The Umbrella Academy focuses on a dysfunctional family of super siblings that were all brought together by one man: Sir Reginald Hargreeves. Every member of the Academy has a complicated relationship with their adoptive father who trained them to be heroes but didn't look out for their emotional health and development. After his death, the siblings uncover many of Reginald's shocking secrets like the fact that he knew about the impending apocalypse and that Vanya had powers. This raises a lot of questions about the monocled, eccentric billionaire.
At the start of the series, Reginald Hargreeves, industrialist, inventor, and Olympic gold medalist, adopted seven out of forty-three children born on October 1, 1989, to women who weren't pregnant when the day began. Instead of giving them names, he gave them numbers and raised them to be a superhero team which he dubbed "the Umbrella Academy." He left the nurturing of the kids to their robot mother and his monkey assistant, Pogo. From the beginning, Reginald said that the Academy was going to save the world, but one by one, the kids left and the team fell apart.
The only one who stayed was Number One, Luther. Unfortunately, he was critically injured on a mission and Reginald had to give him the body of an ape to save his life. In order to give Luther purpose, Reginald gave him a new mission and sent him to the moon. Later, shortly before the end of the world in 2019, the family patriarch killed himself to bring the siblings back together.
Throughout Season 1, the siblings uncover several of Reginald's secrets. First, Luther finds out that his mission to the moon was fake and the news breaks him. Later, Klaus temporarily meets his father in the afterlife where he finds out that Reginald knew about the apocalypse, that he killed himself to reunite the family, and that Klaus had only scratched the surface of his true power. Finally, Vanya discovers that she has powers and that Reginald suppressed them because she was too powerful to control.
At the end of Season 1, the audience gets even more background on Reginald than his children have. At the beginning of the episode "The While Violin," a young Reginald says goodbye to an ailing loved one. Before he leaves, he takes a look outside and sees several rockets launching into the sky over a field littered with strange structures. He also opens a jar of lights and they float up towards the sky. He later arrives by boat in a new city during what appears to be the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. There, he takes interest in an umbrella factory that's for sale.
Evidently, there's a lot the Hargreeves family and the audience don't know about Reginald, including where he's from and the real reason why he adopted seven babies of mysterious origin. All of this leads back to the main mystery involving him knowing the world was going to end and believing so strongly that the Umbrella Academy would save it.
One theory is that, like in the comics, Reginald is an alien disguised as a human. After all, the planet he was on during the flashback may not have been Earth. It showed several rockets leaving the planet, technology which isn't widely available, especially not in the early twentieth century. This could explain why he's so distant from his children and why he doesn't seem to understand the damage he inflicted on them as a result. Reginald may have loved the woman he had to leave behind but he shows no affection whatsoever toward his children, perhaps because he's not human like them. Some also believe that the lights he released into the sky could be connected to the forty-three babies born in 1989. As fitting as this theory is, however, the adaptation has taken liberties with the source material before and could further alter Reginald's story.
Another possible outcome is that Reginald is from the future. This would explain how he knew about the end of the world and how he knew that Number Five wasn't ready to time travel. If this is the case, then young Reginald wasn't on a different planet in the flashback, but Earth in the future. This could also be the reason why he so adamantly believes that the Umbrella Academy will save the world because they would have already done it in his original time. Alternatively, he could've been escaping an apocalypse in his own time and traveled back in time to stop it as the Umbrella Academy did at the end of Season 1. With Sir Reginald Hargreeves returning for Season 2, let's hope the siblings will find out more about his past.
The Umbrella Academy is based on the Dark Horse Comics series created by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá and stars Ellen Page, Tom Hopper, David Castañeda, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Robert Sheehan, Aidan Gallagher, and Justin H. Min. Season 1 is currently available on Netflix and Season 2 will be released on July 31.