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youremyonlyhope · 2 years

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I tried to map out all the universes/timelines in Umbrella Academy and where they branched off.

(I actually wrote this post originally in September of 2020 and saved it as a draft. Just now, I’ve gone through and edited all the Vanyas to Viktors and corrected his pronouns, so I hope I didn’t miss any. I decided to finally just post this before Season 3 premieres tomorrow because this post may not be relevant after that and then it will never leave my drafts.)

I like that this show basically follows the Butterfly Effect, and every decision and change branches off as a whole new timeline. The way I interpret it is that none of the timelines seem to ever truly get erased or reversed. Each timeline keeps going on forever after our characters leave them, and they can’t ever get back to their first timelines or any of the others that they’ve left.

I’m trying to keep this in some sort of chronological order, but with time travel it doesn’t really work out, so it’s in chronological order from the point of view of the characters (mostly Five) and I guess the order of the episodes too but not linear time itself.

The Original Timeline and Apocalypse: Reginald and Grace raise Pogo. JFK dies and Reggie witnesses it. Grace is out of the picture by 1989 for an unknown reason. Reggie adopts the 7 Umbrella kids we know and love, and makes the Grace robot (I will call her Mama Grace) to take care of Viktor. Five jumps forward and gets stuck in the future. Ben dies. Reggie kills himself to bring the kids together. We assume Viktor is influenced by Leonard/Harold and causes the apocalypse, and Leonard is present when it happens. Five lands in the future after April 1st 2019 to find the world in ruins, everyone’s dead, he discovers his siblings’ bodies, and sees Luther holding the fake eye. Five spends 45 more years in this timeline and then the Handler has him join the Commission. This is the timeline that Five originally spans from, the rest of the siblings from this timeline are dead. Everyone in the world is dead in this timeline. All the other Season 1 timeline events are the same as this one up until March 2019.

Season 1 Main Timeline: The moment Five arrives in March 2019, this timeline branches off from the Original Timeline and this is what we see for most of Season 1. All the episodes, besides The Day That Wasn’t, are part of this timeline. Five warns them about the apocalypse and infiltrates the Commission to find out about Harold Jenkins (all Commission scenes in The Day That Wasn’t are in this timeline). The apocalypse still happens, but Harold dies sooner without ever obtaining his fake eye. This time, Viktor blows up the moon because of how upset and scared he was and not because of Leonard/Harold’s influence. Mama Grace and Pogo both die. Hazel and Agnes go back in time. Five transports the siblings back in time to avoid having them die again and to see if they can find a way to properly prevent the apocalypse this time. However, all the other characters in the show die: the sheriff who helps Allison, Chacha when she’s at the payphone, Kenny and his mom at the bowling alley, Diego’s friend Detective Beeman, the girl at the rave, and unfortunately, Allison’s daughter Claire dies too. This is the timeline that all of our characters, besides Five, span from.

The Day that Wasn’t: Basically everything that happened in that episode is its own timeline. The Allison and Luther moments, Diego and Mama Grace moments, Klaus getting to speak to Dave, Viktor finding Reggie’s book in Harold’s room much sooner than he does in the Main Timeline. Mama Grace and Pogo likely live. You could argue that this timeline got erased, but I think that this timeline still went on and we just didn’t see it since we had to follow Five back in the Main Timeline. His Commission moments really occur in the Main Timeline, but all the other scenes in this episode are in this separate timeline. In this one, Allison and Luther most likely will go to California to be with Claire, Klaus gets closure from Dave’s ghost, and who knows what Mama Grace ends up telling Diego. Maybe Mama Grace tells Diego about Viktor’s powers, maybe Viktor leaves Harold earlier, and maybe the siblings work together to help him prevent the destruction of the world. Or maybe Viktor still ends up causing the apocalypse. We’ll never know how this timeline ends since we didn’t see it.

Kennedy Lives Timeline: This is the timeline that Five lands in on November 25 1963 at the start of Season 2. The FBI makes Viktor cause an explosion, JFK isn’t shot, Reggie is there to witness it, and the US blames the Russians. We go to war, and 3 days later the nuclear bombs hit America. The Frankel Footage is filmed (Diego says in season 2 episode 8 that they can hear the explosion in the footage, but not a gunshot). Five was in this timeline for a few minutes to witness his siblings battling prior to the nuke landing. It seems that prior to Viktor’s explosion, this timeline runs the same as the Main Season 2 Timeline, except without Five being present to help pull his siblings together (they manage to come together without him). It officially branches off from the Season 2 Main Timeline because Five never went backwards to arrive on Nov 15th. In this timeline, all the siblings die from the nuke, along with everyone else in America (and probably the world eventually).

Season 2 Main Timeline: This timeline is what we see for most of the season. The moment that Klaus and Ben landed in the 60s, they already made this a whole new timeline from the Original Timeline and the Season 1 Main Timeline. Hazel takes Five back to November 15th 1963 to try to stop the Kennedy Lives timeline from happening and gives him the Frankel Footage from the Kennedy Lives Timeline. A few little things are changed at first, like Dave enlisting a week early into the Marines instead of the Army and Diego tackling the decoy Umbrella Man who was on the Grassy Knoll instead of Reginald. But what really makes this timeline different from the Original and Season 1 Main Timelines is the Umbrella siblings’ meeting with Reginald. Grace ends up leaving Reginald over the JFK assassination plans, which I assume is different from the Original Timeline since it’s caused by Diego talking to her and he wouldn’t have been there before. When 1989 comes around in this timeline, Reginald picks Ben and 6 different children, he calls it the Sparrow Academy, and Ben survives whatever mission killed him in the Original Timeline (which I guess sort of implies that it really was the siblings’ fault that he died if he lived without them there.) Reggie doesn’t feel the need to kill himself in 2019 since the siblings all still live with him. In this timeline, there are also 2 sets of the Umbrella siblings living in 2019: the ones who are out living relatively normal lives in the world and weren’t adopted by Reggie, and the ones who came into this timeline from the Season 1 Main Timeline (or Original Timeline for Five). Also, everyone is now different ages due to all the time travel. Most depressingly, in this timeline Claire is likely never born because Allison never got famous and probably never married Patrick, so I highly doubt that Allison is ever going to see her daughter again in the show. Season 3 will continue to take place in this timeline.

Younger Five Stays Old: This version of Five leaves the Original Timeline to come to 2019 like our Five, but he gets to stay old (because our Five gave him the right equation) and also has the knowledge that Viktor is the one who causes the apocalypse with his previously unknown powers. When Five arrives back to his siblings in March 2019, he’s probably successful in stopping the apocalypse because he can help Viktor with his powers and he doesn’t have to be stuck as a 13 year old. At first I thought this timeline would have the Sparrow Academy since it branches off after that branch had already diverged, but the fact that we still see everyone from the Season 1 funeral in the portal means that this Five gets to be in a timeline with the original 7 kids. So it runs the same as the Original Timeline (Ben dying, Reggie dying) up until Five arrives in 2019. This is the only timeline where everyone except Ben lives. (I hope. It depends on if this Five can actually help Viktor enough.)

Viktor Still Blows Up the FBI: This timeline is similar to the Kennedy Lives timeline, except Five is present from November 15th onwards. This one is confusing. We don’t see this one in the show, Diego just catches a glimpse of it on the Infinite Switchboard. I initially thought that he was just seeing the Kennedy Lives timeline, but I realized that this is actually a different but very similar timeline. The biggest difference is that all the events of Season 2 happen because Five goes back to November 15th unlike in Kennedy Lives where he arrives on the 25th. Even with Five around, Viktor still blows up the FBI building, JFK survives, and then it likely plays out like the rest of the Kennedy Lives Timeline. It’s really only different because Five is there a few days earlier.

Everyone Dies: This is the timeline that happens if Five doesn’t go back in time by a few seconds at the end of the Season 2 finale. The Handler shoots everyone, the last Swede shoots the Handler, and then he likely kills Five too if he sees that Five’s still alive (or Five succumbs to his wounds). This is the most depressing timeline, besides the Original Timeline of course.

I want to say that that should be all the timelines.

The only one I’m really iffy about is the “Viktor Still Blows Up The FBI” Timeline since Diego only saw that one on the Infinite Switchboard and it didn’t end up actually happening to our characters. But the Day That Wasn’t Timeline didn’t really happen either and I’m counting that one.

Basically, as far as I can tell, Season 3 is going to take place in the Season 2 Main Timeline due to Reggie meeting our kids and deciding “Nope. Not getting them.” and adopting the Sparrows instead.

#the umbrella academy #umbrela academy #long post #this took over an hour to write #and i had to go back and edit other timelines when i remembered differences #(those tags are from september 2020. more accurately it took almost 2 years to write this post)#(but in the original night i wrote for an hour straight then added some more and edited and tonight i added even more)

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