How long does it take to fall in love? The penultimate episode of The Umbrella Academy offers one answer: six years, five months, and two days. That’s roughly how long Five and Lila spend wandering the endless maze of subway tunnels before they end up acting on their mutual attraction, pausing their quest to cancel the apocalypse in favor of holing up in a cheerful little universe for two. Of course, we get to experience this story a little faster than Five and Lila experience it.
In a montage that runs a little under four minutes, The Umbrella Academy gives us those six years. We see Five and Lila wander, argue, and play checkers; feast on roasted subway rats and give each other minor surgeries and haircuts; and, at last, nuzzle on the subway car before waking up in the same bed. None of this is surprising, exactly.
The Umbrella Academy has been fairly unsubtle in teasing a flirtation between these two all season, and it’s totally plausible that they might fall for each other — probably in general and definitely in this specific situation. They are, after all, each other’s one constant in an ever-shifting rotation of alternate universes. It doesn’t hurt that the execution of this sequence is so strong.
Neville Kidd, The Umbrella Academy ’s longtime cinematographer, does a credible job selling this love story over a compressed timeline. A well-chosen song — “Ahead by a Century” by The Tragically Hip — does some emotional heavy lifting, and Aidan Gallagher and Ritu Arya, two of the show’s strongest actors, manage to sell this love story with little more than glances and smiles. But as much as I enjoyed this flourish, it’s hard not to wonder: What might a more effectively paced version of this storyline have looked like? One instructive parallel might be “ Long, Long Time ,” the widely acclaimed third episode of HBO’s The Last of Us , to which this storyline in “Six Years, Five Months, and Two Days” bears more than a passing resemblance.
(Among other things, both episodes highlight the joy of eating strawberries with your lover in the post-apocalypse.) Part of why “Long, Long Time” worked so well is that The Last of Us was patient enough to spend an entire episode on it. In this case, I think the truncated episode order for The Umbrella Academy ’s final season is working against it.
At one point, Five briefly reminisces about the universes they’ve entered together over these years: one populated by secret police, another by feral pigs. But how much more impactful would this love story be if we got to see those adventures? How much more troubling would it be if we had more time to sit with Five’s decision not to tell Lila he’s found the way out? How much sadder would it be when Lila tells Five that their love affair was “survival, nothing more” and leaves him to return to Diego and their children? Instead, with the final season spanning a slender six episodes, The Umbrella Academy concludes other plotlines need to be served. We get a minor reconciliation between Viktor and Reginald — this timeline’s Reginald, anyway — in which he offers Viktor the affirmation that had always been denied.
Diego and Luther’s wacky CIA adventure takes a turn when Deputy CIA Director Lance Ribbons turns out to be a deep-cover Keeper, resulting in a massive, largely goofy fight scene set to (what else?) “Secret Agent Man.” And then there’s the resolution of Klaus’ weird little side quest. When we left at the end of the last episode , he’d been buried alive in a pet cemetery.
This episode finds him passing the time by playing with a lighter, singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” and befriending a ghost dog until Allison and Claire find him. It’s not that this subplot is bad , exactly; it’s that I don’t understand what purpose it served, especially in an abbreviated final season in which screen time is at a premium. Starting a few episodes ago, Klaus got into a mess of his own making; we met a bunch of side characters with no connection whatsoever to the larger narrative, and Klaus, now freed from the grave, has returned to the world of the living, apparently more or less the same as before.
And none too soon because the show’s grand finale will probably require each of the Umbrellas in top form (and ready to use the new superpowers we’ve hardly seen them play with yet). Ben and Jennifer are driving around in a fugue state, unwilling to accept that their own love story will also bring about the end of the world. The Umbrellas may want to stop it, but the Keepers, of course, are just fine with that.
But who’s really pulling the strings here, anyway? The episode’s climactic twist comes when the man we originally met as Sy Grossman confronts Gene outside the King Reg Burgers. Gene has been threatening Sy all episode, but Sy doesn’t waste time with threats, opting instead to kill Gene outright. And then rip off his own skin, because “Sy” isn’t Sy at all.
It’s Abigail Hargreeves, apparently emerging as the final season’s true villain, and slipping into Gene’s skin to take control of the militia. There are more questions than answers here. What is Abigail’s real plan here? Does Reginald know anything about it? Is she truly evil, or is there a benevolent motive beneath all this violence? We don’t know much yet, and the show doesn’t have a lot of time to tell us, but this disguise doesn’t seem likely to hold up for long — at the very least, Jean and Gene seem to understand each other intimately enough that it won’t take Jean long to realize someone is wearing her husband’s skin.
But that’s just one of many cliffhangers left to be resolved in the series finale. As the episode ends, Jean orders her fellow Keepers to “play the song” — and given this show’s penchant for needle-drops, I’m sure we’ll be kicking off the final episode with a good one. • Five makes Lila a bracelet — an apparently extraneous detail unless, say, that’s how Diego finds out she cheated on him with Five.
• A rough one for alt-comedy fans: We lost Nick Offerman and David Cross within the same episode. • But not before we learn that mint chocolate chip ice cream gives Gene the squirts. • At least Klaus acknowledges he’s borrowing a bit from Kill Bill .
• “I would strangle a kitten for a hot bath.” By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice and to receive email correspondence from us..
