It's a truth universally acknowledged that with great power comes great responsibility.
Taking into account both the comics and the TV series, here are some of the worst things
the Umbrella Academy has ever done.
Whether you're talking about the comics or the TV series, there's no denying Reginald
Hargreeves is the worst.
After all, he probably caused all those spontaneous, non-consensual pregnancies through his magic
alien sparkles, resulting in the births of the Hargreeves children.
And then he raised the seven kids he was able to purchase in a sterile, unloving environment,
where his only focus was on the children's special abilities and not their emotional needs.
Yet, while Hargreeves mistreated all of his adopted children to varying degrees, it's
no contest when it comes to which one of the Hargreeves siblings drew the shortest straw.
Poor Vanya Hargreeves was raised to believe she had no powers at all and was, therefore,
unworthy in every sense of the word.
It's only once she becomes an adult that she learns she's actually the most powerful of
the seven, and that her father had been suppressing her abilities with medication her whole life,
claiming she needed it to regulate her mental health.
Not only did he lie to Vanya for decades, but he excluded her from the Umbrella Academy's
missions, causing her to feel distanced from her family and doubt her own self-worth.
"I'm afraid there's just nothing special about you."
Reginald Hargreeves was a horrible father no matter how you slice it, but his treatment
of Vanya took the cake.
As a child, Allison Hargreeves received the superhero moniker "The Rumor," thanks to her
ability to use her voice to convince anyone to do anything she wanted.
With a gift like that, the world is truly Allison's oyster, and once she leaves home
as a teenager, she uses it to her full advantage.
Allison rumors herself into fame and fortune, which, while definitely not the most forthright
way to engage with the world, at least doesn't seem to be hurting anyone.
However, she crosses a line in both the comics and the series when it's implied that she
rumors a man named Patrick into falling in love with her and, subsequently, marrying her.
While we never get a detailed look at Allison and Patrick's relationship, it seems that,
at some point, Allison told Patrick about her powers and agreed to stop using them.
However, their marriage fell apart when he caught her using her powers on their daughter, Claire.
"Good luck on your next film.
Hope it turns out better than your marriage."
"Dysfunctional" is honestly a pretty tame way of describing the dynamic among the Hargreeves siblings.
But at least the Netflix characters make slightly more of an effort to establish meaningful
relationships with one another than the siblings in the comics do.
However, one place in which the TV heroes really drop the ball is toward the end of
the first season of The Umbrella Academy, when the men of the Hargreeves family utterly
disregard the opinions and suggestions of their sisters.
After Luther realizes how powerful Vanya is, he betrays her trust when she returns home
to ask for help, choking her unconscious and locking her in a soundproof bunker underneath the mansion.
Vanya pleads with him to let her out, but he refuses to listen to her.
Allison, whose throat Vanya slit in a fit of rage, also demands that Luther release
Vanya, but he won't listen to her, either.
Later, after Vanya escapes and destroys the Academy, Allison beseeches her brothers to
try to talk to Vanya, but this time all of them ignore her and attempt to attack Vanya
instead, which does not go well.
Not only does this strip both Vanya and Allison of their agency, but with the men calling
all the shots, the women are literally robbed of their voices.
In both the comics and the TV show, Klaus, also known as The Séance and Number Four,
winds up time traveling back to the '60s, where he enlists in the army and fights in
the Vietnam War.
However, the details of Klaus' time in the '60s are very different, and while the TV
series sees him falling in love with, and then witnessing the death of, a young soldier
named Dave, the comics don't give him a tragic love story.
Instead, they give him a job running a nightclub and creating a Televator, a sort of TARDIS-like
transport originally invented by Reginald Hargreeves that allows occupants to travel
through space, time, and other dimensions.
When it's finally time for Klaus, Diego, and Luther to head back to their time in the Televator,
Klaus hands an unexplained baby he'd been carrying around off to a local Vietnamese woman.
It turns out that, much to everyone's surprise, the baby belongs to Klaus, although we never
learn anything about the mother or even the baby's name.
Truthfully, it's probably good that Klaus realized he had no business raising a baby.
On the other hand, especially given his own upbringing, it seems rather callous that he
just casually hands off his own child without much of a thought before departing forever,
and he never mentions his offspring ever again.
Both the second season of Netflix's The Umbrella Academy and the second volume of the comics
center around the assassination of John F. Kennedy, but the way it plays out in each
is very different.
In both the TV series and the comics, Number Five winds up duking it out with his older
self after he's tasked with killing the president, but in the TV show, it's actually the sinister
Majestic 12 organization that carries out the assassination plot, absolving the Umbrella
Academy of any role in the death.
However, in the comics, things play out very differently.
After witnessing a cataclysmic future in which Kennedy survives, setting off a chain of events
leading to the end of the world, Five travels to the past, intent on making sure the assassination
is carried out.
Like in the show, his brothers are determined to stop the assassination, but Five has accounted for this.
Just when his siblings think they've stopped the assassination, we see that Allison has
taken Jackie Kennedy's place in Kennedy's car, and she rumors Kennedy's head to explode.
In Season 2 of the Netflix series, after the entire Hargreeves clan accidentally travels
through time back to the '60s, Klaus drops into the year 1960 alongside the ghost of
his dead brother, Ben, also known as The Horror, and Number Six.
Ben died when they were all teenagers, but thanks to Klaus' ability to communicate with
the dead, Klaus has remained in constant communication with him in the years since.
After becoming irritated with Ben, however, Klaus lies to their siblings after they've
reunited, telling them that ghosts can't time travel when they ask about Ben.
"You need serious help."
It's played for laughs in the show, but if you think about it, this is a particularly
cruel thing for Klaus to do to Ben.
Numerous times, Ben voices how much he misses his siblings and wishes to be with them again.
Even though the rest of their siblings express a desire to speak to Ben, and Klaus knows
he's Ben's only connection to the rest of the world, he still refuses to acknowledge
Ben's presence.
Klaus is likely motivated much more by pettiness than any sort of real maliciousness, but even
so, punishing your dead brother by refusing to let him communicate with his loved ones
just because you're annoyed is a pretty jerky thing to do.
In the Umbrella Academy comics, Klaus is more of a sad character than a comedic one, but
in the TV series, he largely serves to provide some laughs.
This is how it's framed when it's revealed at the beginning of Season 2 that Klaus started
a cult in the 1960s.
While Klaus didn't set out to start a cult, he quickly realized he could get special treatment
if he used his knowledge of the future and his powers to convince people that he was some sort of oracle.
Klaus' cult, which he dubs Destiny's Children, is played almost entirely for laughs, until
he eventually abandons them to return to the future with his siblings.
However, in the real world, cults are deeply problematic organizations that thrive on brainwashing,
manipulation, and abuse.
Viewers know Klaus isn't a predatory person, but he still wound up brainwashing his followers
through lies and manipulation.
After adopting his seven superpowered children as babies, Reginald Hargreeves molds them
into a crime-fighting superteam.
But of course, defeated supervillains have to go somewhere, and in the comics, it's revealed
that after being subdued by the Umbrella Academy, Reginald Hargreeves ships off the cowed baddies
to the Hotel Oblivion.
The Hotel Oblivion isn't really a hotel at all, but instead, it's a prison located in
a hellish alternate dimension, where bad guys are locked inside indefinitely.
A glimpse inside one inmate's Hotel Oblivion experience shows that the residents gradually
go mad from isolation, that the TVs play really weird cartoons, and that the rooms are stocked
with Hargreeves-authored self-help literature.
In the first season of the Netflix show, Vanya spends much of the season vying for the competitive
first chair violin position in her local orchestra.
At the end of the season, she unleashes her newly discovered powers and winds up accidentally
blowing a chunk off the moon, triggering an apocalyptic event.
However, in the comics, the orchestra Vanya joins isn't just a regular musical group.
Instead, it's an ensemble made up of, quote, "madmen and murderesses," intent on bringing
about the end of the world.
And they call themselves the Orchestra Verdammten, which translates to "Orchestra of the Damned."
The conductor of the orchestra tries to recruit Vanya early on in order to help them bring
about their goal, but she refuses.
However, once Vanya learns the truth of her powers and her father's deception, she returns
to the Orchestra Verdammten and voluntarily joins their ranks.
While it's understandable that Vanya would be deeply hurt after learning that she's been
lied to and manipulated her entire life, joining a group bent on destroying the world seems
like overkill.
This is one area where the Netflix show makes Vanya much more sympathetic.
Vanya's tour of destruction once she realizes the extent of her family's betrayal doesn't
stop at her joining a villainous orchestra.
Before she heads off to her fateful performance, she also unleashes her powers on her family
mansion, and in the process, she kills her family's primate caretaker, Pogo.
Throughout the lives of the Hargreeves siblings, Pogo has served as both a mentor and a surrogate father figure.
Vanya feels understandably betrayed when she learns that Pogo was in on Reginald's secret,
but it still seems like a bridge too far when she kills him in cold blood.
In the comics, she uses her powers to make his head explode, while in the Netflix series,
she impales him on a pair of antlers mounted above their fireplace.
One of a handful of important characters created just for the Netflix series is the cunning
Handler, who works for the Temps Commission and serves as both a frequent ally and nemesis
of Number Five.
While the Temps Commision exists to maintain and protect the timeline, the Handler's role
has always felt a little more ambiguous, and she always seems to have a hidden agenda that
serves only herself.
So it's worrisome when, as a tradeoff for giving Five a means to return himself and
his siblings to their proper time after getting stuck in the '60s, she requests that he assassinate
the entire Board of Directors of the Commission, putting her in charge.
Granted, Five is rather desperate at the time, but that doesn't change the fact that he's
willing to hand over control of time itself to someone entirely untrustworthy and self-serving,
all in the name of getting himself and his siblings back home.
No list of terrible actions committed at the hands of the Hargreeves family would be complete
without mentioning the, not one, but two apocalypses the siblings have managed to cause.
The first one occurs when Vanya embraces her powers as the White Violin and blows a chunk
off the moon that then comes hurtling toward Earth.
That apocalypse is thwarted in the comics by Séance and circumvented in the show by
Five transporting all of his siblings back in time.
But even so, there's no denying that the actions of the Umbrella Academy caused it in the first place.
"Did dad say anything about the apocalypse when you spoke to him?"
The second takes place in the '60s, after the Academy successfully prevents the assassination
of JFK, which winds up ultimately triggering a nuclear war with the U.S.S.R.
Once again, it's the Hargreeves siblings interfering in the timeline that triggers the eventual
apocalypse, proving that in the world of The Umbrella Academy, it's true that no good deed
goes unpunished.
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