The Umbrella Academy season 3 could be dealing with the multiverse, all based on one important detail from season 2. The superhero genre has been dominating the entertainment industry for years, and though there are two connected universes that rule this genre, they have also made way for darker, lesser-known superheroes to be adapted to film and 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.
The Umbrella Academy follows the Hargreeves, seven adopted children who along with other 36 babies around the world were born on the same day and under the same mysterious circumstances. Scientist and billionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore) set out to adopt as many of those babies as he could but only got seven, and as the kids developed superpowers, he trained them and formed the team “The Umbrella Academy”. Sadly, Reginald wasn’t a good father, and the kids parted ways as years passed and didn’t talk to each other until they reunited years later for Reginald’s funeral. The Hargreeves also had to team up to stop the apocalypse, but as they failed to do so, they ended up jumping to a safer place and point in time, and so season 2 caught up with the team in Dallas, Texas, in 1963.
Through The Umbrella Academy season 1 and 2, the Hargreeves were chased by The Commission, an organization overseeing and managing the space-time continuum, and more specifically by The Handler (Kate Walsh), who had a personal issue with Five (Aidan Gallagher) and later the rest of the team. Through The Handler, viewers got to visit the headquarters of The Commission and got a glimpse of how things work there, and in season 2 there’s one seemingly unimportant detail that could actually hint at something bigger in season 3: the Infinite Switchboard, through which the Temps agents monitor the timeline for any abnormalities that could mess with the flow of time and thus allows them to detect threats.
The Infinite Switchboard suggests a multiverse within The Umbrella Academy, as this could show the Temps a variety of timelines rather than different points in time from the same timeline. In a now-deleted Reddit post (via Looper), a fan suggested that when the Hargreeves failed to stop the end of the world at the end of The Umbrella Academy season 1 and traveled back to the 1960s, they created a new timeline, which is supported by how when they returned to 2019 at the end of season 2, things were very different: the world hadn’t ended, Reginald was alive, and their team didn’t exist, as instead, Reginald created the Sparrow Academy. If there is a multiverse in The Umbrella Academy and the Infinite Switchboard is there to monitor all those different branches, then season 3 could see the title team traveling through these different timelines (perhaps with the help of the Televator, which was teased in season 2) in an attempt to find their own or on a mission to correct their timeline.
The Umbrella Academy season 2 ended on a major cliffhanger, and as plot details about season 3 are still unknown, fans are coming up with a variety of scenarios and stories for the new season based on both the source material and the previous seasons. The possibility of a multiverse in The Umbrella Academy is believable, though that would also bring a lot of complications to the already complex plot of the series, as there will be more paradoxes to look out for among many other things.