Need a refresher on everything that went down in The Umbrella Academy’s action-packed first season? Well, grab a jelly doughnut from Griddy’s, stay away from any suspicious-looking briefcases, and leave your daddy issues at home because it’s time for a recap.
In the first season of The Umbrella Academy, the powerful Hargreeves siblings deal with heartache, loss, and challenging family dynamics as they race against time to stop the impending apocalypse. Thanks to time-traveling Number Five’s (Aidan Gallagher) peek into the future, they must band together to stop Viktor (Elliot Page) before he inadvertently destroys the world.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Just be forewarned, there are more spoilers ahead than in an advance copy of Extra Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven.
It all goes back to Oct. 1, 1989. On that day, 43 women around the world gave birth to children even though they weren’t previously pregnant. A wealthy, eccentric man named Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore) found seven of those children (later revealed to have superpowers) and adopted them to form the Umbrella Academy. He taught the children to harness their powers to fight crime (well, all but one of the kids — but more on that later), but he wasn’t exactly the world’s best father. Let’s just say love and affection didn’t come naturally to him.
In the first episode of Season 1, we meet almost all of the seven siblings who were brought together as children. They return to the mansion they grew up in after Reginald unexpectedly dies. Number One is Luther (Tom Hopper), an abnormally large man who has until recently been stationed on the moon. Number Two is Diego (David Castañeda), who moonlights as a crime fighter and can throw knives with deadly accuracy. Number Three is Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman), a movie star who can make people do anything by telling them she heard a rumor that they did it. Number Four is Klaus (Robert Sheehan), who can talk to dead people and is a drug addict. After that, things get a little complicated. Number Five has been missing since he was a kid, after he accidentally time-traveled into the future, and Number Six (Justin H. Min) is dead. Last of all, Number Seven, aka Viktor, seemingly has no powers at all.
It turns out that Reginald Hargreeves killed himself in order to bring the siblings together because he knew it was the only way they would unite to stop the apocalypse. He’s helped by the other two members of the household, Grace (Jordan Claire Robbins), a lifelike robot that has taken care of the Hargreeves children since they were young, and Pogo (voiced by Adam Godley), a supersmart chimpanzee butler. Reginald’s death has the intended effect when the surviving siblings unite at the mansion, and Number Five appears through a time portal to tell them that he’s been to the future and they have eight days to stop the apocalypse. Even though the siblings are estranged — because some of them abandoned the academy and Viktor published a tell-all novel called Extra Ordinary: My Life as Number Seven — they decide to work together.
Remember when we said Viktor was the only one of the Hargreeves siblings who didn’t have any powers? Turns out, that’s not entirely true. In fact, he’s the most powerful of them all. When he gets upset, his emotions create incredibly destructive energy waves, so Reginald had concealed his powers from him since he was young. One day, Viktor meets Leonard Peabody (John Magaro), a new violin student, and the two begin a romantic relationship. Unbeknownst to Viktor, Leonard is actually Harold Jenkins, a man who is darkly obsessed with the Umbrella Academy and who just got out of prison for killing his father. Yep, even in the world of The Umbrella Academy, dating sucks. Jenkins finds Reginald’s journal (that Klaus had impulsively tossed in a garbage can), which reveals the full extent of Viktor’s powers. He then gets Viktor to stop taking the medication that controls his powers, kills a fellow orchestra member so Viktor can become first chair, lures Viktor to an isolated cabin, and helps him unleash his full destructive force. After Viktor seriously injures Allison and kills Grace, Pogo, and Leonard, his intense emotions funnel into a beam of energy that blasts into the moon, breaking off a large chunk that hurtles toward Earth and causes the apocalypse.
Unfortunately, they don’t know he’s behind it until it’s too late! When Five initially portals back into the present (in a child’s body, since he got the calculations wrong), the only clue he has to go on to find the person who causes the apocalypse is a glass eyeball. He figures out that the maker of the glass eyeball is a lab called Meritech Prosthetics, but all of the evidence is destroyed before he can get his hands on the information that would lead him to the right person. (Later, Leonard loses an eye in a fight, which reveals that the eyeball belongs to him.) All that effort was worth it, though, if only for the hilarious scene where Klaus pretends he’s Five’s dad during an interrogation at the lab.
Right. A time-traveling organization called the Commission works to protect the world’s current timeline by assassinating anyone who might alter it. Five previously worked for the Commission after he was recruited by the Handler (Kate Walsh) in the future. When he goes rogue and travels to the present to stop the apocalypse, the Commission sends two agents, Hazel (Cameron Britton) and Cha-Cha (Mary J. Blige), to kill him. (Members of the Commission use briefcases to time travel since they don’t have the power to do so on their own.) The deadly duo shoot up the Hargreeves mansion, destroy evidence at Meritech (while incredibly high), kidnap Klaus, lose their time-traveling briefcase, and kill Diego’s girlfriend, Detective Eudora Patch (Ashley Madekwe). But they don’t succeed in stopping Five. Hazel does, however, succeed in finding the love of his life, Agnes (Sheila McCarthy), a waitress at local diner Griddy’s Doughnuts, much to Cha-Cha’s lethal consternation. By the end of the season, Five has sabotaged the Commission’s ’50s-era headquarters and Hazel shoots the Handler.
Glad you asked! Bereft of any other human interaction while he was in the future, Five fell in love with a mannequin named Dolores. Yes, you read that correctly. He tracks her down in a department store once he’s traveled to the present and carries her with him for most of the season. Meanwhile, Luther and Allison finally admit the feelings they’ve had for each other since they were kids. Klaus accidentally time-travels back to 1968 and falls in love with a Vietnam soldier named Dave (Calem MacDonald), and after he travels back to the future, he sobers up mainly so he can speak to Dave’s ghost.
Maybe! At the end of the first season, the Hargreeves siblings track Viktor down at an orchestra concert where he’s about to send a blast of energy into the moon, causing the apocalypse. As they battle the agents of the Commission, Klaus is able to use his powers to let their deceased brother, Ben (Justin H. Min), take on a physical form so he can defeat all of the agents. (This is a new power for Klaus as he was only previously able to talk to Ben, not physically manifest him.) The siblings then unite on the stage of the theater, where Five is able to time-travel with all of them seconds before the apocalyptic blast hits the theater. Will they be able to alter events so the world doesn’t end? On to Season 2!
