How Game of Thrones inspired The Umbrella Academy’s crazy climax

“I wanted the last episode to be a non-stop action episode,” showrunner Steve Blackman told Yahoo Movies UK. “I wanted to have a little break in the beginning, and then give it a few false endings, where you keep thinking you’ve got to the end, but it’s not over yet, and you still need to get the end. It’s not over yet!”

I just finished the season last night, and I gotta say, even if The Umbrella Academy can be a bit too clever for its own good sometimes, I love that it goes there. That last episode was a non-stop adrenaline rush that really did feel like a finale, with big revelations and huge action set pieces following one after the other, and all of it tied together well enough that I didn’t feel like we were being given spectacle for its own sake.

Not that spectacle is a bad thing, and when it came to that massive rush of Commission goons trying to gun down our favorite family of dysfunctional superheroes, Blackman took inspiration from the best. “I was really loving Game of Thrones, and I was watching it at the time,” he said. “I wanted to do our version of the horde army coming over the hill. So, that’s why we had all those commission agents. It was a lot of fun to do.”

As Yahoo points out, the agents had “briefcases rather than Dothraki blades,” which makes me think the specific inspiration for the battle was the Loot Train Attack, where the Dothraki charge down the Lannister lines:

Happily, the battle went better for the Umbrella Academy than it did for the Lannisters.

But as fun as the climax was, heart of The Umbrella Academy is its characters, and Blackman wanted to give all of them a fitting end…for now. “I really enjoyed giving each character an ending, and I wanted to wrap up all the stories,” he said. “But then I wanted the final coda to be a real twist that makes people say, ‘Oh, now I gotta wait again for another season?!’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, you do!’”

That twist, by the way, involves the superpowered siblings finally managing to get back to their own time, only to find that something is very wrong. We don’t know everything, but it looks like the third season, if it happens, will involve them facing down their own dark dopplegangers, including their brother Ben, who in whatever timeline they stumbled into didn’t die but instead grew up to be a jerk with a thin little mustache?

And that was just one of the big twists from the finale. We also found out that Sir Reginald Hargreeves, the stern billionaire who adopts the Umbrella Academy members as kids, is actually…a space alien? Apparently, that’s something we learn in “the first few frames” of The Umbrella Academy graphic novel by Gerard Way, but it sure surprised the hell out of me.

“[I]f we are lucky enough to have a season three, we clearly have to pay that off,” Blackman said. “I have a very good idea what I want to do with that. But dad’s a little different.”

Talking more generally about a potential third season, Blackman wants to continue exploring these terrifically quirky characters. “I’d like to put some characters together who don’t normally spend a lot of time together,” he said. “I’m fascinated with Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) and Diego (David Castañeda), who don’t spend a lot of time together. And I haven’t done a lot of Luther (Tom Hopper) and Vanya (Ellen Page). Allison and Klaus (Robert Sheehan) have spent some time together, but not a lot. I’d like to try new pairings of people and see how the dynamics play out.”

At this point, I’m definitely down for another season. If the show can keep up the momentum it’s built, Netflix could have a winner for the ages on its hands.

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