Full spoilers follow for The Umbrella Academy season 4.
Two of The Umbrella AcademyThe show’s lead actors have expressed their disappointment over a major storyline from Season 4, which was significantly cut due to time constraints.
Ritu Arya and Aidan Gallagher, who play Lila and Five, spoke to Ny Breaking ahead of the Netflix series’ final season, admitting they wanted to explore the duo’s timeline-shifting subplot in more depth in episode 5.
The fifth episode of the season, titled “Six Years, Five Months, and Two Days,” sees the pair continue their multiverse adventure to not only try to prevent another apocalypse, but also to fix the official timeline. You know, the one that disrupted the unexpected births of the Hargreeves siblings – which took place in October 1989.
Although Five discovers in episode 2 that they can initially travel through the time-traveling subway network without any problems, they soon become trapped in the maze of trains.
Lost in time and space, Five and Lila jump between universes in their search for a multi-dimensional exit—one that gets them into all sorts of scrapes and antics. The pair search tirelessly for a way out of their predicament, until one day they finally admit defeat and agree to relocate to a completely different timeline. They don’t manage to return home until nearly seven years later, when Five discovers a notebook written in by one of his alternate universe selves, with instructions on how to find their way out of the tunnel system.
The writing team behind one of Netflix’s best shows came up with so many ideas that Lila and Five’s time-traveling adventures could have been an entire episode in and of themselves. Unfortunately, due to the truncated nature of Season 4 (it’s only six episodes long, instead of the 10 episodes of its predecessors), many of the pair’s adventures were left on the cutting room floor.
“I’m really happy with how it turned out,” Gallagher said when I asked how the cast felt about the shorter episode count this season. “I wish the storyline that we see in Episode 5 had been given a little more time. We got to hear about a lot of different elements of their journey that they (the writers) had to leave out.”
“Yeah, there was some really cool stuff in there,” Arya interjected. “Apparently Five and Lila go to Tokyo and have all these really crazy adventures where they fight through different worlds for a way out, which we didn’t have time to explore. I wish they hadn’t told us that, because it sounds like it would have been pretty epic to reenact it and then watch it.”
It’s unclear whether any or all of those ideas made it far enough into the production process to be filmed before they were ultimately cut. What is clear is that The Umbrella Academy‘s fourth and final season doesn’t capitalize on its six-episode run. Indeed, it was one of my biggest gripes with this episode, which you can read more about in my spoiler-light review of The Umbrella Academy season 4. You’ll also want to check out my article where I explain The Umbrella Academy the end of Season 4 to get answers to your biggest questions about how the show’s many storylines will conclude.