Umbrella Academy: Reginald Sabotaged The Team’s Powers – Theory Explained
Season 2 showed the power of the Umbrella Academy grow. It’s possible that it was Hargreeves himself who was stunting the power of the team.
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One theory about The Umbrella Academy suggests that Reginald Hargreeves actually sabotaged the team’s powers. As the mentor and ersatz father figure of the team, Hargreeves molded the group to fit his vision. With The Umbrella Academy season 3 on the way and focusing on the Sparrow Academy, audiences will get to see how the academy could have turned out if he had done things differently.
In The Umbrella Academy, when Reginald Hargreeves learned that children were being born under strange circumstances, he acquired seven of the babies and had them raised under his supervision. Under strict training, he was able to have six of them manifest their powers and find some measure of control over them. With the seventh, Vanya, he was unable to control her power and instead had her locked away and brainwashed to believe that she had no powers at all. In season 2 the ex-members of the academy discovered new aspects to their powers when out in the world on their own.
While showing new dimensions to the characters’ powers could be chalked up to The Umbrella Academy’s comic book origins and the tendency those narratives have to want to up the stakes and the powers, there is potentially much more to it than that. Vanya’s powers were deliberately suppressed, but the others were similarly sabotaged – unconsciously or not – by Hargreeves’ tactics. This is most apparent with Klaus, for whom Hargreeves’ lack of sympathy led to him being terrorized by forces he didn’t understand and turning to drugs to be able to cope. Without Hargreeves’ presence, he is able to get clean and gain a much greater hold on his powers.
This also manifests clearly in the powers that Diego and Allison demonstrate in The Umbrella Academy season 2. While Diego’s power has previously only been able to bend the trajectory of metal that he has thrown, the beginning and the end of season 2 show him being able to bend or stop bullets fired at him. Allison’s power is shown to go beyond altering someone’s will to changing their physical reality as she makes people’s heads explode in the introduction to the season. These imply that Hargreeves developed their powers until their most basic form manifested and then held it there. It also suggests that Allison’s use of the phrase “I heard a rumor” might not be necessary for her power, but rather simply a crutch that Hargreeves helped her develop. Like Vanya, Five represents a possibly more intentional sabotage. Hargreeves continually pushes back on Five trying to test his powers further as he tries to assert control over the academy.
This need for control hamstringing his ability to allow the Umbrella students to reach their full potential is emphasized by how clearly his suppressing of Vanya’s powers is motivated by personal fear. While Vanya has killed countless nannies, Hargreeves’ response was always to replace them, eventually with a robot, to respond to the symptom of the problem. It is only when Vanya hurts Hargreeves himself and he realizes that he is failing to have control over her that he resorts to removing her access to her powers through manipulation of Allison. This lends credence to the possibility that Reginald similarly purposefully limited the potential of all of his pupils, potentially sensing that his control over them was linked to their inability to fully understand or utilize their abilities.
For season 3 of The Umbrella Academy, audiences know that Hargreeves did things drastically differently, as the Sparrow Academy has already confirmed that Ben survived in this timeline. Having met the team in the 1960s, it is likely that he changed his approach to training as well as who he recruited. It seems possible that his fear of their powers combined with an understanding of their potential could have led him to take more drastic measures to ensure his dominance over them, ensuring the Umbrella Academy struggle to overcome his control of the Sparrows when the two groups cross paths.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/umbrella-academy-reginald-powers-sabotaged-theory/