Editor's Note: The following article contains spoilers for Season 3 of Umbrella Academy.Season 3 of Netflix's Umbrella Academy, created by Steve Blackman and based on the comic series of the same name by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, is here, and it's more time-warped than ever. The Umbrella siblings successfully made it back to 2019, but things are not quite how they remembered. After their little visit with Reggie (Colm Feore) back in 1963, he was so unimpressed that he decided to adopt seven different children, forming the Sparrow Academy.
Surprisingly, it turns out the Sparrows are the least of their worries. The major villain of Season 3 is not their replacements, not even dickhead Ben (Justin H. Min) – it's a little something called a kugelblitz.
So, What Exactly Is a Kugelblitz?
Despite the kookiness of its name, a kugelblitz (German for "ball of lightning") is actually a real phenomenon. In the field of astrophysics, a kugelblitz is when a massive concentration of heat, light, or radiation creates what is called an event horizon, or a boundary around a black hole from which nothing can escape, including light. In simpler terms, a kugelblitz is a black hole formed from radiation instead of matter.
In order to understand how the Umbrella Academy caused a kugelblitz, we first have to talk about the grandfather paradox. In Season 3, the Umbrellas make the shocking discovery that their mothers all died on the same day: October 1, 1989, the day they were born. But it doesn't stop there. It turns out that Harlan (Callum Keith Rennie), who retained the powers that Viktor (Elliot Page) gave him back in 1963, was responsible for their deaths. After his mother Sissy (Marin Ireland) died, Harlan (Callum Keith Rennie), in his grief, lost control of his powers and made a connection to the Umbrella's birth mothers, inadvertently killing all of them before they could give birth.
So, how exactly can the Umbrellas currently exist if, in this timeline, their birth mothers died before they were ever born? Enter the grandfather paradox.
The grandfather paradox is a classic time travel trope, most famously depicted in Back to the Future. Essentially, the grandfather paradox is when a time traveler alters events in their past that cause them to erase themselves from existence. The grandfather paradox the Umbrellas created set forth a kugelblitz, a blinding orb of light that is rapidly expanding in the luggage room of the Academy mansion. The kugelblitz is bigger than just the timeline; as Five (Aidan Gallagher) describes it, it's "the opposite of the Big Bang. Instead of the universe expanding, it's now collapsing in on itself." It, quite literally, is swallowing all time and space. As it continues to expand, the kugelblitz sends out what Five calls "kugel waves" that gradually wipe the universe's slate clean of everyone and everything, starting with a few lobsters, then Marcus (Justin Cornwell), Sparrow Number One, and in the finale, all time and space itself.
The best solution Five can think of to prevent the kugelblitz from occurring is to go back in time to stop Harlan from killing their mothers, destroying the paradox and stopping the kugelblitz before it starts. There's just one little problem with that plan: their briefcases don't work, and Five doesn't have the best track record for teleporting his family to their intended destination. Instead, the Sparrows and the Umbrellas unite and use their powers to condense the kugelblitz and store it inside Christopher, the Sparrow Number Seven, a telekinetic cube. Their victory is short-lived, however, when a simple clink of a glass against Christopher causes the kugelblitz to burst out of him, taking Christopher and Fei (Britne Oldford) with it.
Do the Umbrellas Stop the Kugelblitz?
Yes and no. Within a day, the entire planet is blitzed except for Hotel Obsidian, the superpowered Umbrellas/Sparrows, and Reginald. The Umbrellas and the two remaining Sparrows, Ben and Sloane (Genesis Rodriguez), try to enjoy whatever little time they have left before the last kugel wave takes them, too. Just as they are about to be blitzed out of existence, Reg, of course with some nefarious plan up his sleeve, ushers them through the tunnel to the other side of Hotel Obsidian into what is called the Hotel Oblivion. As Reggie reveals, the hotel isn't actually a hotel at all, but a machine that runs exclusively on the seven Umbrella/Sparrow's powers. In 1918, Reg discovered a portal to another dimension hovering in the air in the middle of a crop field. He built the Hotel Obsidian around the portal as a front, knowing he'd need the portal in order to reset the universe and bring back his long-dead wife, Abigail.
Essentially, the Hotel Oblivion was a failsafe that the creator of the universe left as a back door, should the universe need to be reset. While the kugelblitz does wipe out the entire universe, Reginald (or, more so Allison, who kills Reg and presses the button, finishing the job) manages to reset the universe, but at a grave cost. The Umbrellas don't have their powers anymore, Sloane is missing, and Reginald (now with Abigail by his side) appears to dominate the city, which is filled with Hargreeves-owned buildings.
Perhaps Five should have taken his 100-year-old self's advice: "Don't save the world."