‘The Umbrella Academy’ Never Followed Up With This Storyline

Editor’s note: The below contains spoilers for The Umbrella Academy Season 4.

The Big Picture

• Season 4 of
  The Umbrella Academy
  features ground-breaking revelations about Ben Hargreeves’ mysterious circumstances.
• Showrunner Steve Blackman hints at the meaningful connection between Ben’s subway scene and Season 4.
• Ben’s mid-credits scene may symbolically link to his past and his role in Season 4, despite potential storytelling limitations.

Although The Umbrella Academy‘s plot can become quite repetitive and convoluted, each season delivers another apocalyptic event the Hargreeves siblings need to deter, and the show always manages to link narratives together cohesively. Season 4 is filled with ground-breaking revelations — including the mysterious circumstances behind the first Ben Hargreeves’ (Justin H. Min) death, a hidden detail that has plagued the show since the first season. However, the fourth and final season of The Umbrella Academy does seem to drop the ball in some respects, leaving us with unanswered questions, one of which pertains to the Season 3 finale’s mid-credits scene.

What Happens in ‘The Umbrella Academy’s Season 3 Finale’s Mid-Credits Scene?

Season 3 introduced us to the Sparrow Academy, where we meet Sparrow’s version of Ben Hargreeves. With another apocalyptic event on the horizon, this time in the form of the Kugelblitz, Reginald (Colm Feore) convinces the Umbrella Academy alum plus Sparrow Ben to reset the universe using a button at Hotel Oblivion. After Reginald’s plans are partly foiled and the button is pressed anyway, the siblings find themselves in a newly created timeline where Reginald and Abigail (Liisa Repo-Martell) oversee their cities in towering skyscrapers, and where the siblings have lost their Marigold-induced powers. After this cliffhanger of a revelation, the credits roll, only to be interrupted by a seemingly inconsequential scene.

The mid-credits scene begins in a subway, where the voice and destinations called on the intercom suggest the location of Korea. The camera pans through the commuters and lands squarely on Ben. He is wearing a crisp suit and professional frame, with his hair slicked back and a calm, poised expression on his face. There’s a poetry book open languidly in his hands as he gazes off into the distance — overall, it is a fairly enigmatic scene.

‘The Umbrella Academy’ Showrunner Hinted That This Mid-Credits Scene Would Be Meaningful in Season 4

This is the first mid-credits scene The Umbrella Academy has added to the show, with its second one being after the series finale. As such, it is understandable that we would believe that the scene would be of greater importance — especially considering how suspiciously innocuous it is. Showrunner Steve Blackman had also previously confirmed that this scene was meaningful and would connect to Season 4, telling Netflix that it’s the Sparrow version of Ben that we are watching and that viewers should be asking the question: “what the fuck is he doing on a Korean subway train reading a book about pottery?” Blackman went on to elaborate:

“As every good
Umbrella
fan knows, no moment in the show exists in isolation. Everything we see has meaning. And this moment is no exception. Ben has a reason to be there… but you’ll have to wait until Season 4 to understand why.”

Though Blackman teased this story, there — disappointingly — doesn’t seem to be any overt connection in Season 4. This may be due to the limited number of episodes in the final season, which was only greenlit for six episodes instead of the show’s usual ten by Netflix. Blackman told The Hollywood Reporter that though he would have preferred eight, the six episodes were enough to portray the key stories he needed to tell during this season. He also mentioned that some of the stories “got jettisoned along the way,” including Luther (Tom Hopper) and Sloane’s (Genesis Rodriguez) relationship. As such, this connection around Ben may have also fallen victim to the six-episode-arc.

What Version of Ben Hargreeves Are We Seeing in the Mid-Credits Scene?

If we were to enforce a possible, yet tenuous, link between Season 3’s mid-credits scene and Season 4, we could potentially be seeing Ben during his con artist phase in between seasons. The Umbrella Academy Season 3’s closing scenes saw the proverbial band break up and go down their separate pathways, all at varying degrees of excitement about figuring out life with powers. At the beginning of Season 4, Ben finishes up his prison sentence and begrudgingly goes to live with Luther in his derelict home. We learn that Ben had essentially been scamming people by luring them into investing in his cryptocurrency scheme, leading him to be charged with his white-collar crime.

As such, the scene in the subway could be a glimpse into Ben’s life as a con man. With his suave demeanor and classy appearance, it could easily point to him conning Korean investors out of money — the ensemble certainly looks the part. While this is a somewhat reasonable interpretation — though we’re not sure why he would have run over to Korea for his scheme — it doesn’t seem as meaningful and ground-breaking as Blackman’s comments led viewers to believe.

Does Ben’s Mid-Credits Scene Link To ‘The Umbrella Academy’ Season 4?

Alternatively, there may be a more symbolic interpretation of the link between the mid-credits scene and Season 4. There have been theories that the subway Ben is seen on is related to the train in Seoul that we saw in the opening scene of Season 3. The Umbrella Academy Season 1 opened with the tale of how our beloved super-powered Hargreeves came into existence, where 43 women were touched by golden Marigold particles and immediately went into labor. In Season 3’s alternate universe, these mothers are brutally killed, and only 16 super-powered children are born, with several going on to the Sparrow Academy. One such mother was on a Seoul train that may be the one Ben is on, suggesting that Season 4 would go into his past.

Ultimately, Season 4 does go into Ben’s past by finally revealing the elusive circumstances around the death of the Umbrella version of the character. It may also hint at how Ben plays an instrumental role in Season 4 with the Cleanse — Ben is even the one who tricks the Hargreeves into reclaiming their powers. The setting of the subway could also allude to the time-traveling subway system that Five (Aidan Gallagher) stumbles upon. Though we never see Ben actually in the underground subway tunnels, it could be referring to the symbolic connection between the Cleanse and the multiversal subway as well. These associations are a bit of a reach, and it may just be a case of the mid-credits story not making the final cut due to time restrictions. Either way, the viewing experience of The Umbrella Academy‘s final season is not at all affected by the mid-credits scene, rendering it meaningless in hindsight.

The Umbrella Academy is available to stream now on Netflix in the U.S.

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