In just one season, The Umbrella Academy left many mysteries and a couple of confusing moments and concepts, among those everything around Five (Aidan Gallagher), his time-travel abilities, and the effects of these. Five disappeared when the Hargreeves siblings were 13 years-old, and came back 16 years later – but he still looked like a teenager. Time-travel, no matter the context, can be very tricky, but Five’s transformation can be explained with a mix of real life and in-universe concepts, which also solve other mysteries surrounding this character.
Based on the comic book series of the same name by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, The Umbrella Academy was one of the most successful Netflix releases of 2019, and it follows the dysfunctional family of adopted siblings, the Hargreeves. All seven of them were born on the same day, under the same mysterious circumstances (none of their mothers were pregnant when the day began), and were quickly adopted by the equally mysterious billionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves. Each kid developed a unique set of superpowers, so Reginald trained them and formed a team of superheroes called “the Umbrella Academy”.
Reginald wasn’t a good father figure, and the siblings ended up going on their own ways, reuniting years later for Reginald’s funeral... and to stop the apocalypse. The first one of the Hargreeves children to leave the group was Five, who disobeyed Reginald when this one warned him about jumping to the future and did it anyway, getting stuck in a post-apocalyptic world for decades. Although Five very quickly explained how he came back and why he did so in his teenage body, it happened too fast and he used a lot of scientific terms. Luckily, his return and other things related to him can be explained through real life theories and in-universe concepts as well, as put together by a Reddit user. Let’s take a look.
Why Five Couldn’t Go Back Right Away In The Umbrella Academy
One of the biggest questions viewers had about Five’s time jump into the future and his return to the present day was why he wasn’t able to return right away. After landing in the post-apocalyptic future, Five is seen unable to channel his abilities and go back to his siblings, and so spent more than four decades there, alone, trying to figure out the right equation to return to when he disappeared. The aforementioned Redditor explains, with the help of quantum physics, that traveling forwards in time is much simpler than traveling backwards, as in order to travel to the future you only have to accelerate “along your same time-space curve at greater speed”. This means that Five isn’t magically appearing somewhere – he’s just moving way faster than the human eye can register.
The author goes on to explain that, in order to go back in time, the probabilities involved in causality are what make it much more complicated, as he would have had to put everything done by the jump into the future back to its place, and that’s much messier and difficult than it sounds. However, there’s the “many worlds theory” which doesn’t require reversing causality, instead having to break down into quantum particle sized bits to then travel through a wormhole that connects different timelines or dimensions. Reginald actually warned Five about this when he said that time travel is like “descending blindly into the depths of the freezing water and reappearing as an acorn”, as it requires a very precise ability to calculate complex probabilities. This is why it took Five so many years to solve the equation, as there were many elements to take into account in order to make a successful jump back in time.
Why Five Came Back As His 13 Year-Old Self
The Umbrella Academy would then be relying on the “many worlds theory” to make Five’s jumps through time possible. This means that Five had to reduce himself to the size of quantum particles to go back – problem is, there are many other dimensions, and one mistake could mean ending up in a different time, even one where he doesn’t exist. Five also had to find the way to basically reassemble himself after landing, which makes everything even more complicated.
Now, he didn’t land back in 2019 as his 58 year-old self because he couldn’t bring his body through the wormhole in the fabric of space-time, so he just – like he said – projected his consciousness into a suspended quantum state version of himself. Much easier than pouring a big amount of energy into bringing his older body to the past, with energy that he might not even be able to generate. In other words, it’s easier for him to transfer his consciousness across long distances (as in: between dimensions/timelines) than his body, which might only be able to travel shorter distances (for example: dimension A in 2019 and dimension B in 2019).
The author of the post explains that he can’t be his 29-30 year-old self either (which is how old he would have been then) because he never really became 29-30 in his timeline. They theorize that Five made two jumps: one from 1968 (where he left his 58 year old body) to 2002 to get back to his 13 year-old body, and then a “normal jump” forwards to 2019. They add that this can be supported by his transformation when the “portal” opens in the middle of the Hargrevees’ backyard, where they see older Five turn into teenager Five, without going through the years in between.
Five’s Time Traveling Could Introduce Other Dimensions
Because Five’s time traveling uses the quantum physics concept and the “many worlds theory”, this could mean that season 2 of The Umbrella Academy will introduce other dimensions – more so because it already did, though very subtly. Episodes 1 to 6 took place in what the author calls “2019 Dimension A”. At the end of episode 6, which is titled “The Day That Wasn’t”, Five takes viewers to “2019 Dimension B”, and that’s where the series is set for the rest of the season (which is why episode 7 is called “The Day That Was”, as that’s the new timeline Five landed in). Dimension A still exists, but isn’t visited again, meaning that Alison and Luther’s dance happened, and Vanya found Reginald’s notebooks at Leonard’s house.
At the end of The Umbrella Academy season 1, Five decided to make a temporal jump with his siblings in order to save themselves from the apocalypse, with the rest also reverting to their 13 year old selves – meaning that they went through the same processes of displacing their consciousness. The Hargreeves could then stay in 2002 to make things right with Vanya (as they would have their older consciousness) and then make another jump forwards to a “2019 Dimension C”, where they could have prevented the apocalypse – or not. After all, there are countless possibilities and Leonard Peabody might also be alive in Dimension C.
The rules and complications of time-travel change from story to story, and ultimately every writer will do whatever they please with them. It’s hard to say if The Umbrella Academy will explain its use of time-travel at some point or if it will leave it to interpretation, but this theory has some very interesting points that give more clarity to Five’s abilities and how they come into play in the story, and they also explain his detachment from his siblings, as he knows there are countless versions of them in other dimensions.