The Umbrella Academy is preparing for its third season, and while plot details remain unknown, the character posters hint at a major Five change that will benefit the character. The superhero genre has seen a variety of stories and characters in recent years, both on the big screen and on TV/streaming, and one of the most successful titles has been The Umbrella Academy. Created by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá, The Umbrella Academy is a comic book series that made the transition to streaming in 2019 thanks to Netflix, becoming one of the platform’s most popular titles.
The Umbrella Academy follows the Hargreeves, seven kids who were born on the same day, at the same time, to women who weren’t pregnant when the day began, as well as other 36 kids around the world. After hearing about this curious event, scientist and billionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves set out to adopt as many of those babies as he could but he only got seven. As they started to develop superpowers, Reginald trained them and formed The Umbrella Academy, sending them on different missions to fight different criminals. However, as Reginald wasn’t a good father, the Hargreeves ended up parting ways over time, and the first one to leave the team was Five (Aidan Gallagher), who has the ability to teleport through space and time.
During the first 13 years of his life, Five had only used his powers to teleport from one place to another, so one day, he had the idea of time-traveling, which Reginald quickly shut down by telling him he hasn’t tamed his own ability yet. Feeling underestimated by his own father, Five left and started jumping to future years, until he arrived at a post-apocalyptic time and was unable to jump back in time. Five spent four decades in that future before being recruited by The Commission, and when he finally found the way to return, he reverted to his 13-year-old body while his mind and memories stayed the same. Physically, Five is the youngest member of The Umbrella Academy and the only one who still wears the team’s uniform as he doesn’t have any other clothes, but that seems to be changing in season 3, and with that comes a major change in Five’s development.
Every member of the Umbrella Academy has their problems with Reginald as he treated them differently and badly, and Five has struggled to move away from his father’s shadow and expectations, and even after his death, he continued to try to prove that he can do a lot more than jump from one place to another and he can be a hero. Wearing the uniform is not only due to him not having any other clothes and basically no time to go shopping, but it’s also a symbol of that struggle to find himself and become his own person, separate from what Reginald had in mind for him. Now, the character posters for The Umbrella Academy season 3 show Five wearing a new suit instead of the team’s uniform, hinting at him finally detaching from Reginald and his expectations and becoming his own person. This fits after the events of The Umbrella Academy season 2, where Five unlocked a new ability within his powers as he reversed time to save his family (which, ironically, was possible thanks to a talk he had with Reginald). Five will be a lot more confident now, and he doesn’t need to prove anything to anyone anymore.
However, with the Umbrella team back in 2019 but in a different timeline where Reginald is alive and he created the Sparrow Academy instead of the Umbrella Academy, it’s to be seen how this will affect Five and his dynamic with his father, though this is the same Reginald he had a serious conversation with in 1963. The Umbrella Academy season 3 is on its way to being very different from the previous seasons, and Five seems to be on his way to a major, positive transformation that will benefit him and possibly the team as well.