[Editor’s note: The following contains major spoilers for Season 4 of The Umbrella Academy.]

The Big Picture

‘The Umbrella Academy’ showrunner Steve Blackman chose a non-traditional, but worthy ending for the family of superheroes.
The cast learned about the ending at the last possible minute and found it emotional, but accepted it.
Blackman planned the ending from the start, while facing challenges in shooting the final ensemble scene.

Knowing the fourth season would be their last, show creator Steve Blackman didn’t want to give the family of unlikely superheroes a traditional ending in the Netflix original series The Umbrella Academy, but he did want to be sure to give them a worthy one. After a reset of the timeline that stripped them of their powers and left them to find a new purpose, they learn their father, Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore), is alive and well while a mysterious group known as The Keepers are talking about a Cleanse. Viktor (Elliot Page), Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman), Luther (Tom Hopper), Klaus (Robert Sheehan), Diego (David Castañeda), Ben (Justin H. Min) and Five (Aidan Gallagher), along with Lila (Ritu Arya), quickly realize that they must restore their powers, even if some of them really don’t want to, because they need all the help they can get to set the world right again.

During this one-on-one interview with Collider, Blackman talked about wanting to challenge the notion of what makes a superhero, that this was the ending he always wanted, informing the cast about the series ending, shooting the final moment with them all together, the story he wishes he’d had time to return to, the hardest thing they had to pull off this season, his favorite moment in the series, the creation of Gene (Nick Offerman) and Jean (Megan Mullally), revealing what really happened to Ben, and all the “Baby Shark.”

Showrunner Steve Blackman Didn’t Want a Traditional Ending for ‘The Umbrella Academy’
Image via Netflix

Collider: Was there really no way to get these characters out of sacrificing themselves to save the world? Was it inevitable that they had to be consumed for it all to end?

STEVE BLACKMAN: Early on, I wanted to challenge the notion of, can you be a superhero if nobody knows you ever existed or knew who you were? I wanted to have an untraditional ending. I didn’t want them to die, per se, but this was a way to get them to a worthy ending where they’re saving the world, but they’re saving a world that they caused to go kablooey themselves. Not directly, but they were the reason things were going bad anyway.

Did you try any other endings before realizing that this was the ending?

BLACKMAN: This was the ending I really wanted. I did talk about some other endings, but I always came back to this one in my mind.

When you’re telling the entire cast that you’re wiping them out before the end of the series, is that a different conversation than just having to let one actor know?

BLACKMAN: No, because I said to them, “It’s not really dying, it’s ceasing to exist.” I know that sounds like semantics, but it’s slightly different. But the truth is that they all liked the ending. They thought it was a good way out. It was sad to shoot that final scene, but I think everyone felt it was a worthy ending. They were all very good with it. I didn’t get anyone pushing back. They thought, “This is the way out.”

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How did you let them know? Did you tell them all at once? Was there a group conversation about it, or did you talk to them all separately?

BLACKMAN: I withheld the last pages of the script to the very end, which I’ve done every season. It’s not to be mean. I just don’t want them to overthink the scene. I want it to be a little more spontaneous. So, I gave it to them the night before, or a day and a half before, and they came in and were like, “Whoa!” It was cool.

The Final ‘Umbrella Academy’ Scene With the Family Was One of the Very Last Shots of the Entire Series
Image via Netflix

What was it like to shoot that final scene with everybody together, waiting to be consumed? It felt like a rare final moment to get to have everybody together.

BLACKMAN: Great question. We shot it in sequence, so that was almost the very last shot of the entire show. And just before we rolled, I said to everyone, “Just to remind you guys, this is the last time we’ll ever be together as a group,” and then it hit them. You could see it hit them. They were like, “Oh, wow, this is seven years of our lives. Most of our thirties were spent on this show.” It was very emotional. It was a really, really long day, so they were all tired, but I thought they all acted beautifully. It slowly hit them, as the scene was progressing over hours, that this was it, it was the end of the run. It was a really emotional time for everybody.

Did it take longer to shoot than normal? Did it go quicker than normal?

BLACKMAN: It didn’t take longer than normal. It was just a very long day. Each take, they were such professionals and they gave it all, even when they weren’t on camera, to the other actor. Instead of just phoning it in, they were emotional for the entire day. By the end, they were just so drained from crying and feeling those emotions. I could see their eyes at 3:30am and they were like, “I’ve gotta go home. I’ve gotta sleep now.”

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If we had gone back to the start of the series and asked you what you thought the last season would be, or what the last moment would be, was it anything like this in your mind? Was this what you had pictured, in the very beginning, or did it become something very different from what you originally thought?

BLACKMAN: Amazingly, I knew that this was the ending. I wanted an ending like this. A lot of the stuff in between completely changed over time, but I had a good sense of this ending and how I wanted it to end. I didn’t want them to win in a traditional way. I didn’t want a completely miserable ending. I wanted something in between. Even in the first season, I had an idea of how I would end the series, and I wanted to do four seasons. It was a perfect number for me. I didn’t want to do five. I didn’t want to do three. Thankfully, Netflix was kind enough to give me the four seasons, so I could complete the story.

‘The Umbrella Academy’ Showrunner Steve Blackman Couldn’t Get to Everything He Wanted But Is Happy With What They Did

Once you knew that this was the final season and that you’d have six episodes, how did that shape things? Was there anything you couldn’t do? How did that affect what you ended up doing?

BLACKMAN: Yeah, there were things I didn’t get to do. There was a story with Luther and Sloane that I wanted to do. There were a few other things with Hargreeves that I wanted to do. But I felt we did everything I needed to do, to wrap up the season. There were bigger things, like the Jennifer Incident, that I wanted to explain. There were a few other things that I wanted to explain. Yeah, I could have done another couple episodes worth of material, but I feel like six is a great number for this final season. It was a lot of fun to do, but I feel what we have in it is really enough. I think the fans will really appreciate it.

What would you say is the wildest thing you got to do this season, that you’re surprised you actually pulled off?

BLACKMAN: I think the ending because the VFX were so complicated. The fight in the store was so complicated to do it. We had to do many, many extra shots and reshoots. I didn’t think we would get it. I didn’t think we could finish it. We were running out of time and money, and we worked so hard to get all these extra shots and finish that sequence in the store. That was the hardest one. That last episode was the most expensive episode that we ever did.

What is your favorite moment in this series? On a personal level, as the person who guided this through from beginning to end, what is the moment you’ll think of when you think about this series?

BLACKMAN: I think “Footloose” was a great moment. We were all depressed from COVID. It was during the COVID lockdown and we were doing all the protocols, but it was just so wonderful and freeing. We’d all quarantined, and we came out and were able to take our masks off for that dance. There was just one family, the Sparrows, and we all just laughed. It was just pure joy for the actors and pure joy for the crew. It lifted the spirits of so many people, for the five days we shot that sequence. It just really was a wonderful moment in time.

When you decided to do this time jump, and then you showed us where these characters are without their powers, how did you decide where they would each be? Did the actors have any input into where their characters would be?

BLACKMAN: No, not really. I talked to the writers, and we talked about what we thought would make for a more interesting storyline. I had a good sense of what Luther would be doing. I didn’t think Luther was gonna be able to hold a job. We knew what we wanted to do with Diego and Lila. And then, I thought Viktor would probably have his life together better than the rest. That’s how it came about.

How did Tom Hopper react to learning that Luther was going to be stripping in a silver thong?

BLACKMAN: Tom laughed for a second, and then he said, “I’m game.” Tom is such a good guy and he was so easygoing. He was like, “Okay, I’ll do it.” He’s got the right body for it, so that helps. But he was so giving, and he said, “No problem.”

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We got to see some really interesting relationships this season. There’s the situation with Allison, Klaus and Claire, and there’s Lila and Diego, and there’s also Lila and Five. What did you enjoy about what you were able to do with the relationships this season?

BLACKMAN: The challenge was that we’d done three seasons and I wanted to try new relationships and new pairings. To see Lila and Five in a different light, and to see Diego and Lila, and one of my favorite storylines is Viktor and Hargreeves and that father-son relationship, I thought was really good. Viktor struggled so much as a child, and now his life is going so well, but he’s held up by one thing, which is that he’s got these unresolved issues with his father that he has to fix before he can really go on in life. That’s very relatable to a lot of people, these unresolved issues with your parents. We just tried to find new relationships and to really evolve the characters, one more time.

You always need to accomplish a lot in the final season of a series, so I always find the addition of new characters interesting because it feels like they have to be just a little bit more important or meaningful when it’s the last season. What led to Gene and Jean? How did that come about, and did you always know that it would be Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman.

BLACKMAN: No, I didn’t. It was something we talked about in the room. The writers were talking with me, and we came up with the idea of these husband-and-wife professors. I don’t know who came up with the idea to call them Gene and Jean, but early on, I did start to think about who could play [those characters]. I’d worked with Nick Offerman on Fargo years earlier, and I had heard that they like working together, as husband and wife. So, I was getting ready to do the hard sell to them. I got them on a Zoom, and it turned out that they loved the show. They were uber mega fans of the show, had seen every episode, and wanted to do the show. They wanted in, and we wanted them, so it was perfect. And they were lovely, from start to finish.

Showrunner Steve Blackman Had a Plan For What Happened to Ben in ‘The Umbrella Academy’
Image via Netflix

What made you decide to reveal what really happened to Ben? Did you know from the beginning how that would actually play out?

BLACKMAN: Yes. I talked early on with Gerard Way about a few versions of the Jennifer Incident and what Ben’s part was. Gerard may go in a slightly different direction as he goes on with the graphic novels, but this is something I said I’d like to try and he thought it was a good idea. We knew we had to resolve this storyline for the end of the show, and I thought this was a good way to go. We had discussed it in an earlier season, so I actually had a pretty good plan on how to get to this storyline for Ben.

How did you approach figuring out what you wanted it to look like when Ben and Jennifer were together for too long and how that would keep evolving?

BLACKMAN: It went through a lot of iterations. We toyed with the idea that they didn’t seem to notice what was happening to each other for a certain point. And then, it changed. It really was actually one of the harder things to make sense of for the season. Eventually, we landed on the idea that they’re changing together. Because they’re bonded through all timelines to come together, they would be affected in the same way. Like flies to a moth, they couldn’t not be together. One way or another, they were gonna find each other in every timeline, and they do in this timeline.

Why all the “Baby Shark”?

BLACKMAN: It’s possibly having young kids, who are now a little older. I believe that is the most annoying song ever written, by any human being. There was one other one we tried, but I can’t remember what it was. We just thought it was the funniest one. And it’s very international. I found online that it’s in like 26 languages. It’s everywhere, that song.

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Do you know what’s next for you? How far are you into whatever you hope to be doing next?

BLACKMAN: I have a deal with Netflix, so I’m starting to work on new projects. I’m just now getting over the fact that this is really the end of Umbrella. I’ve had my mourning period, and now I’m ready to move forward. It was just such a wonderful run with these actors, this crew, all the writers, and everyone involved, but I’m ready to move forward. I’m excited to see what the fans think. I hope the fans like our final season because they’ve been so supportive of us for all these years.

The Umbrella Academy is available to stream on Netflix. Check out the Season 4 trailer:

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