Umbrella Academy Season 3 Recap: The Ultimate Test for the Hargreeves Family

In the third season of The Umbrella Academythe Hargreeves siblings must band together to save the world from certain doom. Sound familiar? It should, because that’s also the recap of seasons 1 and 2 of The Umbrella Academy.

But that’s not necessarily a bug. Sometimes resetting plots and settings ad infinitum can be frustrating – and there are certainly moments in this season of The Umbrella Academy this feels like something that has happened before. At the same time, showrunner Steve Blackman introduces many new plots, new characters, and new settings to complicate everything, some straight out of the comics, some loosely inspired by them, and some just for fun. There’s a lot to process, both starkly different and stunningly the same. But in the end it all comes down to the Hargreeves siblings and the ill-fated cycle of their own making. How much you enjoy this season will depend on how much you enjoy stories about people suffering because they keep making the wrong choices, even in the face of possible annihilation.

[Ed. note: This review contains some mild setup spoilers for the third season of The Umbrella Academy.]

This season finally kicks off with the Hargreeves siblings in 2019 — except it’s a different version of 2019 than they know due to their shenanigans in 1963. The biggest difference is that Reginald Hargreeves did it Not adopt them as children. Instead, he chose seven different super-powered children born on October 1, 1989. They are now an elite team of crime fighters known as Sparrow Academy.

At first, most members of the Umbrella Academy seem resigned to accepting their new destiny in this strange timeline, but they soon realize that their presence in this alternate reality seems to have triggered one New Apocalypse on the Horizon. Luther (Tom Hopper), Diego (David Castañeda), Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman), Klaus (Robert Sheehan), Five (Aidan Gallagher) and Viktor (Elliot Page) must work alongside a whole new cast of dysfunctional Hargreeves siblings to come to an end to stop the world.

at its core, The Umbrella Academy is a tragedy – the seven siblings trapped in their patterns and unable to break out of them due to their own fundamental flaws. Set dressing may change, but it’s still the Hargreeves siblings coping with their own trauma and making terrible decisions. For those who want the Hargreeves siblings to finally learn, grow, and successfully stop the apocalypse, the bad news is that this season will feel long and drawn out, reflecting many of the same arguments and disagreements.

It doesn’t help that this season’s pacing feels a bit odd, with the last three episodes in particular being disjointed, almost as if they’re from a different season entirely. The bigger mysteries that will be revealed in the later episodes could use more building work initially, but then again there is so much groundwork with the new timeline, new characters and changing motives of everyone. Last season benefited from the fact that audiences were already so familiar with the characters that they grew well when thrown into a new environment – because yes, of course Klaus started a cult and Allison is at the forefront of the civil rights movement and Diego managed to throw himself into a psychiatric hospital.

This time around, some plot elements get more attention than others, and it certainly feels massively uneven. Especially the main driving force for the last three episodes doesn’t get built up much until it suddenly becomes the most important thing in the universe. Meanwhile, other important threads from previous seasons are being quickly tied up and put to rest without much resulting fanfare. While these plot elements end up being unbalanced, the focus is still on the Hargreeves family.

With a whole new cast of characters this season and more lore (not to mention a whole new 50 years or so affected by the Umbrellas’ antics of 1963), there’s quite a lot of moving parts. But for those invested in dysfunctional family members who are both each other’s salvation and ultimate downfall, the addition of a family unit that might be more powerful (and certainly better at all teamwork) provides a fun contrast for the Umbrella Hargreeves to game against.

The red thread that unites all three seasons The Umbrella Academy are the Hargreeves siblings and all their shit. In the first season, everyone was pretty much at each other’s throats; in the second, after being scattered about various points in the 1960s, they finally found solace and joy in their reunions. This season is a bit of both – after they screw up yet again, tensions are high and the presence of another (seemingly better) family makes things worse. However, being the only people who can relate to it, they find some sense of solidarity with one another as the end of the world looms (again).

There are moments that could go deeper. Allison and Diego — the only two siblings who are people of color — confiding in each other that they were trapped in the 1960s, for example, might lend itself to deeper interrogation rather than just being an excuse for Allison to open up harden. But while the characters constantly bicker, it’s different from the chilling animosity seen in Season 1. We’ve seen how they got along this time, and we know that deep down they love each other — it’s just after a lifetime, Having competed against each other and subjected to brutal training routines, they are still processing all of that trauma. And that means that even when they try to fix things, they still make the same mistakes and fall into the same patterns. It can be frustrating, but it makes sense. The Hargreeves siblings may grow as individuals, but ultimately they are trapped in a prison of their own design, bound to one another and pulled down by their weakest link.

While the Sparrows are many characters at once at first, they eventually fit well into the established dynamic. It helps that the two families have one point in common: Ben, who in the Umbrella Academy universe was a cute boy who tragically died (and whose spirit has stayed with Klaus in previous seasons); at Sparrow Academy, he’s the cutthroat, cocky number two of the family. The Sparrows provide an interesting contrast to the Umbrellas, a family who on the surface get along well but actually hate each other. Throw in Diego’s zany art-ex, Lila (Ritu Arya), who catapults herself right into the mix of things, as well as the Hargreeves patriarch’s version in this timeline, and this season is almost fully resilient to just how many characters and dynamics it has can juggle. But when everything falls into place and individual groups stand out, it gets pretty fun.

This season of That Umbrella Academy is a a lot of. It is so much. And yet it is the way it has always been. There may be new characters and new locations and a new doomsday cataclysm on the horizon, but at the end of the day it’s a show about a group of siblings who love each other dearly, while at the same time being incredibly horrid to one another because they know exactly how they can break each other.

When it comes to, The Umbrella Academy always delivers. The reason the world keeps ending is because the Hargreeves siblings keep screwing up. This is the third time this has happened, and as the show continues to thrive, it’s likely that they’ll fail a lot more than they succeed. It’s frustrating but delicious that way. And for those drawn to the cyclical nature of recurring tragedy and family love as both a source of strength and ultimate weakness, The umbrella academy ccontinues to be as intoxicating to viewers as the Hargreeves family is to themselves.

The third season of The Umbrella Academy comes to Netflix on June 22nd.