Most of the problems of the Umbrella Academy team are due to their upbringing, as their father, Reginald Hargreeves, is actually a bad parent – but why? The superhero genre has been dominating pop culture in recent years, in big part thanks to connected universes like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC’s Extended Universe, and this popularity has also made way for a different (and darker) type of superhero stories. Such is the case of The Umbrella Academy, a series of comic books by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá that jumped to the world of streaming in February 2019 thanks to Netflix. The series was an instant hit, and a second season arrived in July 2020.
The Umbrella Academy is all about the Hargreeves, seven adopted kids who along with other 36 babies around the world were born on the same day, at the same time, and to women who weren’t pregnant when the day began. After hearing about this event, scientist and billionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves 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 Umbrella Academy” – and that was the beginning of everything. Reginald’s actions through the years led to the separation of the team and years later to his suicide, as he needed to bring them back together to stop the apocalypse, and all of this (including the end of the world itself), could have been prevented had he not been a terrible father.
Reginald was cold towards his children and never showed affection, and he saw them more as weapons than as his kids. To make it all worse, his methods of training and education were too extreme sometimes, as seen in how he would lock Klaus up in a mausoleum for hours (sometimes even days) to “confront his fear and control his powers” and how he decided to heavily medicate Vanya and have Allison rumor her instead of finding the best way to help her with her powers. It’s not surprising, then, that the Hargreeves parted ways through the years, and the reasons for Reginald to be such a terrible father are actually shown in the series, but in subtle ways.
First off, The Umbrella Academy season 2 confirmed that Reginald is an alien, just like in the comics, so his education and more is entirely different to that of humans, and as much of a genius as he is, he hasn’t fully understood what being a father is truly about. The Umbrella Academy team didn’t turn out as he expected either, becoming a reflection of his own limitations and failures, and knowing that the apocalypse would be triggered by one of his children further added to him being a terrible parent figure to the team. Now, in The Umbrella Academy season 2, when the Hargreeves met Reginald in 1963, he was only interested in Five precisely because the rest were a mess and Five seemed to be the “successful” one of the group as well as the more mature one, which might contribute to him being a better father to the Sparrow Academy in the new, current timeline.
It’s to be seen how Reginald will behave towards the Umbrella Academy in season 3 given that his team is now the Sparrow Academy, and the original team (except for Five) didn’t leave a good impression when they met in the 1960s. Perhaps Reginald will be a better father figure to the new team, though not exactly “father of the year” yet as there’s a lot about him and his backstory that keep him away from being a good father – and hopefully, season 3 will cover more about his mysterious past and why he is the way he is.