Spoilers below for The Umbrella Academy’s final season, so be warned if you haven’t yet streamed it in full!
One of the past week’s biggest streaming releases has definitely been the final season of The Umbrella Academy, which remains one of Netflix’s most binge-worthy shows, even if the six-episode swan song has taken some huge hits from critics and the fanbase. Though the powered-up comic book adaptation finally revealed what the Jennifer Incident was, with the Hargreeves siblings saving the world’s purest timeline once and for all, that victory came with arguably TUA’s most shocking character interactions.
I’m speaking, of course, of the gobsmacking and oh-so-illicit romance between Aidan Gallagher’s Five and Ritu Arya’s Lila that inspires the fifth episode’s title, “Six Years, Five Months, and Two Days.” The whole episode was a wild trip, both metaphorically and literally, as the two characters became stuck within the subway system without a way to return to their shared home. And along the way, their mutual disgust morphed into something more emotionally fraught and knotted with desperation and despair.
Even though Five and Lila’s eventual kiss seemed inevitable long before it happened, the actual moment and immediate aftermath was still jarring as all hell. And as it turns out, showrunner Steve Blackman was keenly aware that this plot point was going to be a divisive one amongst fans. Here’s how he put it when talking to Netflix’s Tudum:
OK, so that’s my big swing of the year that I’m wondering if the fans will love or hate me for. I felt that Five had to have a love story. I mean, he’s a 64-year-old man in the body of an 18-year-old. So we thought he could have a love story. And I thought, ‘How can he have a love story? He’s not the kind of guy who’s going to date.’ I thought Five needed to be with someone, whether it be a boy or girl. We thought we had an opportunity with Lila. And we tried it. I don’t know how the fans are going to take it.
Honestly, I don’t take too much issue with this part of the explanation, at least if it’s completely removed from the context of what’s happening in other characters’ lives. While I don’t think that every TV character absolutely needs a romantic storyline to be vindicated, I think Five is a very special case as someone who has experienced so many other emotional extremes without romantic love being accounted for.
And I also get that The Umbrella Academy isn’t exactly teeming with hot young singles who fetishize nice suits and timeline fuckery. To that end, Blackman continued his explanation by addressing more of why the creative team set Lila up as Five’s loving foil:
I wanted him to kiss Lila because they’re extreme opposites and they hate each other. But really, they are remarkably similar. They’re both assassins, and they both went through the Commission. So they really do understand each other. And I thought, ‘How would we get them there?’ It would take years to get them to appreciate each other. And I thought, ‘OK, that’s what I’m going to do.’ I went and had them lost together for seven and a half, almost eight years together [to] see if something grows. And it did grow.
Also a sensible enough thought process in the sense of “length of time” being a key factor in the impetus behind Lila and Five locking lips. Considering these two once fought each other while Lila was fully nude, and without any hornball energy wafting off of it, I get that them being forced to live and survive together even under such dire circumstances can lead to such complex energies. And that after so many years of hopelessness, even the most unexpected relationship can form.
Blackman revealed that they filmed the scene in such a way that Gallagher and Arya’s kiss would feel as spontaneous and potentially awkward as could be. In his words:
By the time they kissed, they’re so sweet at that point. You could believe that they would be together. We wouldn’t let them rehearse the kiss. We got him to the point just before the kiss, and then we let them do [it] on the day and it was just perfect.
That's all good and well, but now let's strike at the heart of the matter, and why the above explanation can still fail as a proper justification, even though it's mostly understandable.
The Big Issue With Five And Lila's Romance
For all that Steve Blackman explains the companionship well enough from Five's perspective, he doesn't really provide a whole lot of commentary about why it makes sense from Lila's point of view. Because that would be way harder to pull off.
To be sure, The Umbrella Academy's fourth season does successfully portray Lila as a ball of frustration as a family woman, with her marriage to Diego the main source of her angst. But it's not as if their chemistry was completely absent, or as if he was a truly terrible husband and/or father. So I don't know that I wholly believe that Lila would have threatened that bond with Five of all people, even after years of roasting rats and peeing on subway tracks and whatnot.
At least not after only half an episode of TV. This whole thing would have been far easier to swallow had it taken place across two or three episodes, a knowingly impossible feat within this shortened season. As such, the story arc comes across as overly rushed and fairly cringe-y despite having fairly smart and measured reasons for existing in the first place. But Aiden Gallagher and Ritu Arya both sell it well enough that it didn't bother me that much going into the finale.
Of course, the finale had a bunch of equally bonkers choices in how it handled Ben and Jennifer's Cleanse monster, and I still have questions about the final scene in the park, and how some of those characters existed in that reality. But I suppose I can just ponder those thoughts for the next...oh, I dunno...six years, five months, and two days.
The Umbrella Academy's four-season run is available to stream in its entirety with a Netflix subscription.
