The Umbrella Academy season 1 introduced the audience to Pogo, a talking chimpanzee who was part of the Hargreeves family, and season 2 showed a bit of his backstory – but an easy-to-miss detail might reveal how different his future in this timeline will be. Based on the comic book series by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, The Umbrella Academy made the jump to the world of streaming in February 2019 thanks to Netflix and became an instant hit with critics and viewers. The series was renewed for a second season not long after, and the audience reunited with the title team in July 2020.
The Umbrella Academy follows the Hargreeves, seven adopted siblings who along with other 36 babies were born on the same day, at the same time, and to women who weren’t pregnant when the day began. This event caught the attention of scientist and billionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves, who set out to adopt as many of those babies as he could but only got seven. As the kids developed superpowers, Reginald trained them and formed the team “The Umbrella Academy”, but as the kids grew up, they parted ways. After not seeing or speaking to each other for years, they reunited for Reginald’s funeral and to stop the apocalypse. Sadly, the Hargreeves couldn’t stop the end of the world and lost many loved ones in the process, including Pogo.
Viewers got to see Pogo again in The Umbrella Academy season 2, which took the audience and the Hargreeves to Dallas, Texas, in 1963, as the only solution for them to survive the apocalypse was to jump to a safer place and point in time. Once there, Five decided to find Reginald, but before he got to his father, he came across a young Pogo, who wasn’t the well-mannered, soft-spoken assistant he and viewers knew well. The series then explained that Pogo was an ordinary chimpanzee who was trained and primed to be launched into space in a rocket on a mission supervised by Grace (Jordan Claire Robbins) and Reginald. Unfortunately, the launch didn’t go as expected and Pogo returned severely injured and on the verge of dying, with Reginald using a serum to save him, which also made him sapient. After that, it’s unknown if he continued by Reginald’s side, as he was nowhere to be seen when the Hargreeves returned to 2019, but a small detail in season 2 might reveal what happened to him.
Eagle-eyed viewers noticed a very peculiar product in the episode “Öga for Öga”, when Five travels to 1982 to kill The Commission’s executive board. On his way, he stops at a vending machine for a quick snack, specifically a Fudge Nutter bar, but right next to it is a chocolate bar named Pogo-Gogos. This is a detail very easy to miss (unless you’re looking for all the hidden sparrows in The Umbrella Academy season 2, as the logo has one in the second “o”), but it might reveal a lot about Pogo’s fate after he was injected with the serum and Reginald started educating and training him. Given that Pogo had a strong bond with Grace, it’s possible she took him with her and they continued working together, and this time his missions were successful (especially as the tagline of Pogo-Gogos reads “Take flight with...”), so much that he became a celebrity. This would explain why he wasn’t seen at the house when the Hargreeves returned to their present and met the Sparrow Academy, meaning Reginald didn’t count on his help to raise his children.
Of course, what exactly his missions after the failed launch could have been is unknown, though it seems unlikely that Grace would subject him to the same suffering again. It's to be seen as well if Pogo (and Grace) will return in The Umbrella Academy season 3, but it should, at least, address what happened to him after Reginald and Grace broke up and thus explain why Pogo is not part of the Sparrows’ family like he was with the Umbrellas.