The Umbrella Academy cuts corners in a frustrating final season

There’s a joke about The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” in How I Met Your Mother. Marshall and Ted are on a road trip, and a cassette with that song is stuck in the car’s tape player. It’s the only thing they can listen to. So they listen to it, over and over and over and over again. The joke works because the audience buys into Marshall’s argument: It’ll come back around. It’s fun, at first, then it gets a little annoying, then it’s so awful you want to throw yourself from a moving vehicle just to get away from it. And then it’s fun again.

No one’s ever come around on “Baby Shark.” That is, to some degree, the point. 

The Umbrella Academy‘s fourth season, which premieres August 8 on Netflix, opens six years after the events of season three. The Hargreeves siblings are all living, still powerless, in the alternate universe created when they hit the reset button at the end of the previous season. They’re all getting by, though none of them are particularly thriving—except for maybe Klaus (Robert Sheehan), who’s three years sober and now paranoid about germs and safety. But hey, it’s better than the drugs, alcohol, overdoses, deaths, and resurrections, right? Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) is working as an actor, though not an especially successful one, supporting her daughter, Claire (Millie Davis), but notably not her husband, Ray (Yusuf Gatewood), who, we’re told later, left Allison sometime during the six-year time jump. 

Five (Aiden Gallagher) is working for the CIA, infiltrating a mysterious, cult-like conspiracy theory group called the Keepers, who are obsessed with what they claim are memories from a different timeline. In one of the season’s strengths, the Keepers are run by Doctors Jean and Gene Thibodeau, played with unhinged delight and just the right amount of menace by real-life couple Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman. Lila (Ritu Arya), as it turns out, has also been sneaking out to Keepers meetings, but mostly as a way to escape the boredom of her life as a stay-at-home mom to three kids with Diego (David Castañeda).

Diego’s not doing great, either, working as a clearly depressed delivery driver (though he’d definitely tell you he’s doing great, thank you very much) and just trying to get by without talking about or acknowledging his feelings in any way, shape, or form. Meanwhile, Viktor (Elliot Page) owns a bar up in Canada, Luther (Tom Hopper) is a stripper (gotta show off that bod now that he’s no longer half gorilla), and Ben (Justin H. Min) has just gotten out of prison after a four-year sentence for crimes related to a crypto scam.

The Umbrella Academy doesn’t waste any time getting back on its bullshit. In the first episode, a mysterious dry cleaner named Sy Grossman (David Cross) kidnaps Viktor, though he very quickly reveals that he doesn’t mean Viktor any harm: He just needed to get the whole Umbrella Academy back together because he thinks they’re the only ones who can save his daughter Jennifer (Victoria Sawal), who disappeared after getting involved with the Keepers. After the requisite arguing, they all begrudgingly get in Diego’s van and head up to New Grumpson, Maine, where they’ve got a lead on Jennifer. The problem with Diego’s van is that there’s a “Baby Shark” cassette stuck in the tape player, and it’s driving everyone nuts. We’re supposed to find this funny, but we doubt anyone’s ever heard “Baby Shark” and come away feeling positively about the experience, whether it’s played for laughs or not.

“Baby Shark” is also doing a lot of heavy lifting as a metaphor for Diego’s life: He’s stuck in a rut, working a job he hates, coming home, doing it all over again the next day. An endless loop. Baby shark, baby shark. When you’ve got just six episodes to wrap up an entire series full of time travel, alternate universes, and various world-ending threats, you’re going to have to cut some corners. But if you’re considering using “Baby Shark” as a replacement for genuine character development, it might be time to take a step back and think about whether you’re really focusing on the right things. And, for most of its final season, The Umbrella Academy is not.

The series, based on the comics by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bà, has always been messy. But The Umbrella Academy doesn’t just dabble in mess: It’s one of the pillars upon which it was built. Seven kids, all born on the same day under mysterious circumstances, all with superpowers, adopted by an eccentric millionaire (Colm Feore) with plans of turning them into a famous crime-fighting team. He never gave them names, just numbers, ordered from most to least useful. He called them the Umbrella Academy and ran them into the ground until they all told him to get fucked (except poor, gullible Luther, always Reginald’s No.1, loyal till the end and abandoned on the moon for his trouble). 

Every season, the team has saved the world from an apocalypse, the show’s lore building and expanding each time. It’s nearly impossible to keep track of at this point, but that shouldn’t matter: We come for the mess, the bickering and the sniping and the endless problems and angst. We don’t come because we actually care about whatever the hell the Commission is up to, or even about where the Commission came from and what their purpose is. We come for the weird, impromptu dance sequences, the striking and gorgeous set design, and the unique depiction of childhood trauma filtered through a bizarro-world lens. 

So it’s frustrating that season four flips that script. There’s a whole lot of info dumping about the nature of this new danger the Umbrellas are facing, but that leaves little room for character growth. Some arcs are abandoned entirely in favor of running toward an ending the show hasn’t earned. Even the dance sequence this season is between Jean and Gene. It’s a lot of fun (especially the song it’s set to, which we won’t spoil), but it sidelines the Hargreeves siblings in what should ultimately be their story. The Umbrella Academy‘s finale manages to pull together most of the plot threads that have been left hanging over the seasons, but not all of the characters get the attention they deserve. And for a show that thrives on mess, the ending feels disappointingly neat. 

The Umbrella Academy season 4 premieres August 8 on Netflix