The Umbrella Academy season 4 answered the biggest questions the previous seasons left, including why Five created The Commission. Seizing the rise of dark superhero stories, Netflix brought The Umbrella Academy, a TV adaptation of the comic book series of the same name by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá. The Umbrella Academy was a big success for the streaming platform, but its time came to an end with its fourth season, which, even though was the shortest, was packed with action, drama, and answers to the biggest questions the series had left.
After arriving at a new timeline without their powers at the end of The Umbrella Academy season 3, season 4 caught up with the Hargreeves and Lila six years later. The Hargreeves and Lila teamed up again for a rescue mission that led them to regain their powers, reunite with Reginald, and make some shocking discoveries about the end of the world and their influence in the multiverse. The Umbrella Academy season 4 also solved the mystery of Five and the creation of The Commission, which came with another surprise.
The Umbrella Academy Season 4 Reveals Five Created The Commission To Fix The Broken Timeline
The Umbrella Academy Answered The Biggest Question About The Commission
The goal of The Commission was to make sure that all events that were supposed to happen in each timeline happened.
The Commission was an organization that oversaw and managed the space-time continuum. The goal of The Commission was to make sure that all events that were supposed to happen in each timeline happened. To ensure this, The Commission had various agents who were sent through time and space to get rid of anyone who threatened to mess with the events that needed to happen. The Commission was led by a Board of Directors led by A. J. Carmichael, but the employee the Hargreeves (and mostly Five) had to deal with the most was The Handler (Kate Walsh).
In The Umbrella Academy season 2, The Commission faced a coup by a group of employees led by Herb, who was later chosen as the interim Chair of the Board after Carmichael, The Handler, and other board members were killed. Unfortunately, in The Umbrella Academy season 3, Five and Lila traveled to The Commission to understand the new apocalypse but found the headquarters in ruins. A recording left by Herb explained that the timeline was collapsing and everyone else was gone, and he was then sucked up by the Kugelblitz.
Five learned that the presence of the marigolds (a.k.a. the 43 children) broke the timeline, causing it to branch, creating a multiverse.
There, Five and Lila also found an old man with a cryptic tattoo and a missing arm inside a breathing chamber. The man was the founder of The Commission, as well as an elderly future version of Five. Season 3 didn’t go further into this, but season 4 solved this in its final episode. Five learned that the presence of the marigolds (a.k.a. the 43 children) broke the timeline, causing it to branch, creating a multiverse. Five created The Commission to get rid of those timelines, but that never went as he wanted.
The Commission’s Founder Was One Of The Number Five Subway Variants
Five Came Across A Huge Surprise At The Subway
The diner was run by variants of Five who had given up trying to save their respective timelines.
The reason why Five didn’t remember founding The Commission nor could he understand why he did it was because he wasn’t the founder. In the final episode of The Umbrella Academy, Five left his siblings and returned to the multiverse subway station to take the train. At one station, Five saw himself and followed him, arriving at a diner hidden at the station called Max’s Delicatessen. The diner was run by variants of Five who had given up trying to save their respective timelines.
The diner’s walls were full of artwork of the different ways the Hargreeves had ended the world across the multiverse, so Five understood that they were doomed to destroy the timelines over and over again. One of his variants went ahead and created The Commission, while the rest either continued fighting for their respective timelines or gave up and joined the other Fives at the diner.
The Commission’s Purpose Explains Why It Wanted The Umbrella Academy Dead
The Commission Spent Years Going After The Umbrella Academy
Five also learned the solution to all of this: their deaths.
Five’s surprise meeting with his variants at the diner was packed with shocking reveals. In addition to learning that their births shattered the timeline, one of his variants created The Commission, and that they were doomed to end the world over and again, Five also learned the solution to all of this: their deaths. To stop the loop, erase the branches and restore the main timeline, Jennifer’s durango had to consume all the marigolds, so the Umbrellas had to sacrifice themselves.
The Five who founded The Commission surely learned at some point that the deaths of the Umbrellas were key to fixing the timeline.
Before this revelation, the Umbrellas had escaped from the apocalypses they faced (except the one at the beginning of season 2, but Five was the one who escaped). This reset the timelines and carried on with the loop, and it explains why The Commission wanted to kill the Umbrellas. Throughout seasons 1 and 2, The Handler made it a personal mission to end with Five and then his siblings as well, forcing them to escape from her and the apocalypse and jump to other timelines.
The Five who founded The Commission surely learned at some point that the deaths of the Umbrellas were key to fixing the timeline, hence why The Commission went after the team in seasons 1 and 2. This, however, raises even more questions, such as, if the agents of The Commission could travel anywhere in time and space, why didn’t they go back in time to make sure the marigolds didn’t make it to Earth or got rid of the mothers of the 43 children right before giving birth.
The Umbrella Academy Season 4 Proves The Commission Was A Failure
The Commission Wouldn’t Have Worked In Any Timeline
If the Hargreeves were doomed to end the world over and over again, The Commission was doomed to fail.
The Commission’s goal is understandable, but it was never going to work. The main timeline branched out into quite possibly infinite timelines, and even if The Commission worked at a “neutral” point in time and space, allowing it to keep track of the timelines and the threats to the events that had to happen, its goal was going to be near impossible. If the Hargreeves were doomed to end the world over and over again and were trapped in a loop as the Cleanse/durango never consumed all the marigolds, The Commission was doomed to fail.
The Commission served as the antagonist of the first two seasons, and it should have stayed that way. The reveal of a Five variant being the founder of the organization and his reasons for it only made The Commission useless and its mission a failure, and left many questions about how much Five knew about the multiverse and why he never tried other, more direct ways to restore the timeline.