Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy was a hit series with fans of the comics and people who had never seen it. The reason the show worked as well as it did was due to the source material that went into it, which translates into some of the most interesting characters ever written.
One of the most interesting, yet enigmatic characters of the bunch was Number Five. Though he was only one of the members of the Umbrella Academy, his powers and experiences made him central to the plot of the series, but how much do you really know about him? Here are the facts all fans need to know about Number Five.
Updated on August 6th, 2020, by Shawn S. Lealos: While Number Five had a strong story in the Umbrella Academy comic books, he underwent some major changes in the Netflix series and has become a stronger character as a result. He has always seen himself as the smartest man in the room, thanks to the fact that he has lived longer than his siblings. In Season 2 of Umbrella Academy, he also proved to be even more powerful than anyone expected. Here is a look at five more things you need to know about Number Five after Season 2's reveals.
15 HE IS STILL IN A CHILD'S BODY DUE TO A MISCALCULATION
The one big difference between Number Five and his brothers and sisters is that they are all 30-year-old adults, but Number Five is an older man in a child's body — even though they were all born at the same time. This is because, unlike previously believed, Number Five can jump anywhere in time he wants to, but it needs to be precisely configured. When Number Five faced off with another version of himself in 1963, he explained that he got the decimal in the wrong place and helped his alternate version get the jump to 2019 right the second time around.
14 HE HAS PERFECTED SMALL TIME JUMPS
While he was in 1963, Number Five had a chance to talk to Sir Reginald Hargreeves and got some interesting advice. It was advice that he might have used when his father initially raised him. Instead of just jumping at a random moment, Reginald told him to think hard and work on small jumps in time first. Number Five put this into motion when he concentrated and made a jump into the past to save his brothers and sisters and did it perfectly.
13 HE IS ALWAYS THE PROPHET
While Vanya is "always the bomb" and is always the Hargreeves sibling who brings about the apocalypse, Number Five has a tragic fate as well. In the first season, it was Number Five that woke up in the apocalypse and saw how the world ended, finding himself tasked with forcing his family to save the world. In 1963, Number Five miscalculated his jump and saw the apocalypse again, returning as a prophet. He was forced, once again, to reassemble his team to save the world again.
12 HE FEELS RESPONSIBLE FOR HIS SIBLINGS
All the Hargreeves children were born at the same time, and all the children are the same age. However, in Season 2 of Umbrella Academy, Number Five is now a couple of decades older than his brothers and sisters since he time jumped into the future and couldn't get back for years. This makes him more experienced than his siblings. As he showed in Season 2 (especially with Diego and Luther), he feels responsible for not only protecting his brothers and sisters but also pushing them into action.
11 HE DOESN'T TRUST HIMSELF
In 1963, Number Five did something he didn't want to do. He had to approach his alternative timeline self, who was there to kill John Kennedy. Number Five knew that he was ready to quit the Commission and return to 2019 to warn his family of the apocalypse. However, this meeting was hilarious because neither version of Number Five trusted the other, knowing that he would do anything to reach his goals, regardless of what he told himself. If anything, this proves Number Five knows he is untrustworthy.
10 HE’S ONLY KNOWN OF AS “THE BOY”
On the show, most of the siblings called him Number Five, but as far as anyone is truly concerned, he’s just known of as “The Boy.” This is due to the fact that his adoptive father never gave him or any of the children names and only referred to them by a number.
Even when he returned to the present, he still was only referred to as “Number Five” instead of with a name like the others. Their mother had given them a name as they got older, but since Number Five had disappeared prior to that taking place, he remained nameless throughout the entire comic book run and television series.
9 THE FANS JUMPED IN TO NAME HIM
Number Five was always a popular character from the comics, but since the television series was launched over at Netflix with Aidan Gallagher playing him, his popularity has skyrocketed. Just because the fans love the character doesn’t mean they are satisfied with his lack of name.
To fix the issue, the show’s official Twitter account challenged the fans to come up with a proper name for the character… and they did! The consensus online is to name him “Frank” in honor of one of the members of My Chemical Romance, Frank Lero. Fans even pointed out that Gallagher looks like a younger version of Lero, which works out perfectly.
8 SPACEBOY AND THE BOY ARE TWIN BROTHERS
All of the children adopted by Hargreeves call one another brother or sister, but they are not actually related in any biological sense of the word. That’s true for most of them, and the TV series seems to have taken its cues from the comics, but there’s one aspect about the books that didn’t make it onto the series.
The Boy and Spaceboy are actually twins having been born to the same unfortunate, and surprised woman. This was revealed during the Dallas storyline in the comics and never made it over to the Netflix series… at least not in the first season, but it seems unlikely at this point.
7 HE’S 60 YEARS OLD
Time travel is a tricky business, especially when it’s difficult to control. When Number Five starts mucking about with his ability to travel through time, it looks as if he’s got a real knack for it. Unfortunately, the reality of his powers makes his abilities far more chaotic than they initially appear.
After transporting himself to the future beyond a point in which all of civilization is destroyed, he immediately tries to return, but can’t. As a result, he spends the next 50 years wandering the apocalypse until he can return, but his time travel shenanigans push him through time as a young boy with the mind of a 60-year-old man.
6 HE CAN TRAVEL THROUGH TIME IN ONLY ONE DIRECTION
When The Boy starts working out his time travel skills, he finds it easy to move through time, but only in one direction. He could only naturally travel through time in a forward direction, which is why he ended up getting stuck in the apocalyptic future for five decades.
When he was finally able to return, it required extensive work, and it was far from an easy thing for him to do. The process resulted in his de-aging to the body of a child who still retained the mind of a full-grown adult. While he managed to make the trip back after 50 years, backward time travel still eludes him.
5 HE MISSED OUT ON THE TEAM’S FIRST MISSION
In the comics, The Boy was much as he appeared on screen, but one of the changes made to the show involved having him take part in the team’s first mission. This didn’t occur in the comics, and the very first mission of the team took place in Paris… to stop the rampaging Eiffel Tower from running amok.
He wasn’t there because he had already shot himself into the future. When the work was done and the Eiffel Tower situation was resolved, Sir Reginald remarked that the loss of Number Five was no great detriment to the team or the mission.
4 HIS BEST FRIEND IS A MANNEQUIN
Just like the television series, Number Five had one true love in his life, and it was a mannequin. It’s not something you can really blame the guy for. After all, he was alone on a desolate landscape looking for life and a means of returning to his own time for fifty years.
The closest thing to a person was the half-burned torso and head of a mannequin he named Dolores. She became his confidante and only friend whom he carried about for five decades before finally returning to the present. It’s not clear how “deep” the relationship between the two actually went, but Number Five clearly loved Dolores throughout time and space.
3 HE JOINED THE TEMPS AETERNALIS
In the Umbrella Academy universe, time travel is such a problem, an organization was founded to deal with people who might screw up time itself. The Temps Aeternalis found and captured/recruited Number Five long after he arrived in the future, and he became one of their greatest assets.
They experimented on him with the goal was to turn him into an assassin they could use to correct/alter the timeline. He was hardly their only asset, and once he failed a mission, the group sent Hazel and Cha-Cha into the field to terminate him, which didn’t work out too well for anyone concerned.
2 HE BECAME ONE OF THE BEST ASSASSINS IN HISTORY
To turn Number Five into a usable asset, Temps Aeternalis experimented on his DNA. They combined his own DNA with that of a number of history’s greatest (or worst depending on how you look at it) serial killers. The result was a man who could pop in and out of places and kill with relative ease and impunity.
By the time he had served the organization to prove himself, Number Five had become the deadliest assassin in the history of… well, history. He had a 100% success rate, which meant that sending him to do a job always resulted in the target’s extermination.
1 HE WAS SUPPOSED TO KILL JFK
The reason the Temps Aeternalis turned on Number Five had to do with the fact that their #1 assassin didn’t assassinate the last target he was sent to kill, one John F. Kennedy. By not going through with the operation to take out President Kennedy, Number Five screwed up the timeline.
This was something the Temps Aeternalis simply couldn’t stand for. When he left his “post” to return to the present, they dispatched two of their best killers to take him out. Hazel and Cha-Cha were more than capable of killing any normal target, but Number Five proved more difficult to exterminate than most.