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Netflix's wildly successful The Umbrella Academy introduces the Hargreeves siblings as the adopted children of "mysterious billionaire" Reginald Hargreeves, but the show indicated in the season 1 finale that he might be more closely related to them after all.

In the series, as in Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá's comics, Sir Reginald Hargreeves a.k.a. The Monocle (Colm Feore) adopts seven, supernaturally powered children after they're born to mothers who famously showed zero signs of pregnancy before giving birth. He proceeds to raise them with a myopic focus on developing them into a team of superheroes, but his lack of paternal affection (in part) results in the team splintering and the siblings becoming estranged before they reach adulthood.

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Hargreeves is the only father the children ever know (unless you count kindly mutant chimp Pogo (Adam Godley), and there's very little attention paid to their biological paternity in either iteration of The Umbrella Academy. However, the prologue to the comics' first book, The Apocalypse Suite, features a pretty whimsical explanation of how the kids came into being: during an intergalactic, interspecies boxing match, "Tusselin' Tom" Gurney knocked out a space squid with an atomic elbow at exactly 9:38pm, and on the same day 43 children were born to previously un-pregnant women. No other explanation is given for the children's origins - the books would have us believe that an atomic knockout punch instantaneously spread space seed lightyears away and those seeds grew into the Umbrella Academy. Stranger things have happened and do happen in the story, so it doesn’t feel particularly worth mentioning.

But the show abandoned that prologue, and the choice to eliminate the boxing match could've been explained by simple practicality at first glance - showrunner Steve Blackman set the absurd, macabre tone of the show just fine without paying Weta Digital to create a boxing squid. But the flashback that kicks off episode 10 “The White Violin” implies Blackman might have had something else in mind when he changed the beginning of the series - maybe something having to do with the mysterious parentage of Hargreeves' children.

The Umbrella Academy's Births Are A Mystery

Season 1 of The Umbrella Academy opens... aggressively. We watch a young Russian girl share her first kiss in the middle of an indoor swim practice. It's sweet, innocent and touching - everything a first kiss should be. And then she gives birth in the middle of the pool and Vanya Hargreeves is born. That day, October 1st 1989, 42 other women across the world also gave birth without showing any previous signs of pregnancy. “Eccentric billionaire and adventurer” Reginald Hargreeves adopted seven of them and the rest is history.

The series doesn’t give any more of an explanation regarding the heritage of the seven children who will eventually become the Umbrella Academy. As far as audiences know they never saw their mothers again and no mention is ever made of their paternity. Season 1 spends its entirety introducing us to the Hargreeves family and their warped childhood, but largely ignores the mystery surrounding their parentage – until the season finale, that is.

Related: The Umbrella Academy Cast and Characters Guide 

Sir Reginald's Backstory And the Jar Of Lights

“The White Violin” begins with a cold open uncharacteristically focused on Sir Reginald. For the first nine episodes remains the taciturn, loveless head of the household who goes to great lengths to ensure his children don’t associate him with any type of affection. But “The White Violin” introduced a very different man. On a planet that clearly isn’t Earth, “Reggie” prepares to leave and laments that he can’t take his dying wife with him. He brings her a violin and she insists he take it with him and give it to someone who will love it as much as she did. She pushes him to leave saying, “The world needs you,” and after he says goodbye, Hargreeves picks up a glass jar filled with lights, opens a window and releases the them into the air.

In the background, we see various rockets take off from the planet indicating others might be leaving, but there’s no confirmation that that’s the case or what would cause such an exodus. In any case, Hargreeves leaves what we can assume is his home planet after releasing a bunch of tiny lights into the sky. He travels to Earth and arrives in the year 1928, and almost immediately thereafter buys an umbrella company. We never learn anything more about his planet, his wife and the mysterious lightning bugs they kept. But the significance of this sequence can’t be ignored when discussing how the Umbrella Academy children came into being.

Page 2: Page 2: Did Sir Reginald Give The Umbrella Academy Their Powers?

Did Sir Reginald Give The Umbrella Academy Their Powers?

Given the already supernatural nature of The Umbrella Academy as a story, it’s easy to overlook just how prescient Sir Reginald would’ve had to be to a) take notice of 43 children born on the same day to unexpectant mothers, and b) adopt them and immediately start training them on the off chance they had superpowers. But there’s no real explanation for how he seemed to know exactly what he was getting, unless you believe that he knew exactly what was going to happen.

We have no way of knowing exactly what the lights were that Hargreeves released into the air, but it’s extremely plausible they were the seeds of what would eventually become 43 surprise children and eventually, seven superheroes. If we agree that Sir Reginald and his wife were the aliens they appear to be, maybe this is how they procreated – or at least how they procreated when they needed their progeny to survive whatever apocalypse appeared to have befallen their homeworld. As to the 61 years it took between the time Sir Reginald arrived on Earth in 1928, it could simply be that it took the “eggs” that long to follow him or find appropriate hosts. This fully explains why he would’ve been so eager to find and raise the children, and why he was perfectly prepared to do so.

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There’s, of course, no real confirmation of this theory beyond the compelling evidence we just cited, so it could be Sir Reginald Hargreeves was just an alien with some magic beans who, in an unrelated event, heard about some interesting births one day and decided to create a team of superheroes on a whim. But not only is that highly unlikely, it’s subpar storytelling.

The Umbrella Academy is a family drama in superhero drag, complete with overachievers, black sheep and a withholding parent. When we find out after his death that Hargreeves did care for his children more than he ever indicated while he was alive, it completes the dysfunctional family narrative. Keeping Sir Reginald an alien with no real investment in his children beyond their abilities undermines how resonant it is when we think he might’ve been extremely invested in them as people and cared more than he could show. In addition to revealing how Hargreeves got to Earth, the show also clarifies that he knew how important the children would be to the future of the planet. We can infer that he thought showing them affection would interfere with his ability to properly train them, and since he’s literally the only person on the planet who could do that effectively, the choice would’ve been clear.

It deepens Sir Reginald’s character significantly to know that underneath his cold demeanor he genuinely cared about the children… even if he did brainwash Vanya and lock Klaus in a tomb with a bunch ghosts (we didn’t say he was a good dad). Ultimately, it enriches the story and adds necessary dimension to his character. So, yeah, we might be wrong about this, but don’t you kind of want us to be right?

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