The Umbrella Academy Member With The Greatest Amount Of Power
If the inaugural season of Netflix's latest comic book confection The Umbrella Academy has taught us anything, it's that rivalries between super-powered siblings are pretty untenable — and at times, they can even be quite dangerous.
The Umbrella Academy follows the travails of the seven Hargreeves kids who, having all been born on the same day under highly irregular circumstances, are "adopted" by billionaire-industrialist-slash-mad-scientist Sir Reginald Hargreeves, who believes there may be something special in their genetic makeup. That hunch proves right, and in raising his adopted children (whom he initially assigned numbers instead of names), Sir Reginald helps develop their abilities in hopes of making them a super squad of crime-fighters.
Of those abilities, they're a blend of run-of-the-mill superhero stuff with a couple of intriguing wildcards in the mix: Number 1 (Luther) possesses super strength, Number 2 (Diego) is quick and beyond handy with a blade, Number 3 (Allison) can control events by saying "I heard a rumor," Number 4 (Klaus) can speak to the dead, Number 5 (known only as Number 5) can teleport and jump through time, and Number 6 (Ben) can transform himself into a murderous, tentacled beast. As for Number 7 (Vanya), well, when we first meet her, we're led to believe there's nothing special about her in the least.
As mentioned, the siblings' unique abilities led to some tense rivalries and a seemingly perpetual power struggle within the group. The first season of The Umbrella Academy spends the bulk of its time watching the emotionally damaged adult versions of the Hargreeves struggling to reconnect, and consistently displaying how handy their powers may be in the real world — not to mention the coming fight to save said world from annihilation. As fans watched the Umbrella Academy try to make sense of their lives, one of the more hotly debated questions that arose is which Hargreeves sibling has the greatest amount of power.
It's a question the series doesn't officially answer until the season 1 finale: Vanya, the so-called "normal one," eventually developed into the powerful "White Violin," who in turn became the bringer of the apocalypse.
Is Vanya truly fated to become death, the destroyer of worlds?
Those who worked their way through all 10 hyper-violent, time-shifting episodes of The Umbrella Academy may have seen that big twist coming. (And those who have read the Umbrella Academy comics upon which the Netflix series is based certainly knew where things would eventually go.) Thus, the greater mystery developed throughout the season isn't why Vanya's powers weren't developed alongside those of the other Academy members, but how her father actually went about stifling her development.
As The Umbrella Academy begins, a powerless Vanya is initially presented as an outsider even in her own family. We go on to learn that she was never a part of any of the group's "missions," and was even left out of family portraits. The utter isolation she felt as a child clearly scarred her relationships as an adult, but we come to learn that Vanya's lack of powers may not be entirely what it seems, and there may be something more to all those meds she's seen taking in the early episodes.
Those pills, prescribed by her father, were meant to keep Vanya in a constant state of sedation. She's barely off them a day when we start to see her powers emerge. Initially, Vanya discovering and developing her powers seems like an exciting prospect, but a flashback eventually leads us to see why Sir Reginald took the extreme measures he did — which shockingly included forcing Allison to make Vanya believe she was normal. It seems Vanya's powers are directly connected to her emotional state, and emotions were something the generally icy (and supremely manipulative) Sir Reginald proved tragically unequipped to handle.
By the final episodes of The Umbrella Academy season 1, the emotional toll a lifetime of isolation took on Vanya — and the knowledge that her father (knowingly) and sister (begrudgingly) were the key figures behind it — proved too much. When her family eventually takes dramatic action to hold her back, Vanya snaps. In turn, her emotions explode unchecked — and so too do her newly discovered powers.
As the finale unfolds, it's clear Vanya's powers will indeed bring about the end of days. But even as Vanya's evil alter ego fully emerges, it feels like we're only getting a glimpse of her world-ending power — which involves her harnessing the elements, and thus absorbing then expelling increasingly unstable amounts of atmospheric energy into the world. In the end, her super-powered brothers and sisters, even in their united state, cannot stop Vanya. It's their actions that lead Vanya to fracture the moon and bring forth the asteroid storm that ends mankind's reign. Luckily, the Hargreeves hatch a last-minute plan to use Number 5's abilities to jump back in time and try to stop the apocalypse by helping their sister control her power.
Presumably, the already green-lit season 2 of The Umbrella Academy will pick up in that moment. Hopefully, it will also start to answer the all important questions of exactly how strong Vanya really is beyond her "most powerful" status in the Umbrella Academy, and whether or not she's fated to end the world.