Umbrella Academy boss explains apocalyptic season 1 cliffhanger
Note: This article contains game-changing spoilers for the season one finale of The Umbrella Academy.
When the premise of a series is all about superhero siblings uniting in grief to save the world from the apocalypse, you don't exactly expect them to fail, do you?
Well, when it comes to The Umbrella Academy you should, as that's exactly what happened in season one's positively cataclysmic finale.
Related: 8 big questions The Umbrella Academy season 2 needs to answer
Chatting to Entertainment Weekly about the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers, showrunner Steve Blackman explained why he decided to deviate from Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá's comic book arc and, y'know, end the whole world.
And, interestingly, the answer is very straight-forward.
"Yeah, it ends horribly!" Steve gleefully admitted, explaining: "What I really wanted to do was find a really good cliffhanger.
"I also thought it was too easy for this family to come together in eight days and save the world. It has to be trickier than that."
Revealing that he wanted to save the Hargreeves family more than he wanted to save the world, Steve continued: "I wanted to have an ending where they sort of came together as a family, but they didn’t achieve the greater goal of saving the world.
"If we get a second season, we'll see how they're gonna end up. These guys aren't dead, but we don't know what happens."
Calling Umbrella Academy's bombshell ending "very telling", the series boss suggested delivering a happy ending was far too easy.
"I thought it told a lot about who this family was, which is they couldn't quite get it together," he explained. "Their wonderfully dysfunctional family couldn't quite win the day."
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