Was The Umbrella Academy Betrayed By The Commission?
In Netflix's hit show "The Umbrella Academy," the organization known as the Commission is charged with maintaining a proper timeline. After Number Five (Aidan Gallagher) miscalculates his own abilities to jump through time and ends up in an apocalyptic and lonely future, he meets with their representative, "The Handler" (Kate Walsh), and she offers him a job.
Accepting the position as a temporal assassin, Number Five's true aim is to ultimately return to his family to save them and stop the apocalypse, but due to the nature of time travel, Number Five's actions may actually make him complicit in the world's destruction. Having a rogue time-traveling agent appears to be a major problem for the Commission, and they do everything in their power to stop Number Five and his Umbrella Academy family.
Throughout the first two seasons of "The Umbrella Academy," the Hargreeves family must fight off the Commission in order to save themselves and the world (or so they think). But after the super-powered final battle of Season 2, the Hargreeves siblings are greeted by a member of the Commission who thanks them for their service in dealing with the out-of-control Handler, allowing them to return to their own time. But when they arrive home again, the Hargreeves siblings land in a very different reality, meeting the Sparrow Academy. This new timeline and what it means for the Hargreeves siblings will be explored in Season 3.
But isn't the goal of the Commission to respect a certain order of events? If so, how can the organization so easily allow an entirely new timeline to play out? Based on the ending of Season2, it seems like the Commission has not yet completely played their hand, and they might still be manipulating the Umbrella Academy into either maintaining the proper flow of time as they want it to be or creating a new one.
Has the Commission been manipulating the Umbrella Academy the entire time?
Considering the nature of The Commission and its relative omniscience as to what "the plan" for time is, it's likely that the organization is actually still manipulating the Hargreeves.
In Season 2 of "The Umbrella Academy," one of the most interesting scenes involves the Hargreeves siblings meeting their adoptive father Reginald (Colm Feore) long before they are born. This encounter has the unintended (or so we think) consequence of Reginald adopting different children and creating a new timeline. In this new reality, Reginald forms a group known as the Sparrow Academy, while also erasing the very first apocalypse the siblings try to avoid. But with their extreme ability of foresight, how could the Commission let this happen? Or did the Commission want this to happen, intending to leave the Hargreeves stranded in a new timeline?
While the Commission seems thankful for the Hargreeves siblings' actions in Season 2, it's possible that Number Five and his family are puppets in a far grander game. Perhaps the Commission is still on its correct path, and everything the Umbrella Academy does is exactly what needs to be done, leading to some strange future. At no point does anybody from the organization say that their mission statement has changed, and it's not like everyone that works there suddenly just agrees to let the Hargreeves siblings do whatever they want. Unless, of course, the plan is ultimately to let the family think they are doing what they want, when in reality, they are being manipulated by the Commission in order to create their desired timeline.
As it would seem foolhardy to let a group of super-powered individuals ping-pong through different eras, one has to wonder what angle the Commission is really working, and how much of a role the organization will play in the upcoming "The Umbrella Academy" Season 3.