Luther attempts a career in stripping, and Klaus – sober and germaphobic – has become a liability rather than a loose cannon. These are people who spent their lives lamenting the burden of their gifts, only to discover that ordinariness carries its own quiet devastation. For a single episode, the conceit worked beautifully: a domestic comedy of diminishment, the anti-spectacle of people who once saved the world now struggling to file tax returns.
Six Episodes Forced a Sprint Through a Marathon’s Worth of Story
Then Netflix’s episode order intervened. The final season consisted of just six episodes, down from the ten allotted to each of its predecessors. Blackman told SFX Magazine that four seasons had always been his intended trajectory and that the shorter count did not compromise his vision. Critics disagreed, often sharply. IGN‘s Chase Hutchinson gave the season a 7 out of 10 but conceded it “often feels constrained and narrow thanks to its shortened length.” On Rotten Tomatoes, the season limped to a 55% critics’ score – a precipitous drop from the 77% and 91% marks of seasons one and two. The audience score was more damning: 19%.
The structural problem was not merely one of quantity but of ambition. Season four introduced a new faction in the Keepers, explored the origins of the Jennifer Incident, attempted to resolve the enigma of Reginald Hargreeves’ wife Abigail, and still found space for a subplot in which Five and Lila become lost across multiple timelines for seven years. Each of these threads merited space; together, they strangled one another. Radio Times described it as “a race to the finish line” where the pay-off felt rushed, while TheWrap‘s Lauren Thoman concluded that “launching a plane and landing it are two different skill sets.”
The Cast Carried the Weight Where the Scripts Faltered
What prevented the season from collapsing entirely was its cast – a group of actors who had, over five years and numerous delays caused by the pandemic and the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, developed an almost telepathic ensemble chemistry. Aidan Gallagher, merely twenty years old during filming, inhabited the fifty-eight-year-old Number Five with a physical commitment that bordered on the uncanny: his creaking posture, his exasperated vocal fry, his perpetual air of being the only adult in a room full of manchildren. TheWrap noted he “will be hard to accept going forward as anything but a crotchety 58-year-old time traveller after embodying Five so fully for four seasons.”
Robert Sheehan’s Klaus found an unexpected emotional register in sobriety – his usual manic energy replaced by a jittery, hypochondriac anxiety that, at its best, felt like a genuine evolution rather than a reset. Justin H. Min’s Ben, the resurrected Sparrow Academy variant, finally received the narrative weight the character had long deserved, becoming the season’s fulcrum through his connection to Jennifer and the apocalyptic Cleanse. Ritu Arya’s Lila Pitts and Gallagher’s Five, paired together on a time-displacement odyssey across episode five, provided the season’s most coherent and emotionally satisfying arc – a relationship built on mutual exasperation that gradually deepened into genuine affection.
Steve Blackman’s Shadow Over the Final Act
The season’s reception was further complicated by a Rolling Stone investigation published in June 2024, weeks before the premiere. The report detailed a January 2023 HR complaint filed by twelve former writers and support staffers accusing Blackman of “a long history of toxic, bullying, manipulative, and retaliatory behavior.” Allegations included pitting staffers against one another, taking credit for others’ work, and making remarks described as sexist, homophobic, and transphobic. In text messages provided to HR, Blackman wrote about Elliot Page’s coming out as trans: “Oh my f – king God. Kill me now.” Blackman’s representative dismissed the claims as those of “a handful of disgruntled employees” and maintained the texts referred to the logistical challenge of rewriting scripts under a compressed timeline.
Universal Content Productions launched an investigation in spring 2023 and cleared Blackman of most allegations, though sources told Rolling Stone the investigation was less than comprehensive – a majority of people named in the complaint were never contacted. The Writers Guild of America intervened on the question of credits, amending Blackman’s sole “teleplay by” credit on the series finale. The allegations cast a pall over the final season’s release, raising questions about the working conditions behind a show that championed empathy and acceptance – values embodied most visibly in Page’s Viktor.
Without Gerard Way’s Blueprint, the Narrative Meandered
The most revealing dimension of season four’s struggles was its relationship to its source material. The first three seasons had drawn from Way and Gabriel Bá’s graphic novels – Apocalypse Suite, Dallas, and Hotel Oblivion. Season four ventured into largely uncharted territory. Without the structural scaffolding of the comics, the narrative meandered. Subplots proliferated without resolution; mysteries accumulated without payoff. The Keepers, introduced as a shadowy threat, were dispatched without adequate explanation. Abigail Hargreeves’ significance was gestured at rather than explored.
Blackman acknowledged the challenge to Collider, noting that he wanted “to explain the Jennifer Incident” while conceding that “there will still be mysteries left.” Way, speaking at the August 2024 Hollywood premiere, expressed pride: “I’m really proud of everybody’s hard work and how much they cared about the world.” Yet the world Way and Bá continue to build in print tells a different story. Their new comic series, The Umbrella Academy: Plan B, launched in June 2025 through Dark Horse Comics as a six-issue run picking up directly after Hotel Oblivion – introducing the Sparrows as primary antagonists, a thread the Netflix series only touched upon in its muddled third season. Bá told Variety that the show “took elements from our original story and worked it out into telling it their way.” The comics, unburdened by budget constraints or network notes, retain the anarchic inventiveness that made the original work so compelling.
The Self-Sacrifice Ending That Rushed Its Own Emotional Logic
The season’s climactic gambit – in which the Hargreeves, realising that their very existence is the source of the world’s recurring apocalypses, choose to let the Cleanse consume them, erasing themselves from every timeline – was, by any measure, a bold narrative swing. It subverted the conventional superhero finale in which the team defeats the villain and returns to a restored status quo. Instead, the siblings accept that the only way to save the world is to ensure they never existed in it at all.
Blackman described the ending to Collider as the conclusion he had always envisioned: “I wanted to challenge the notion of, can you be a superhero if nobody knows you ever existed? I wanted to have an untraditional ending. I didn’t want them to die, per se, but this was a way to get them to a worthy ending where they’re saving a world that they caused to go kablooey themselves.” The ambition was admirable. The execution, however, was hampered by the compressed runtime. The emotional weight of the siblings’ sacrifice – the gravity of choosing non-existence – deserved a slower, more meditative treatment than six episodes could provide. As Autostraddle‘s Valerie Anne wrote: “This is the way The Umbrella Academy ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.” The post-credits scene – eight marigold flowers blooming at the base of a tree in a restored timeline – invited speculation about renewal but felt more like a tease than a payoff.
A Legacy Defined by What Almost Was
The Umbrella Academy season four illustrated the tension between creative ambition and structural limitation – a tension that, paradoxically, mirrored the show’s own themes. The Hargreeves siblings spent four seasons discovering that their gifts were inseparable from their damage; the show itself discovered that its strengths were inseparable from its constraints. The ensemble remained beating: Elliot Page’s Viktor emerged as the emotional anchor, and Nielsen data confirmed the audience’s investment – 155 million viewing hours in the show’s first half-year, with season one re-entering the streaming charts alongside it.
Yet the season also exposed the fragility of television conclusions. Unlike its comic-book progenitor, which continues to unfold in a medium unconstrained by episode orders or production schedules, the Netflix series was forced to compress, summarise, and ultimately sacrifice nuance for the sake of narrative closure. The result was a season that oscillated between moments of genuine emotional resonance – the siblings reuniting, Five and Lila’s time-lost romance, Klaus confronting his sobriety – and stretches of bewildering incoherence.
For fans, the bittersweetness was compounded by the knowledge that the Umbrella Academy story lives on. Plan B, with its exploration of the Sparrows and the question of who truly controls the Hargreeves legacy, suggests that Way and Bá are far from finished with this universe. The Hargreeves family, it turns out, were always better at causing chaos than resolving it. Their television swansong, appropriately enough, did precisely the same.
