Is The Umbrella Academy Ending At Season 4?
Warning: The following contains spoilers for "The Umbrella Academy" season 3.
The "Umbrella Academy" season 3 finale feels like an ending. The latest batch of episodes sees the Hargreeves siblings endure a true apocalypse for the first time, but they also make it out of the Hotel Oblivion after hitting a reset button that sends them to a new version of their reality. Only, in this world, the Hargreeves siblings don't have superpowers.
"Oblivion" ends with Viktor, Diego, Allison, Luther, Klaus, and Five parting ways to try to live normal, apocalypse-free lives for once. It's not exactly closure, but it's a surprise ending that seems to take away the central conceit for the series entirely, leaving fans to wonder where the show could possibly go next. According to showrunner Steve Blackman, the series has at least one more season worth of familial dysfunction to explore.
Blackman told The Wrap that he has had a four-season plan for the series for a while now, and that if the show gets another season (it's not yet renewed), it could be its last. "I think inevitably if we got a season 4, it's going towards an endgame," Blackman said. He continued:
"I think at a certain point, I'm not sure where we'd go after season 4. We have to be careful. My plan for next year is not to continually tread on the same ground we have before. It's a challenge to come up with a new way to subvert this storyline, and I think we have an idea how to do that."
The showrunner weighs in
The filmmaker says that the team's ideas for season 4 "would be a great ending for the run of the show," which seems like a pretty definitive clue that the series aims to wrap up after four seasons. Yet, the fourth season still has to be ordered by the streamer, which has very publicly been changing strategies and axing programming lately. Netflix typically doesn't renew series immediately after they air, so it may be a while until we hear more about the status of season four.
The series based on Gerard Way's comic books has reinvented itself with each new batch of episodes, beginning in the present day before time travelling back to the 1960s. The latest season saw the Hargreeves return to a version of the present-day that was fundamentally changed by their timeline meddling, so that the Umbrella Academy as they knew it never existed.
The show also introduced The Sparrows, an alternate timeline version of the Hargreeves that seemingly functioned as a much more well-oiled machine than their counterparts. By the season's end, The Sparrows seem to have vanished, while the Hargreeves are back to their pre-apocalypse selves — albeit without their powers. The show is also neck and neck with Way's comic series now, as its third arc was published in 2019.
Blackman doesn't sound entirely opposed to continuing "Umbrella Academy" beyond its initial four-season plan, but for now, one more season seems to be the goal. "I'm not saying I couldn't do more, but you know," he says, but "I think that would be very satisfying for the audience, four seasons."