[Editor's note: The following contains spoilers through the Season 1 finale of The Umbrella Academy, "The White Violin."]

Set against the ticking clock of an impending apocalypse, The Umbrella Academy introduces us to a world of would-be superheroes, time-traveling assassins, and deep dark family dysfunction. The first season of the Netflix series inspired by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá's comic series of the same name is a rather complex journey, full of alternate timelines and a massive ensemble of characters, and at ten-hours long, it's not exactly a quick revisit.

Need a refresher on how Season 1 ended? Can't quite remember why Luther was sent to the moon? Need a guide to getting all those characters and numbers straight? If you're looking for quick Umbrella Academy Season 1 recap before diving into Season 2, we've got you covered below.

The Short Version

In 1989, 43 children were born with superpowers, seven of which were adopted by a mysterious and unyielding billionaire named Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore). Raised by the strict and abusive Reginald and a kind caretaking robot named Grace (Jordan Robbins) and a dapper walking, talking primate named Pogo, the seven Hargreaves children are forged into a dysfunctional superhero team called The Umbrella Academy. Rather than call them by their names, Reginald assigned them numbers according to their perceived usefulness.

Here's a quick character-by-characer breakdown, but if you want more, we've got a full Umbrella Academy cast and character guide here.

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Image via Netflix
  • Number One/Luther - Luther (Tom Hopper) was born with the power of super-strength and assigned the role of the group’s leader, which has made him overbearing and insecure about his abilities in the role. He stayed the longest after the rest of his siblings left. After a mission gone wrong, he was almost killed, but Reginald saved him by injecting him with a serum that transforms him into the hulking, apish figure we meet on the series. Luther has always shared a special bond and romantic love for Allison (Number Three), and after witnessing their affection, Reginald sent Luther on a mission to the moon to separate them, which Luther is devastated to learn was all for nothing.
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Image via Netflix
  • Number Two/Diego - Diego (David Castañeda has the power to manipulate objects around him, which he mostly wields in the form of throwing knives. He’s also first-class at hand-to-hand combat, but being the designated No. 2 has left him with a volatile inferiority complex to match his savior complex. Impulsive and often reckless, Diego is the closest amalgam to a traditional vigilante hero and the series, often getting into conflict with the authorities over his off-the-books methods. He shares a special bond with Hargreaves's “mother” Grace, a care-taking robot created by Reginald.
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Image via Netflix
  • Number Three/Allison - Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) has the ability to compel anyone to do anything by “Rumoring” them. When she whispers “I heard a rumor you…” in someone’s ear, her words become reality, and they do anything she says. Allison earned fame not only as a member of The Umbrella Academy but as a celebrity with an independently successful film career. She has a daughter, but she lost custody after using her powers on her own child. Allison shares a special bond and romantic love for Luther and a complex relationship with Vanya that ultimately almost gets her killed.
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    Image via Netflix
    Number Four/Klaus - Klaus (Robert Sheehan) has the ability to see and communicate with the spirits of the dead, including his deceased brother Ben, and as we learn at the end of Season 1, he can also serve as a conduit to make them appear in the real world. While Klaus uses drugs and alcohol to avoid the spirits around him, Ben is always there no matter what he does, a voice of conscience he needs but begrudges. After getting his hands on one of The Commission's briefcases, Klaus time hops back to the Vietnam era and fights in the war, falling in love with a soldier who dies in his arms on the frontlines. After many failed attempts, he finally sees his father's ghost near the end of the first season, and learns that Reginald killed himself to bring the family back together.
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    Image via Netflix
    Number Five/Five - Five’s (Aidan Gallagher) real name remains a mystery, but the character also known as The Boy was born with the power to jump through space and time. After an argument with Reginald, Five goes on a power binge, jumping through the decades, and winds up trapped in the apocalyptic future where he lives alone for decades. After accepting a job as a time-traveling assassin for The Commission, he jumps back to 2019 in an attempt to stop the apocalypse and winds up trapped in his younger body again. He’s in love with a mannequin named Dolores, his only company during the years he spent in the apocalyptic wasteland. In the end, he uses his powers to send himself and his family back in time to escape the apocalypse.
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    Image via Netflix
    Number Six/Ben - Ben (Justin H. Min) was born with the ability to transform into a deadly tentacled monster, a power that comes in useful during The Umbrella Academy’s famed crime-fighting years, but ultimately leads to his untimely death. Following his death, he becomes a ghostly companion to Klaus, the only one who can see him, though at the end of Season 1, he appears to the whole family when he merges powers with Klaus. The circumstances of Ben’s death are a mystery to the audience, but they haunt his family.
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    Number Seven/Vanya - Vanya (Ellen Page) is the forgotten and discarded sibling, whose tragic tale leads to the end of the world. Reginald raised her to believe that she had no powers and there was nothing extraordinary about her at all, and when she wrote a tell-all book about the family’s secrets, she became even further isolated. However, she’s actually the most powerful of all her siblings, and indeed, she accidentally causes the apocalypse during the rediscovery of her abilities and traumatic past. She shoots a laser beam into the moon, sending an asteroid hurtling towards Earth, leaving The Umbrella Academy no choice but to jump back in time and try to stop the apocalypse again.

The Long Version

The Hargreaves children earn fame and fortune as The Umbrella Academy, using their abilities and their father's fortune to fight crime. But there father's harsh, demanding nature fosters a toxic environment, and after the untimely death of their brother Ben and the disappearance of their brother Five, The Umbrella Academy ultimately breaks apart and the siblings go their separate ways. Luther sticks around the longest, until his father dispatches him to a lonely mission on the moon for four years.

It’s not until Reginald dies that the entire family reunites for his funeral, flaring up old tensions and uncovering long-held secrets. When they discover Reginald’s monocle is missing, Luther sets out to investigate his death. However, when Five returns from the future with a warning of the oncoming apocalypse, they're suddenly reunified (kind of) in a mission with the highest possible stakes.

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THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY

Before his reappearance, Five was missing for 16 years after he accidentally time-hopped too far into the future, where he arrived in the flaming ruins of an apocalypse, discovering the bodies of his siblings among the rubble of the destroyed Umbrella Academy mansion, along with a prosthetic eye he holds on to as his one clue to what happened. After that, he got stuck in an apocalyptic wasteland for decades, with only a mannequin he dubbed Dolores and fell in love with as company. It's not until he's in his 50s that he's rescued by The Handler (Kate Walsh), who offers him a five-year contract as an assassin for The Commission; a time-traveling organization dedicated to ensuring that the timeline stays on track. Specifically, they use time-traveling briefcases to assassinate any outliers throughout history who might derail the apocalypse. Five serves out much of his contract, but escapes early, using his powers to jump to 2019 and warn his family to stop the end of the world. However, he gets the calculations wrong, and when he jumps through time, he reverts into his teenage body.

When he's back in 2019, The Commission sends assassins after Five, and he handily dispatches of the first team in a diner, leaving behind a mess of bodies for the authorities to investigate. Commission hitmen Hazel (Cameron Britton) and Cha-Cha (Mary J. Blige) are sent to hunt him down next, but they're unable to find Five because they don’t know he’s in a child’s body. They do find his family, capturing and torturing Klaus for information. That forces Klaus to get clean for the first time in years, and when he escapes with their briefcase, he travels back to the Vietnam era, where he meets and falls in love with a young soldier that dies in his arms on the frontlines. Klaus returns with PTSD and immediately falls back into his addictions in order to drown out the pain and his powers, asking his family to help him get clean again. Diego's friend and former lover Detective Eudora Patch (Ashley Madekwe) is by Cha-Cha during an attempt to rescue Klaus, spurring Diego deeper into rash behavior.

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Meanwhile, Luther’s investigation into Reginald’s death leads them to Grace after Allison discovers footage of the mom-bot idly standing by and watching Reginald die. Diego reveals that he took the monocle in order to protect Grace, and fearing what his siblings will do if they think she’s malfunctioning, he shuts her down. However, Pogo boots her back up, and ultimately, after Klaus nearly dies of an overdose and finally convenes with his father's ghost, we learn that Reginald reprogrammed Grace’s caretaking code and took his own life in order to reunite The Umbrella Academy and stop the apocalypse. What Reginald doesn’t realize is that he and The Umbrella Academy are the direct cause of it.

Long ignored and outright hated after she published an autobiography that gave up the family secrets, Vanya is the designated outsider of the family, and her family makes her last priority at every turn. In their absence, the suspiciously charming Leonard (John Magaro) makes his way into her heart, driving a further wedge between Vanya and Allison, who is wary of her sister’s new beau. For good reason, it turns out. Leonard grew up with an abusive father, escaping into the adventures of The Umbrella Academy, convincing himself that he was one of them because he was born on the same day. After Reginald publicly humiliates him, Leonard snaps, murdering his father and spending years in an institution. After he’s released, he discovers one of Reginald’s discarded journals, detailing all of Vanya’s secrets, and he devises a plan to unleash her dangerous powers and destroy the Umbrella Academy.

Having been told her life that there’s nothing special about her and she was born with no powers, Vanya poured herself into her music instead, never quite accomplishing greatness, but earning herself a spot on a local orchestra. When Leonard hides the medication she’s been on since childhood, she starts exhibiting signs of tremendous, unfocused power, first through her music, but not in ways she can control. Leonard coaxes and cajoles Vanya’s powers out of her, leading up to a deadly explosion after he pays a group of men to beat him in front of her, costing two of the men their lives and Leonard his eye. It's his prosthetic eye that Five found in the apocalyptic ruins.

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With The Commission doing whatever it takes to keep the apocalypse intact and The Umbrella Academy doing everything in their power to stop it, they accidentally end up pursuing the same end. Everything the Hargreaves do only pushes the timeline closer to its impending doom, isolating Vanya and amplifying her rage. Five even accidentally undoes what might have been the best resolution of all (including a fairy tale dance for Luther and Allison) when he steals a briefcase from the commission and resets the timeline again.

As Vanya’s powers return to her, she starts to remember the truth of her childhood. Vanya was born with tremendous powers that she didn’t know how to control. Triggered by emotions and loud noises, she killed several nannies with explosive tantrums before Reginald invented Grace. Terrified by her power, he locked her in a containment chamber, alone, until he devised a strategy to contain by combining pharmaceuticals and using Allison’s power on Vanya. When she was a child, Reginald had Allison rumor Vanya to believe she was entirely ordinary, the cruel lie he constantly reminded her of her whole life.

When Allison discovers the truth about Leonard, she rushes off to rescue Vanya. But when Vanya learns what Allison did as a child, she lashes out in a fit of rage, channeling her powers into her violin bow and slitting Allison’s throat to stop her sister from rumoring her again. Vanya is immediately horrified at what she did and wants to help, but Leonard takes it as a victory and tries to drive her to further violence and fully unleash her powers. It backfires when she explodes in another fit, skewering Leonard with every projectile in the room. Believing she just killed the man she loved and her sister, she flees in terror, and the rest of the siblings arrive shortly after, just in time to save Allison’s life.

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Vanya returns to her family in grief, but rather than help her, Luther locks her back into the containment chamber, ignoring Allison’s demands to let her free. Years of pent up trauma and power overcome Vanya, who explodes out of her cell and, coursing with unleashed powers. She brings the mansion crumbling down around her, and as her siblings escape, Pogo distracts her and she asks if he knew what they did to her when she was young. Pogo admits that he did and Vanya kills him, hurling him into antlers hanging on the wall. The mansion collapses to rubble, almost exactly like what Five saw in the future, except this time his siblings aren't lying dead beneath the crumbled walls and there's no fake eye to be found (which means Leonard made it to the mansion with Vanya in the previous timeline). Five realizes that the mansion wasn't destroyed in the apocalypse, leading him to believe Vanya is the cause of it. Vanya escapes and makes her way to her big orchestra performance. With The Commission's assassins close behind them, the Hargreaves siblings make their way to the opera house, unable to agree on how to handle Vanya.

There's no easy way to fit this into a clean recap, but it's about this point in the series where we get a bizarre flashback that offers some insight into the, seemingly alien, origins of Reginald. In a sparse, clean room we've never seen before, Reginald is lovingly tending to a bedridden woman. He brings her violin to her bedside and she tells him to give it to someone who will love it as much as she does. He says he can't leave her, but she strokes his face and tells him he must. "I'll die here, but you won't." She tells him, "The world needs you, Reggie." He picks up a jar of twinkling, glowing lights and releases them out a window; as they float into the air, countless missiles launch towards the sky in the background. Next, we see Reggie deboarding from an immigration ship, toting the violin, making his way into the city, where he finds an umbrella manufacturer for sale. It's the only glimpse into Reggie's history that we see in the first season.

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Back in 2019, Vanya is wielding her violin as a weapon of great power, and she transforms into The White Violin, commanding everything around her. During the big final battle at the opera house, Klaus and Ben’s powers merge, allowing Ben’s ghost to appear in the real world and unleash his monstrous side, taking out the Commission assassins. With nothing left between them and Vanya they close in on her, but she immediately overpowers them, seeming to suck the life out of them. Allison sneaks up behind her, a gun locked in on her sister’s head, but she’s unable to kill her, firing the bullet to the side instead. The gunshot startles Vanya, and she releases her siblings, firing off her powers in one giant blast into the sky. Vanya seems back to normal and they think they saved the day, until they notice the giant asteroid hurtling down from where Vanya’s ray struck the moon.

Having failed in their mission to stop the end of the world The Umbrella Academy decides the only choice is to travel back in time and try over again. With moments until impact, Five uses his powers to time-travel his family out of the apocalypse, while the rest of the world burns in the impact – well, except Hazel who uses a Commission briefcase to escape with his beloved donut waitress Agnes just in the knick of time.

That's a wrap on the Season 1 recap! If you're gearing up for Season 2 now, you can read our review of the stellar new season here, and once you make your way through, head here for our ending explainer.