Peak TV has been good to fans of genre television. Almost suspiciously good. It seems like every other week there's a new series debuting with fantastical elements. From obvious fare like Doom Patrol and Titans to more subtle entries like Russian Doll and The Passage, science-fiction and fantasy have elbowed out more traditional fare such as medical dramas and police procedurals. But even among such a crowded field, Netflix's adaptation of The Umbrella Academy stands out for its commitment to Sparkle Motion™.

Based on the six-issue limited series The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba, the series follows a dysfunctional family of adult children as they reconnect in the wake of their father's death. The catch? The siblings were all adopted at birth by a weird old man who was obsessed with their virginal conception and potential superpowers. As such, they were treated more like soldiers and science experiments than kids, leaving each with deep and varied emotional trauma.

The Umbrella Academy doesn't hold any hands here. From episode one, the writing assumes the audience is familiar with the tropes of the superhero genre and is smart enough to follow this deconstruction journey. Being boxed into Netflix's ten episode format has left a lot of original shows feeling unevenly paced but somehow, The Umbrella Academy makes this work to their advantage. There are some truly bonkers questions left unanswered because they aren't important to the main narrative. The writing is smart enough and the actors talented enough that audiences just go along with it. However, it's worth popping the hood to take a look at all these potential future story hooks The Umbrella Academy just left lying around.

WARNING: Spoilers for the first season of The Umbrella Academy abound! However, this writer is a "canon virgin," going solely off the show's lore, so if any of these questions have been answered in subsequent comics, don't spoil it for folks in the comments!

1) What Year Is It?

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Image via Netflix

At first glance, The Umbrella Academy looks like a modern-day superhero story. The siblings talk about air travel and the fashions they wear are current and the calendar math adds up. But then things start to get weird. There are strains of near-futurism within the Academy mansion as Pogo (Adam Godley) and Grace (Jordan Clair Robbins) are the product of sci-fi level of technology. Even the mundane society leans towards the future with the sub-plot about Number Five (Aidan Gallagher) trying to find the owner of a missing prosthetic eye.

Yet for all the markers of modern day, there are some extremely retrograde concepts. No one in the narrative has a cell phone, with all calls being made from landlines or pay phones. Cars, what little we see of them, are more classic than modern. No one uses a computer, physical newspapers are still a thing as are answering machines. When Luther (Tom Hopper) is on the moon base, he has no way to instantly communicate with the outside world. Even music, which features so heavily in needle drop moments throughout the series, are played live or on record players. No iPods or even a Walkman in sight.

All of this can be explained as being an alternate timeline to our own but it is impressive how seamlessly the retro-future aesthetic flows throughout the narrative.

2) Wait, Dr. Hargreeves Is an Alien?

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Throughout The Umbrella Academy, the audience knows something is different about Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore). He's got a very "mad scientist" vibe going but the universe created by the show means you just kind of roll with it. Then the final episode opens with a younger Hargreeves being convinced by his dying wife to...flee the planet? And not Earth, but a Jules Verne dreamscape from which dozens of ships are rocketing off the surface.

It's clear that some great tragedy has befallen this alien world. Yet at the same time, the planet they are fleeing is extremely similar to our own. The odds of two separate civilizations inventing the violin is infinitesimal. So the bonkers question is less about why Hargreeves, an alien creature, is masquerading as a slowly aging noble and more about how his species is tied up in whatever time travel nonsense is happening on Earth.

I could write an entire other article just on this point alone. Did Hargreeves arrive on Earth on purpose? Did he come alone? Is his species tied to the strange phenomena that cause 43 women to give birth that were not even pregnant earlier in the day? Or is he tied to the impending apocalypse in ways we can't yet see? Perhaps Hargreeves is even tied to The Commission and their mission to control the timeline.

3) Grace and Pogo Exist?

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Image via Netflix

The siblings of The Umbrella Academy had unusual childhoods. Not just the endless tests and training, but the caliber of their caretakers. With Hargreeves occupied and, frankly, incapable of the kind of nurturing young children need, the task of actually raising the siblings fell to an unlikely pair: Grace and Pogo.

Grace — whom the children call "Mom" — is an extremely sophisticated android and no one cares or thinks it's unusual. She is proficient in medical care and subterfuge as well as emotional comfort and homemaking. Robbins plays the character with a deep melancholy over the state of her children's wellbeing, her isolation within the mansion, and her struggle to keep family secrets. Grace also appears to be one-of-a-kind. At one point Diego (David Castañeda) opines that Hargreeves never let Grace off the property. But was that because the wider world would be shocked by a human android? Would they even know? Grace inhabits the Uncanny Valley but not to the point that a person on the street would say "That's a robot!"

Then there's Pogo, the hyper-intelligent chimpanzee who was Hargreeves assistant. Was he also confined to the mansion so the denizens of Earth wouldn't know he existed? What could conceivably be the point of Hargreeves tinkering with the chimpanzee genome? There must have been a method to the madness as Hargreeves clearly continued his experiments or Luther wouldn't have ended up with a syringe full of primate DNA. As the alien seemed obsessed with training the Academy kids to be ready to save the world, it stands to reason Pogo existence is tied to that mission. The only question is how?

4) How Did Ben Die?

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Image via Netflix

This is actually one of the more mundane questions. In The Umbrella Academy, Number Six has been dead for years. Luckily, Klaus (Robert Sheehan) has the ability to see and communicate with the dead, so Ben is still around. For some unknown reason though, Klaus has never revealed to his other living siblings that Ben is still with them. One had to wonder if there's some guilt at play here, if perhaps Klaus is partially or indirectly responsible for Ben's demise. Or maybe the Cthulhu monster that lives in Ben's chest just eventually killed him. Whatever happened, Ben was an adult when he met his end which means is likely wasn't due to an Academy mission gone wrong.

5) Who Left the Time Cops in Charge?

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Image via Netflix

The major villains in the series are The Handler (Kate Walsh) and her underlings Hazel (Cameron Britton) and Cha-Cha (Mary J. Blige). The three of them work for The Commission, a shadowy organization tasked with keeping the timeline intact. Using briefcases containing time travel technology, their agents pop in and out of the timeline and kill anyone who would stop the inertia of history. By the time Number Five is on their radar, they've clearly been at this a long time.

But who are they? The Commission possesses technology even beyond that of Dr. Hargreeves, yet they keep their headquarters in the year 1955. They claim to be custodians of time, but how do they even know which timeline is "correct"? Most importantly, why are they so invested in making sure humanity is wiped out in the upcoming apocalypse? If I didn't know any better, I'd say aliens were involved.

6) Where Are the Other Kids?

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Image via Netflix

Hoo boy, this is a big one. The Umbrella Academy opens with narration about how the siblings were born. Each one came from a mother who was not pregnant when the day began. Miracle babies. All told. 43 of them were born on the same day. Hargreeves managed to adopt seven of them: Luther, Diego, Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman), Klaus, Number Five, Ben, and Vanya (Ellen Page). But that leave 36 babies who were raised elsewhere. That's a lot of superpowered kids who are now superpowered — and probably damaged — adults.

What happened to these kids? Did the news keep up with them in the same way they did Academy? Leaving children with special abilities to their own devices with mundane caretakers can go one of two ways: either they grow up well-adjusted because they were loved or they grow up to become supervillains because no one understood what they were going through and it made them isolated and angry. Yes, stopping the apocalypse is crucial, but should the siblings manage to get Vanya's powers under control, the next threat will most likely come from someone just like them.

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