Through a new teaser, The Umbrella Academy has confirmed that season 3 will introduce Hotel Oblivion, a key location in the comics. Although there are two connected universes that have led the superhero genre in recent years, these have made way for other, lesser-known, and sometimes darker stories to get adaptations either to the big screen or TV. Among those is The Umbrella Academy, a comic book series by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá that made the jump to the world of streaming in February 2019 thanks to Netflix, and quickly became one of the platform’s most popular titles, allowing it to continue for two more seasons.
The Umbrella Academy is all about the Hargreeves, seven adopted children who were born on the same day and under the same mysterious circumstances along with other 36 babies around the world. After hearing about this curious event, scientist and billionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore) 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 the kids parted ways as years passed, and reunited years later for Reginald’s funeral and to stop the apocalypse. As they failed to prevent the end of the world, the team jumped to a safer place and point in time thanks to Five’s (Aidan Gallagher) powers, and so The Umbrella Academy season 2 caught up with them in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, where they successfully stop the apocalypse, but also unintentionally changed the timeline.
At the end of The Umbrella Academy season 2, it was revealed that Reginald was still alive in the Hargreeves’ present (2019) and he didn’t create the Umbrella Academy but the Sparrow Academy, with six other children and Ben (Justin H. Min), who is alive and well. The Umbrella Academy is coming back with a third season, but details about the plot remain a mystery, and the only hints are the titles of the episodes, of which one in particular created a lot of speculation: Oblivion, a reference to Hotel Oblivion, an important location in The Umbrella Academy comics and which has just been confirmed to appear in season 3.
The Umbrella Academy’s third volume is titled Hotel Oblivion, and with season 1 covering Volume 1: Apocalypse Suite and season 2 Volume 2: Dallas, it was an expected move. Now, Hotel Oblivion is a creation of Reginald Hargreeves, and on the outside looks like a luxury hotel, but in reality, it’s a prison for all the enemies defeated by the Umbrella Academy. However, more than a prison, it’s more like a torture chamber for them, as the rooms have a lot of self-help material to push the residents to “rehabilitate”, the food has no flavor, the televisions show surreal cartoons, and the view out of the window is that of a strange, nightmarish dimension. Hotel Oblivion housed some of the most notorious criminals the Umbrella Academy came across, such as Dr. Terminal and Perseus XI. Now, with Reginald alive in the new timeline and his new team still together, it’s very possible that he ended up creating Hotel Oblivion to imprison all the bad guys defeated by the Sparrow Academy, and that they will break out at the end of the series, prompting the Umbrellas and the Sparrows to join forces.
As to where Hotel Oblivion could be located, many fans have theorized it’s in the moon, which is why Reginald sent Luther there, meaning that the hotel has existed since the original timeline, but Reginald kept it secret (like many other things). Of course, it’s very possible that Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy will change the history of Hotel Oblivion to better fit the show’s narrative and tone, as it has done with many other settings, events, and characters, but what’s for sure is that it will play a big role in The Umbrella Academy season 3.