Below you will find spoilers for the last season and episode of The Umbrella Academyso be warned if you have not saw it on Netflix.
For a series where every season was about preventing an apocalypse, The Umbrella Academy was not an easy ends in 2024and the shortened final season didn’t exactly help things run more smoothly. The season not only had to resolve the efforts to remove power from the conclusion of season three, but also tie up various loose ends while also wrapping up the long-awaited answer behind The Jennifer Incident. And how did it go? Well, everyone has their own experience.
I share the opinion of others online that the season probably would have been less choppy if it had kept the episode count of previous seasons and/or focused more on the core Hargreeves siblings rather than alternate versions of other characters. I still enjoyed the episodes immensely while watching them and, for better or worse, I’m still thinking about questions I have about the closing scene of the series finale, as well as the flowers revealed in the extended post-credits moment.
As viewers will recall, the OG Umbrella squad sacrificed themselves and allowed Ben and Jennifer’s Cleanse to finally take place, meaning the other 145,000+ additional timelines (subway stations) were invalidated and ceased to exist, leaving only the original timeline that wasn’t obscured by the group’s Marigold-fueled existences. And that untarnished reality was exemplified by the suburban utopia of a sunny day in the park with plenty of cameo appearances, suggesting that many of the characters from previous seasons were living their best lives. But that only led to confusion about the questions that followed.
Is that robot Grace and whose child is in the stroller?
Perhaps the most surprising appearance in the park—aside from Dolores, Number Five’s mannequin lover, who appears in the background—came from Grace, played by Jordan Claire Robbins, or Mom as she was affectionately known by the Umbrella siblings. This is the kind of cameo that’s possibly meant to be accompanied by a big, tongue-in-cheek shrug from showrunner Steve Blackman and the rest of the creative team, but I don’t know how to make the logic work well enough in my head.
I’m not sitting here wondering if Gabriel Bá’s cameo as an artist drawing Herb and Dot means that Bá exists in this universe. But what are we talking about here with Grace? This clearly can’t be the human woman who first caught Reginald’s eye in the 1960s, since she looks exactly the same. And I don’t know if I would automatically assume that this is a granddaughter who looks like her or something.
So that would mean it’s the same version of the robot that more or less raised the Hargreeves kids, but does that even make sense if Reginald created her to be the perfect mother because of all the nannies killed? Even if he had another version of Grace in the works in the ’80s, would she still be walking around with a stroller in 2024?
Which brings us to this all-important follow-up question: Who on earth could be sitting in that stroller? Does Robot Grace have a part-time babysitting job? (Or even a full-time job, because why not?) Or is this supposed to imply that Reginald Despite it take other people’s babies away for unknown reasons? I mean, I WANT to believe it’s Pogo’s kid in the stroller because Pogo is just such a great guy, but I’m afraid it’s nothing that fantastic.
Are these children being raised by other versions of Allison, Diego and Lila?
I can understand the logic behind Allison’s daughter Claire still existing in 2024, along with Lila and Diego’s children Grace and Coco and other family members, and not remembering any of the Brellies. But are these actually the same characters from earlier scenes in season four? Because if so, forgetting the memory of Allison, Lila, and Diego should raise major issues regarding the living conditions and science behind their existence.
If other characters like Kate Walsh’s Handler are enjoying their lives in the original timeline, wouldn’t Claire be living with her father Patrick instead of hanging out with family she wouldn’t have otherwise had contact with? And would Patrick be freaking out now, not knowing where his daughter is or even where her daughter came from?
Or is the idea here that Allison, Diego, Lila and the rest of the main characters in this universe experienced completely natural births without the powers given by Marigold and that they are actually alive out there? If so, would Grace’s middle name still be Stanley as a reference to Javon Walton’s Stan, who disappeared in season 3? Would her name even be Grace?
Okay, but what do the flowers actually mean?
The post-credits scene with the eight golden flowers no doubt left some viewers as confused as the romantic relationship between Five and Lila. On one hand, it seemed like this moment undermined the entire series by showing that Marigold (and presumably Durango) are still on our planet and could potentially wreak havoc again in the future. But it could also be a sign of hope that the core Brellies and their heroism are just as inevitable as any dangers out there.
When asked by Netflix’s Tudum whether the eight flowers actually represented a direct connection to the eight siblings, showrunner Steve Blackman replied:
Not necessarily. There are a lot of conclusions that can be drawn from that. We can assume that there’s an essence of Marigold still out there somewhere in the world. Maybe she never does anything again. And it could just be flowers, or it could be what’s left of it, because there happen to be eight flowers. And a few of them kind of transform into each other. But I’ll leave it up to the audience to decide what that really means. Does that mean there might be more of the Umbrella Academy, or is it just that a tiny part of her essence lives on?
I can actually support this kind of answer, as it doesn’t really matter if there is a “real” answer without more episodes to explore the ideas. So if fans definitely want to believe that the Hargreeves siblings will get back together and save the world from future disasters, then that’s just for the theories. As is the opposite idea, that this world will never have to worry about the threats that can only be dealt with by Five & Co., and that these flowers are the last gasp of Reginald and Abigail’s threat to humanity.
Especially because history will be turned on its head in a whole different way when Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá conclude their comic book arc. Which will hopefully happen sooner rather than later, no matter what timeline we’re talking about.
The Umbrella Academy can be streamed in full with a Netflix subscription.
