Lack of Tech in the Umbrella Academy Universe Makes It Hard to Be a Junkie (Other Meta on How The Academy Kids’ In-The-Moment Suffering Is Probably is All Reginald Hargreeves Fault)
no joke yall
watch it again
no one uses a cell phone
no one uses a computer
there are multiple uses of pay phones
there are no earbuds and we are in 2019 and Klaus here (and other characters in other scenes) are show using fucking walkmans
The world of the Umbrella Academy is a NOTICEABLE 20 years behind us.
In this day and age, no self-respecting dealer would wait outside for a junkie - he’d use a social messenging system to coordinate, meet up in a gas station parking lot, and move on like civilized members of the underworld.
How is that we have Mom’s learning AI and Mr Pogo’s existence and Luther’s current predicament of biomedical engineering and an actual self-sustaining moon-base all of which ...are just...literal impossibilities of science and yet Sir Reginald created them.
And we have Hazel, Chacha, the Handler and the entire Commission (shout out to my main bitch Case Manager Dot - the MVP of the Apocalypse who clearly read UA: Apocalypse Suite on her lunch break and was like “nope, nope, that’s not an. acceptable outcome, we need to fix that shit” and got down to business - I got an entire thing on her LATER)
Yet we are noticeably, glaringly, distractingly behind in technology in a lot of really visible ways that would have fixed the plot completely. Imagine if Allison could have texted Vanya that very important police record instead of having to show her in the car? Imagine if they could have done a google search instead of going to the library for any of the things they need to know? Imagine if they could have ever called each other from their various situations to coordinate ever?
But no one does any of those. I’m pretty fucking sure they cant do it.
Why?
Where’re pagers and cell phones?
Where are CD players and DVD players and smaller headphones?
Where are computers and mp3 players?
Where is the fucking internet?
And if all that is missing, how can Sir Reginald Hargreeves do the absolutely impossible shit he can do and teach a fucking genetically engineered chimp to do it too?!
You wanna know what I think? I’ll tell you what I fucking think
And watch the fuck out because Thar Be Fucking Spoilers For The Finale
I think that
Reginald Hargreeves is from the fucking future rather than outer space like he is in the comics. Otherwise, you explain to me how Sir Reginald comes from a “Long Ago” that has rocket ships that are evacuating AND goddamn violins of human make that )I assume) are Stradivariuses AND how Sir Reginald knows what to warn Five about regarding specific dangers of time travel as a child AND how Reginald would know that he needed to adopt these kids to save the world AND how he would know when it would be happening so as to take drastic measures at the exact right time? Not even being part of the Commission ties up ALL those threads without him leaving the time stream which - as far as we know - he did not.
I think Sir Reginald is a goddamn CHEATER who took his future tech skills and knowledge back with him to the 18mumblemumbles and isnt as brilliant as he likes to pretends. True story, I can type about 80-100 WPM and carry a. conversation with a client while capturing basically everything they say. It makes me seem VERY fucking impressive. The number of clients who have remarked on it is high. But I started learning how to type in 1st Grade and unlike most of those clients, I’ve been practicing hours on end - sometimes 8-16 hours at a stretch because I like it. A skill looks impressive as hell from the outside. If you’ve been practicing it for 25 years and grew up learning how to do it on top of that? That’s not brilliance. That’s training and practice. If you compare that to someone who didnt have access to EITHER of those things tho? Then fuck, if you dont look like a wizard. Think of every person you know who speaks multiple languages, everyone who plays an instrument, everyone who can do a sport, who has a skill. Think how long they’ve been at it. I think that’s what Sir Reginald has going for him with tech. DAMN is he impressive if you dont know what he’s working from. It’s a lot less impressive if you think about him growing up with that technology the way we grew up with cars and elevators. Who knows how to work those? Everybody. Yeah? Well 100 years before that everyone knew how to behave with a horse. I’m just saying. The time you’re in influences your skill set.
I think he MIGHT be a former member of the Commission. Whether he was a part of the Commission or not, he absolutely knew of it’s existence and he knew what 1)their objectives were and 2)what the concrete dates were that were not to be changed [with the exception of the apocalypse, obvi] . My favorite theory atm is that he’s a retired member of Upper Maanagement who is (at this very moment still) playing the long game to change one VERY key event (possibly not even the apocalypse but thats the best guess I have right now) to change that mass exodus that got him separated from the woman - who I’m just gonna assume is and refer to as the very briefly referenced Stela from Hotel Oblivion until canon tells me differently - he loved. He knows what he can’t manipulate because it would draw the attention of a case manager (again, big ups to my woman Dot seriously) but everything else was fair game and he knew it.
He rigged the game to give himself the most possible power and advantage humanly possible and he did it by manipulating the growth of technology. We don’t see this happen, but the humanity in The Umbrella Academy isn’t where we are in the real world and I think it’s because Sir Reginald got to the past early enough to get established and, using his combined knowledge of the way things should go and the way things could go, shaped history to his liking. Over and over we see and hear what a ridiculous egomaniac and manipulator he is but also, we learn that while major events are not malleable the fabric of reality itself is. Five’s Eyeball of the Apocalypse never finds its home in that important skull. The Hindenburg has lots of ways it can go down, the details are something Five and the Handler debate. The Kennedy Assassination happens whether Five shoots him or not. For whatever reason the Briefcase was primed for a trip to 1968, Klaus traveling there for almost a year left a marked change in the world but not enough for the Commission to actually try and take him out (although that could be argued possibly because him going their and getting Dave killed was already fated, possibly because Dave was going to be killed by Hazel and Chacha anyway, i mean, he did land at the foot of Dave’s bed, and possible because it didn’t fucking matter - genuinely no way to know)but point stands - shifts still happen. If Sir Reginald is from far enough in the future, he would know that. He would know that if he got in Bill Gates or Steve Wozniak or Ada Lovelace or Alan Turing or idk whoever invented the CD player’s way even if by offering them something interesting “free trip to bali on this specific date” or “a lucritive research opportunity.” or fuck I dont know “Eduardo Saverin I like what you do with the weather forecasting. Let me send you to singapore to do financial management for me. I think that Zuckerberg might be a bad influence on you. Won’t your father be proud?” then Sir Reginald could have shut a bunch of innovations down and released them at his own pace. The man is a control freak to a degree that is grotesque and to think that it only goes so far as the children, Pogo and Grace is a bit narrow. I think this for many reasons from the fact that it is just so on brand for this particular kind of asshole and fits in with a story that hinges on time travel and I also just finished watching Future Man which as me thinking about timelines and the manipulation thereto a lot before I even started TUA but the thing that put the pieces together for me on this theory was stumbling around tumblr @carol-on who seems very cool and was in the writers room for TUA. That’s all very interesting, but what struck me was the way at the top of their tumblr it says “Every Billionaire is a failure of policy” - Diego Hargeeves probably and when I saw that I was like “HOLY SHIT. THAT FUCKING CHEATING BASTARD. OF COURSE HE SET THIS SHIT . UP.”
Billionaires, in our actual real world, control 99% of the resources if we accept that money is the key to resources without legislation and policy. If there is a policy failure, someone can manipulate that failure and become a billionaire and access resources that should otherwise be regulated. They can do shit like...oh I dont know, BUY CHILDREN. And then ANNOUNCE TO THE WORLD THAT THEY BOUGHT THOSE CHILDREN. Yall, for gods sake. He said it. Out loud. TO THE GLOBAL NEWS MEDIA. “[Their parents] were suitably compesnated.” I just want us all to understand that when someone moves a human being from place to place, particularly across borders for money 1) thats human trafficking and 2) when someone makes that human being work for them without a choice in the matter and without compensation when they ask not to(remember Klaus screaming? remember Ben asking to go home?) after having paid money for their services to someone other than the people providing the service, we’ve moved past the act of trafficking and are in actual slavery. And before anyone says to “but he was their father and when they were adults he let them go” I’ll be happy to point out to you just how many Black slaves were owned by their fathers in America less than 200 years ago, some of whom (not many but few exist on record) were even emancipated upon reaching majority. This is hardly a foreign concept for the world and possibly not for a guy who did land somewhere in the vaguely 18mumblemumbles - not to say we don’t still have slavery in America because we do boy howdy. Don’t forget - he can say it was for unity but Sir Reginald marked them for life as his property when they were children with his actual company logo using tattoos. Romans did that to slaves. And 3) when what someone chooses to do with the human beings bought like properties who are children forced to work without compensation is to make then fight bloody battles that can end in other people dying because of them, well then that person isthe general of an army of child soldiers just like the ones you see in those documentaries and all the slavery, abuse, brainwashing, human trafficking, and psychological trauma that implies.
The point is that a SINGLE WHITE MAN out of NOWHERE appears with 7 kids, 2 of them girls, 3 of them people of color, one of the from the Soviet Republic in the fucking EIGHTIES, and got up in front of the world and said “I bought them. They’re going to fight evil, pay no attention to the corpses.” and faced absolutely no repercussions from that. Yeah, fuck that, asshole. I remember the fucking Michael Jackson trials even if he was found innocent - someone famous cant show up with kids I’m sorry but NO. And I remember when we started seeing footage of the emotional devastation left on child soldier survivors from Central Africa who were kidnapped and drugged and forced into fighting whether they wanted to or not and people watching around the world at the very least had opinions even if they were hollow. Whether these - and so many other terrible things - in our. world have stopped or gotten worse because of mass media and rapid communication - people knew that they were being watched for how they behave.
Sir Reginald acts with this attitude of impunity like he knows he’s NOT being watched. You cannot, absolutely cannot convince me that the larger lack of technology - specifically communication technology - is not something that Sir Reginald wanted and engineered himself. You control information you control everything, including your own invisibility. Which if he is retired Commission, would be valuable, of course, but he, the Handler, Chacha Pogo and Five all are playing the same style of controlling bullshit on similar macro scales. No witnesses is a big plot point for the Commission- could cutting the world off be Reginald’s verion?
Cuz yall, he’s got the technology. He’s sitting on it. With Mom. With Pogo. With his ability to communicate directly to the fucking moon and back directly via text. He is a perfect billionaire because he hoardes like all billionaires hoard - wealth, secrets, influence, power - like the dragons hoard. Only this particular one instead of attacking the environment or the institutions of government attacked the worlds ability to talk to each other. For good for for ill, if he’d had less of a strangle hold on the whole world, maybe things would have gone differently for their family.
He claimed he wanted to help the world but in trying to make it so HE helped the world, he deprived the supposed saviors of what they really needed in the moment - a way to communicate quickly and find information quickly. I mean imagine if Vanya could have sent a text to Allison in Ep 9 or 10 or asked google who is Leonard Peobody? Hm?
But no. Thats not how it works when you horde something to control it utterly and keep it all for yourself to have your desired outcome (which Five learned at his knee and does time and again - and so does the rest of the Commission which is why I think he might be one FTR). That’s not how being a dragon - i’m sorry, a billionaire works.
