You know what sold me on The Umbrella Academy as a show?
The episode that points everything forward, upward, out. Finally, finally, the Hargreeves have tilted their trajectory futurebound. Not stagnant, not regressing. Things work how the audience has been screaming at their screens for it to go. (well except for the Dancing in the Moonlight, but even that is a part of the fantasy of one of the characters).
The whole episode, really, is too good to be true. Its a dream. A fiction within in the fiction. If we didn't know better, we'd believe it to be that. A cruel trick played to mess with the Academy's minds and make them stumble later on.
But that's not the point of it at all. In fact, they don't even know it *could* have happened. And it could have. The Day That Wasn't wasn't some cruel hallucination of a fiction none of them could ever achieve. We see it happen. *The audience* sees it happen. But we are its only witnesses.
Klaus doesn't know that in one version of events, one *so* close to his own, that he summoned Dave.
Diego never will know that his mother broke through her programming for *him*.
Viktor was just a step ladder away from changing his destiny.
And then Five returns, for once, too soon. Every victory, erased.
The last 50 minutes of television are now null and void. Not one character will recall it, learn from it, reference it. Because it would never be lived. Except for the audience. We remember.
In terms of moving the plot forward, The Day That Wasn't is useless. Nothing from it, other than Five's actions parallel to it, exist canonically. Klaus never tells Diego about Dave because Diego is never there in the attic in the first place. There's no Allison around when Luther discovers the truth about his moon research. But we still know how it could have played out.
And that's what made me love this show. In a single episode, the audience is able to finally understand Five's plight, if not inverted. If the Apocalypse was born from the Day that Was and saving the world spurred from the Day that Wasn't, is it not feasible that on some alternate timeline they were switched? Is Five not trying to bring about the Day That Wasn't for all of season one?
Is it not Five, blinking into that family meeting, clutching a briefcase, that ensured it would never come to be?
And, for once, Five is no oracle. He is not burdened with the knowledge of what will or could be. We are. And there's no one to tell. No way to fix the story. All we can do is watch.
snowghoul
pixelskylines
dailybridgerton
