The Umbrella Academy Fan Theory About Lila That Changes Everything
One of the beauties of a show as tangled as "The Umbrella Academy" is that there are endless theories to explore between seasons. Luckily for fans, the last few minutes of "The Umbrella Academy" Season 2 lays out enough teasers to put together some ideas about what could be coming in Season 3.
At the end of Season 2, the dysfunctional super-powered family finally make it out of 1963 Dallas and back to the Academy in 2019. But their home-sweet-home return is cut short by some interesting revelations. Not only is their adopted father Sir Reginald Hargreeves (Colm Feore) alive in this timeline, but so is their dead brother Ben (Justin H. Min) — seen with a new emo haircut and unwelcoming attitude. And as for the Umbrella Academy members, they've apparently been replaced with the so-called Sparrow Academy.
The immediate assumption is that having met his future children in the past and been none too impressed, Sir Reginald decided to do some historical rewriting. With 43 presumably super-powered babies born on October 1, 1989 to choose from, he may have deliberately tracked down different children for his superhero school.
However, there's an alternate theory, one that involves timeline meddling from a different character — specifically, Lila (Ritu Arya), another of the 43 children who has a grudge against the Umbrella Academy.
Did Lila use her briefcase to take out the Umbrella Academy?
The last time both viewers and the members of the Umbrella Academy see Lila, she's using a briefcase to escape to an unknown place and time. By this point, Lila is quite upset with the Hargreeves family, as she discovers that her adoptive mother the Handler (Kate Walsh) had Number Five (Aidan Gallagher) murder Lila's biological mother so she could control Lila and her powers. Though she's originally introduced as Diego's (David Castañeda) fellow psychiatric patient and love interest, Lila proves to be far more important to Season 2 than viewers originally thought. And that could happen again in Season 3.
Reddit user u/helvetica_unicorn has a very interesting theory about Lila. They argue that, motivated by anger, Lila uses briefcase to prevent the five Hargreeves kids she knows about from being born — which would explain why Ben, whom she doesn't know about, survives in this timeline. In this theory, it isn't that Sir Reginald deliberately chose different children — he just didn't care that the people he met in 1963 never emerged, as he saw them as disappointments anyway.
One potential issue with this theory is that no one knows how or why the 43 children were born — except maybe Sir Reginald, but likely not Lila. Their mothers weren't pregnant at the start of the day, and their births were all very sudden, so Lila probably couldn't stop the conception and birth of the five members of the Umbrella Academy. But she could have killed them as children, which is pretty brutal — but then again, she was raised to be an assassin.
It looks like we'll simply have to wait and see what happens in "The Umbrella Academy" Season 3.