‘The Umbrella Academy’ Season 3 Ending – The Same Trick Twice?

The Umbrella Academy has returned this week for season 3 on Netflix, and after binging the entire thing in two days, I’ll say that while the series is still pretty solid, by the end, I’ll admit I am starting to get somewhat annoyed with the repeated premise of all these seasons.

Now in season 3, we are on our third apocalypse that threatens to wipe out all of existence, which even the show kind of treats as a running joke at this point, that literally all they’re doing is non-stop trying to save the universe with maybe a day’s rest in between imminent disasters. Spoilers follow.

This time, their time travel meddling appears to be what’s responsible, as they’ve entered a timeline where they should not exist, given that all their mothers were killed before they were born by a man Viktor gave powers to decades earlier. It’s a grandfather paradox with a few extra steps, and as a result, all of existence decays.

Fortunately, the entire universe collapses except for the cosmic hotel they’re staying in, so the finale of the show has them attempting one last plan to save everything, executed by their totally untrustworthy father and secret alien, Reginald Hargreeves.

The result is…close to identical to what happened at the end of season 2, heading into season 3. After hitting the universe “reset” button, the Umbrella team enters a new timeline where things are different, people are missing, and they have to figure out what’s changed.

This is pretty much what we saw at the end of season 2, where their timeline meddling saw the creation of an entirely different superhero team, the Sparrow Academy, and they had to figure things out from there.

Now, they are dealing with:

• All of them have lost their powers, their “Marigold” presumably eaten by the machine in order to make this reality possible.
• Luther is alive but his Sparrow Academy wife Sloane is missing for some reason.
• Allison is missing, but we can see that Hargreeves has indeed fiddled with the reset settings to give her her family back.
• Hargreeves himself now apparently is some sort of massive business tycoon with multiple corporations that make up the entire city. Also his dead wife, who he was keeping on the moon, is now alive again. So it seems that even though his plan was interrupted and he was killed by Allison during the process, he still got everything he wanted.

I guess I just wonder how long we can keep doing this same concept where A) the entire world/universe is threatened and then saved and then B) the group is thrown into some sort of altered reality situation in the process where a bunch of stuff is totally changed. Like again, the show is good at baseline, and season 3 had a lot of great moments, particularly with Viktor, Allison and Five, I thought, but the overall format does seem to be getting a bit tired. Fan enthusiasm seems to be waning a bit too. Season 3 has a 68% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, compared to the 88% of season 2 and the 85% of season 1. Not sure if everyone is experiencing the same kind of fatigue as me, but I feel like it could be a factor.

I just hope season 4 is a bit different, that’s all, but we are starting out pretty similar already.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.