Of course, the gang don’t get to the end without it getting bloody. Five of the Sparrows end up killed or Kugelblitzed before the end of season three, while Luther (Tom Hopper) marries Sloane (Genesis Rodriguez) only for Sir Reginald to murder him and Klaus (Robert Sheehan), framing their deaths as a consequence of the Hotel Oblivion’s Guardians and the end of the universe respectively. This, he hopes, will help unite his remaining children into following his orders.

In the strange, fantastical Hotel Oblivion he assures them he has a plan to undo the damage and save the universe. All they have to do is face the mysterious Samurai-esque Guardians inside the hotel and ring seven bells (as foretold in an ancient myth…it doesn’t really matter, just go with it).

Together they just about manage to fight them off (with a little help from a revived Klaus and a ghostly Luther he conjures up from the other side), and stand on seven stars as instructed by Sir Reginald…all except Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman), who previously cut an unknown deal with her father in return for convincing the others to go on this mission.

Sir Reginald reveals that the Hotel Oblivion isn’t a building, it’s actually a machine used to build the universe – and using the power of his children and the strange energy that gave them their abilities, he’s able to power it up and reprogram it, recreating the destroyed world. The process is painful and disfiguring for the Hargreeves children, and eventually Allison kills Sir Reginald to stop it.

But Allison still decides to press the big red button to activate whatever Sir Reginald has set in motion, resulting in a very big change for everyone…

The Umbrella Academy season 3 ending explained

Suddenly, we cut to Allison returning to her home in a yellow taxi, mirroring a scene from earlier in the series. This time, however, it really is her daughter Claire up in the bedroom – and bizarrely, her 1960s husband Ray is also present, apparently living with them both in 2019.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Umbrella Academy emerge from a Hotel Obsidian elevator to find themselves in the ‘Obsidian memorial park,’ apparently opened by Sir Reginald on the 1st October 1989 – AKA the day all his adopted children were born.

Five (Aidan Gallagher) notes that “the old man did it” and successfully reset the universe…but that’s not all that’s changed. Somehow, Luther has returned from the dead and returned to his original body, losing the ape-like muscles he was given after an accident prior to season 1.

He quickly notices his new wife Sloane isn’t among them – and then they all notice something else that’s missing. All their powers have apparently vanished, with Five unable to teleport, Diego barely able to spin a knife and Ben remaining resolutely un-tentacled.

Viktor wants them to stay and work out what to do next, but Luther tears off in search of Sloane with Klaus hot on his heels, Diego and Lila head off to start their life together (presumably, she’s still pregnant) and the remaining members also walk out into the world.

Netflix

And that world has changed. As we pull out, we see that Hargreeves is written on almost every skyscraper, with Sir Reginald apparently rewriting the world to make himself the most powerful, wealthy man in it. Also, his wife/partner Abigail – who in the “main” timeline was frozen in stasis on the Moon – is alive and well and by his side.

The implication is simple – in resetting the world, Sir Reginald has also elected to make a few changes, putting himself at the top of the pile and (as part of his deal with Alison to convince her siblings to help) moving time and space to bring both Ray and Claire into the present.

Exactly why he removed the Umbrella and Sparrow academies’ abilities is less clear. It could be that they were just drained as the machine turned on, though Viktor was still able to access his abilities shortly before Alison set the machine off – more likely Sir Reginald removed their powers to neutralise their threat to his new world order.

Exactly what else he changed – and how long our heroes will remain powerless – remains to be seen, though we’re sure that we’ll find out in the next season.

The Umbrella Academy post-credits scene

But that’s not all. Wait until a little bit into the credits, and we see a short scene where it appears Ben is riding on a subway train in Korea. Wearing glasses, a suit and reading a book, he smiles as he hears a train announcement.

This scene is fairly mysterious, and suggests a couple of possibilities. Given how similar the train looks to the one from the first episode of the series – where we see a woman spontaneously give birth to one of the superpowered kids Hargreeves tries to adopt, implied to be Ben – it might be that this is the Sparrow-Ben (who came back alongside the Umbrellas to the memorial park) some time later trying to track down his mother.

Alternatively, it might be the case that this is another Ben. Given how calm and blended in to his surroundings he is, this Ben doesn’t resemble the brash, loud Sparrow version of Ben at all. Could it be that as part of Sir Reginald’s reshaping of the world, he brought the original dead Ben back as well?

Or is it instead the case that in this timeline, the Hargreeves children were never adopted, so grew up where they were born? In other words, are there doubles of all the children living in this world that our heroes will rub up against in season 4?

It certainly seems possible. There were warnings of doppelgangers in season 3 which may have teed this up, and Sir Reginald didn’t seem to expect his children to survive the Oblivion process (hence why he asked Allison, his conspirator, to stay away from it). Maybe in his plan he had also recreated his children, meaning that there are two versions of them all?

Or maybe, you know, it’s just Ben on a train in Korea. We might be overthinking it a bit.

The Umbrella Academy season 3 is streaming now on Netflix. Check out more of our Sci-Fi coverage or visit our TV Guide to see what’s on tonight. 

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