There may be no vacancies at the Hotel Obsidian, but there’s always room for one more when it comes time to do an Umbrella Academy season catch-up!
At the start of Season 3, the Academy may have made it back to the present, but things are far from perfect. Thanks to changes they made in the past, the Hargreeves siblings now find themselves in a parallel universe with a different “academy” full of superpowered crime fighters, a world-destroying ball of energy, and a hotel more difficult to leave than the Hotel California.
In fact, the Hargreeves siblings may be facing their most dangerous threat yet: the complete collapse of the world’s timeline as they know it. Will they be able to save the universe before it’s too late? Glad you asked! Start blasting some ambient bee noises, don’t ring any suspicious bells, and steer clear of Hotel Obsidian TripAdvisor reviews (those cockroaches are seriously out of control) — it’s time for a quick recap of The Umbrella Academy Season 3.
When the Umbrella Academy returns to the present at the start of the season, they find Reginald (Colm Feore) there with a different set of adopted siblings called the Sparrow Academy. After meeting the time-traveling Hargreeves siblings back in 1963 (and not being too impressed), Reginald decided to adopt an entirely different set of superpowered children born on Oct. 1, 1989. In this timeline, that’s muscular Marcus (Justin Cornwell), raven-controlling Fei (Britne Oldford), Christopher (a floating, telekinetic cube), venom-spitting Jayme (Cazzie David), levitating Sloane (Genesis Rodriguez), Alphonso (Jake Epstein), who can cause others to feel any pain inflicted on him, and tentacle-throwing Ben (Justin H. Min). Yes, that’s the same Ben who was in the Umbrella Academy, but this version is way, way meaner.
Far from it. In fact, they immediately start fighting. After the two sparring Academies have an all-out brawl in the mansion (complete with a hallucinatory group dance to “Footloose”), the Umbrella Academy flees and checks into the nearby Hotel Obsidian. In order to calm things down, Viktor (Elliot Page) secretly meets with Marcus to try and make a deal. Meanwhile, this timeline’s version of Grace (Jordan Claire Robbins) discovers a pulsating ball of energy in the mansion’s basement and starts worshipping it as a god. (Yeah, she kind of loses it.) Before a deal is finalized, Marcus returns to the mansion and gets sucked into the ball of energy. That’s gonna be a hard one to come back from!
The Hotel Obsidian is an old luxury hotel with a secret. Needing a place to stay, the Umbrella Academy checks into the hotel, and it doesn’t take long for some seriously weird things to go down. It turns out that the hotel was originally built by Reginald to hide a portal to another universe that can be found behind a wall in the White Buffalo Suite. Before they discover the portal, however, a lot of people start disappearing.
Well, Luther (Tom Hopper) is kidnapped by the Sparrow Academy because they believe he’s behind Marcus’ disappearance. Meanwhile, the actual cause of Marcus’ disappearance (that pulsating ball of energy) starts sending out waves into the city that then contract and take animals, people, and things with it. By using a time-traveling briefcase to visit a rapidly deteriorating Commission, Five (Aidan Gallagher) is able to learn from his older self that the energy is something called a Kugelblitz that’s sending “Kugel waves” out to slowly destroy the universe. The Umbrella Academy accidentally created the Kugelblitz by causing a grandfather paradox. What’s a grandfather paradox, you ask? Well, the quick version is that the siblings returned to a present universe where all of their mothers were killed before they were born, creating an inherent contradiction, hence the paradox.
Soon after the Hargreeves siblings check into the Hotel Obsidian, another mysterious man (Callum Keith Rennie) checks into the hotel under the name Lester Pocket. “Lester” is actually Harlan, now grown up (he was played by Justin Paul Kelly in Season 2). After the Umbrella Academy traveled back to the present, Harlan was left with some of Viktor’s powers. When his mother, Sissy, tragically died on Oct. 1, 1989, Harlan sent out an intense burst of energy that killed all of the Umbrella Academy’s mothers. Now, as Lester, he sends out a similar burst of energy when the Sparrow Academy attacks the Hotel Obsidian, killing both Jayme and Alphonso. And after Viktor takes his powers back from Lester, Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) kills the unlucky guy in revenge for causing her to be trapped in a universe where her daughter doesn’t exist.
Yes! Morally ambiguous Lila (Ritu Arya) also shows up at the Hotel Obsidian with a child, Stan (Javon Walton), who she says is Diego’s (David Casteñeda). (That’s not true. Stan is actually just the child of a friend. But Lila is actually pregnant with Diego’s child.) Stan wreaks plenty of havoc at the hotel, including accidentally killing Klaus (Robert Sheehan) with a harpoon gun. (Don’t worry, he can come back from the dead.) When Stan goes missing, Lila and Diego travel through the universe portal in the White Buffalo Suite to search for him. Once there, they encounter a murderous “guardian” who chops off two of Diego’s fingers before they’re able to make it back to safety. Once they do, and once they finally track down Stan, however, a Kugel wave immediately causes him to disintegrate right before their eyes.
Love is happening! As he spends time with the Sparrow Academy, Luther falls in love with Sloane. Eventually, Lila, Christopher, Viktor, and Sloane try to contain the Kugelblitz in the mansion’s basement. They manage to trap it for a short period of time, but it then explodes, killing Christopher and Fei in the process. Then the Umbrella Academy (along with Sloane, Ben, and Reginald) escape to the Hotel Oblivion where they await the end of the world. Hours before everything disappears, Luther and Sloane announce that they’re getting married. They have a happy wedding, all things considered, but then Reginald murders Luther — which kind of puts a damper on things.
Reginald had previously tried to get everyone to pass through the portal to the other universe to fight the guardian and “ring the seven bells.” Unfortunately for him, they refused. Thinking on his feet, Reginald kills Luther and frames the guardian to convince everyone to pass through the portal for revenge. (Everyone, that is, except for Klaus, whom Reginald pushes out of the doorway at the last minute.) Once in the Hotel Oblivion in the other universe, the team kill the guardians and activate the “seven bells” on the hotel’s floor. A machine built by the creator of the universe appears, and Reginald begins to frantically attempt to operate it, while the life force is rapidly drained from everyone else except Allison. Allison kills Reginald before he can finish trying to reset the universe with the machine, and the team is transported to yet another world.
Some things are better! Allison returns home to find both her daughter, Claire (Coco Assad), and former husband, Ray (Yusuf Gatewood). The rest of the team emerges in a courtyard where the hotel once stood. They’re now in a futuristic city where all of the buildings bear the Hargreeves name and where Reginald can be seen in a tall tower with a woman previously identified as “Abigail Hargreeves.” (In an earlier episode, we had a quick glimpse of her cryogenically frozen on the moon.) That’s not the biggest surprise, though! In a last-minute twist, it appears that the Umbrella Academy have all lost their powers. One thing’s for sure: That’s not going to go well.
