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elia-de-silentio · 1 year

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TENTATIVE ANALYSES: THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY

Episode 5: Number Five

NARRATIVE STRUCTURE

Once again, there are different narrative treads that cross and divide from each other.

• The Viktor Business: Viktor continues his romance with Leonard, but Allison is suspicious. She does a little research on him, and finds out ... nothing. Literally nothing, no records besides a short paragraph about his former wood carving employment and address. She brings this lack of findings to Viktor, but he brutally rebuffs her, feeling that she just thinks he's unable to do his own life decisions. So he keeps going on a date with Leonard, and he's so nice, encouraging him to go for first violin since Helen, the one who usually gets the spot mysteryously stopped showing up. Allison meanwhile enters Leonard's own home to investigate him further, but he returns and forces her to sneak away before she can complete the inspection. Back to Viktor: he absolutely nails the trial! The first chair is his, and he runs off to celebrate by making out with Leonard at his house. A strange distortion shows up, raising unnotoced to the storage room ... were we are treated to a shot of Helen's body wrapped up in a carpet.

• Klaus and Diego in mourning: Klaus returns from his accidental time travel, dirty, bloodied, and crying. Turns out, he landed straight in the middle of the Vietnam war, and joined the fighting, finding an actual romantic partner. But the guy has died, leaving him to return to his own time lost in grief and trauma. He is first noticed and then dismissed by Five, and then joins up with Diego, out to get Hazel and Cha-Cha for the murder of Eudora. The two fail, and are summoned to play chivalry for ...

• Five and Luther: there is an expansion on Five's former life. He used to work for an association responsible for the regular flow of time, and he did so by being an assassin who targeted people who would have disrupted it. Luther is shocked and confused, and has to handle an extremely stressed-out Five who wants to solve things by killing the person responsible for the apocalypse. In the end, they decide to stop Hazel and Cha-Cha by tricking them with a false suitcase and then running away with the help of Diego and Klaus, but the Handler, an higher-up at the Commission, intervenes, and strikes a deal with Five.

NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES

There is some foreshadowing involving Leonard's attic: Allison is right about to investigate it, when the master of the house arrives, forcing her to cut her visit short and run away (by the way, the competent and elegant way she pulls it off is a good shorthand to illustrate the training imparted by the Umbrella Academy). This creates the expectation that there is actually something important in the attic; and in fact, at the very end of the episode, we are shown Helen's corpse wrapped in a carpet in there, a cold shower since besides Allison's suspects we really had no reason to think ill of Viktor's caring and understanding new boyfriend. We could at most suspect him to be a creep, but a murderer?

Also, there is a plot twist in the very last scene of the episode: Pogo reactivating Grace, and making sure she remembers something they can't talk about to the children. Whatever might this be?

CHARACTERS

Luther: he dials down by a lot his I Am Number One rethoric, and like every time he does so, he has much more success in whatever he is trying to do. He is mostly involved with Five, and manages to get him to talk about his situation - not by ordering him, but by showing him actual capacity to listen and understand. He puts Five on a much more equal level to himself that he does with the rest of the Academy, and he gets around him more by proposing deals or even blackmail (defenestrating the mannequin) than ordering him around. Still, his somewhat immature way of thinking manifests in other forms, such as, after learning that Five worked as a hitman, seeking reassurances that he only killed 'bad guys'. As if that made all the difference in deciding wheter a life can continue or not! He is shocked and confused at Five bluntly contradicting him, and admitting that he killed, and would still kill, anyone who get in the way of preventing the apocalypse. This is what motivates him to try and put Five on a different path, the thought of preserving those good and innocent people. Who knows how would he have reacted if Five had reassured him that sure, they would have killed only bad people?

Diego: he is on the war path, seeking private vengeance for Eudora's murder. He still tries to go his Lonely Road way, and nearly gets himself killed, only to be saved by an 'in the way' Klaus. On the other hand, he does lend a listening ear to Klaus when he realizes that something is even more wrong than usual with his brother, tries to help him stay out of troubles and comfort him. Like Luther, he actually does better when he steps outside his idea of how he gas to do things.

Allison: she keeps soundly failing at being the Heart. Viktor accuses her of babying him, of not accepting that he is an adult and he can do his own life decisions. Compare the one way Allison snapped at Viktor: she told him that he was an adult and could no longer blame dad for his mistakes. It is possible that the guilt for this outburst manifested in a desire to treat Viktor as the 'little' sibling, and this goes to obfuscate, in Viktor's eyes, the actually good points she is making: that Leonard is sus as hell. Allison, even when rebuked by Viktor, doesn't renounce 'protecting' him to the point of breaking and entering Leonard's house to look for proof of suspicious activity; she's unfortunately forced to leave before she can find it.

Klaus: think he didn't already have a lot of personal issues? Time travel gave him even more! He ended up dumped in the middle of the Vietnam war, a situation known for being extremely traumatizing for its veterans (and an absolute hell for the Vietnamite civilian population, but that's another story). There, he actually met someone he could call a true love, not a convenient relationship for having a place to stay; and then he promptly loses that person. He is brought back to his time bloodied and screaming, picks up fights in vet bars who can't recognize that he was there too, and seeks comfort in his siblings (no success with Five, more with Diego who is also reeling from the loss of a loved one).

Five: he keeps being absolutely focused on his mission, but in the light of losing his only lead, he is more open with his siblings about it. We get to know more about his past: the way he literally grew up and aged in absolute isolation in a post apocalyptic world after the traumatizing discivery of his siblings' corpses, an event that made him desperate enough to accept to become an assassin for the Commission, a shady organization that pursues the 'correct flow of time' at any cost. He never left the idea of going back to save his family and the whole human race, and he finally got his wish; but now he doesn't know what to do, and ends up making another deal with the Commission.

Ben: he says 'wheeeee!' as Diego and Klaus drive a truck towards Hazel and Cha-Cha. This is getting embarassing.

Viktor: he can no longer take his meds, but actually seems so much better! He speaks his mind to Allison, has a pleasant date with Leonard, and gets even convinced to partecipate to the auditions for first chair. And he gets it! He experiences a much better feeling with the music he is creating, and his performance is so much more convincing. He goes to Leonard to celebrate, and they take their relationship to the next level! Still, he does have a more negative side: when dismissing Allison, bringing up the daughter she can't see is truly a low blow (especially considering that he doesn't know what Allison did, for all that he knows Patrick is denying custody out of spite). The anger he has felt at his family for so long still hasn't found an healthy outcome, even if he is more outspoken.

Leonard: if he acted slightly suspicious last episode, here we get some true shockers. Not in the way he acts with Viktor, he is still caring and supportive ... but it is heavily implied that he was responsible for the disappearence of Viktor's meds (he seems better for it, but how could Leonard know it would have had such an effect?) and at the end, he is revealed as an actual murdered, one who killed the woman who had first chair just so Viktor could audition. And now this good fellow is there making out with a Viktor who doesn't suspect a thing!

Hazel: he continues being frustrated about his job, and getting closer to the doughnut shop lady, Agnes. They share a really cute conversation about birdwatching and future projects of life in the country, and it is apparent that he is considering more and more leaving the Commission.

Cha-Cha: she is mostly there to be frustrated with Hazel.

The Handler: a mysterious woman, an higher-up in the Commission who keeps offering Five deals. She is completely unconcerned about the end of the human race, seeing it simply as something that had to happen.

THEMES

Grief is a theme that receives several elaborations in this episode. It is expressed in its most classical form - the death of a loved one - by Diego and Klaus. The first throws himself into vengeance, barely giving himself a moment to mourn Eudora's death; Klaus, who has nobody to take vengeance on, instead does nothing but openly grieve. He cries, he seeks comfort in his siblings, he tries to retrieve tokens of his time with David (the photo in the vet bar) without caring about what other people could think of him. Still, he doesn't try to summon David's ghost, like Diego suggested; his trauma about his powers runs too deep, and his brother doesn't quite get it.

But there is another one who is grieving here: Five, who is grieving a whole world. This 'kid' has already grown up, completely alone, after finding himself stuck in a devastated world, the corpses of his siblings still warm in front of him. He had nobody to talk to save for a mannequin, nobody to comfort him. The entire human race was gone, and it was years before the Commission deigned itself to rescue him. Now, he has a possibility to avert that horror, and it's driving him mad. He has already seen what will happen if he fails, but he doesn't know what to do, and ends up running circles and talking about killing people (the only thing he has been taught to do in these circumstances) to run from his own fear.

While all of these people are busy dealing with grief, Viktor deals with coming into his own as a person. He has a relationship, maybe the first of his life, he is starting to get forward professionally; and here comes Allison with doughnuts from the shop they visited as kids, and uncalled for relationship advice. Viktor's reaction to feeling himself infantilized is vicious, hitting Allison where he knows it hurts. The gap between the two siblings, after some steps towards closing, is now larger than ever. And Leonard, despite looking like the perfect person, is now esposed to the audience as the last person you should have a coming of age with.

SYMBOLISM

Delores: the only form of interaction Five had during the apocalypse years. While he is awfully fond of her, this episode makes clear that a synthetic creature, whose identity he had completely made up, couldn't hold a candle to actual human interaction and especially Five's family. Notice how in the scene where the Handler proposes the first deal to him, she has a plastic arm extended towards him, in the same pose as the Handler, as if to call Five back to her and the world of solitude she represents. Ultimately, she is abandoned in favor of the Commission.

Allison's sweets: a nice treat she brings for Viktor, right from the place they went as children! Unfortunately Viktor's agenda is already full with a date with Leonard in another cafe. The sweets represent Allison's difficulties in realizing that both she and Viktor are adults now, they have ignored each other for years and she can't just go back to a childhood solidariety they didn't manage to develope back then. She had taken for granted that Viktor would have had nothing else to do, and the childhood treats are casted aside for an adult romantic rendezvous.

Dave's dog tags: a memento of his love that Klaus has taken to carry everywhere, here they become a symbol of the complicated grief that's to come.

REFERENCES

• We are shown some of the works Five had to complete for the Commission; among them we can see footage of the Hindeburg dirigible and of Josef Stalin.

• We see some bits of Viktor's book that Five used to write on his plans for returning to his timeline. It's a bit difficult to read, but there is some incident involving Diego, an open accusation that Hargreeves was the one to initiate Viktor's alienation process, and a mention that Allison used to do Klaus' nails.

And this is all for the episode. Thank you for reading so far!

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