Netflix’s Umbrella Academy is an absolutely wild blend of action-packed superhero saga and blackly comic Wes Anderson-esque family drama, following six dysfunctional estranged siblings with superpowers who must reluctantly overcome their differences in the face of an imminent apocalypse. If you watched season 1, you know the show—which is based on the graphic novels by My Chemical Romance frontman Gerard Way—doesn’t exactly root itself in reality. But season 2, which launched on Netflix Friday, leans more heavily on real events in American history, with the Hargreeves siblings thrust back into the 1960s and tasked, yet again, with averting the end of the world.
This time, the end of the world is linked very closely with a real event: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Three days later, on November 25, 1963, the time-traveling Number Five (Aidan Gallagher) arrives from the future just in time to watch a nuclear strike wipe out all of civilization. Since Five’s just narrowly avoided an entirely separate apocalypse in the year 2019, he knows that something has…gone awry with the timeline here, to say the least.
As Five tries to figure out how to stop this brand new apocalypse, Diego/Number Two (David Castañeda) traveled back in time a bit earlier, and is obsessed with stopping the assassination of JFK. And although the way this all plays out in Umbrella Academy is completely fictional, the storyline features references to real-life conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s death. Here’s a rundown.
How do the Umbrella Academy crew end up in 1963?
In the final moments of season 1, Five teleports himself and his siblings into the past just in time to avoid dying in an apocalypse triggered by Vanya (Ellen Page), who’s suffered a mental breakdown and lost control of her incredibly destructive superpowers. Alas, Five is notoriously inaccurate when it comes to time travel—he’s a 60-something man trapped in the body of a child thanks to a previous mishap—and so the Hargreeves all end up in the same location (a quaint street in Dallas, Texas) but at different times, scattered across a three-year period between 1960 and 1963.
Five ends up at the latest point in the timeline—November 25th, 1963—and finds Dallas transformed into a war zone, with Russian soldiers invading and attacking civilians. The Hargreeves siblings are all there fighting the soldiers, but they’re killed along with the rest of the country by a nuclear missile strike, which we later discover triggered a nuclear holocaust that wiped out the entire planet. Thanks to reformed assassin Hazel (Cameron Britton), Five is able to travel back to ten days earlier, giving him just enough time to track down his siblings and try to stop whatever event led the U.S. into nuclear war with Russia.
What is Number Five’s connection to JFK’s assassination?
Early in season 1, when Five is employed as an assassin by The Commission, he’s shown failing to complete an assignment related to JFK’s assassination. It’s not clear whether he was assigned to kill JFK, or to prevent his assassination by killing Lee Harvey Oswald, but what is clear is that Five—who’d been trying desperately to find a way to get back to his siblings in 2019—abandoned the mission halfway through by jumping into a time vortex. (It’s worth noting that in the original graphic novel, Five is explicitly tasked with assassinating JFK.)
In season 2, though, it’s Diego who becomes fixated on preventing the assassination. Five finds his brother at a psychiatric ward, where Diego is imprisoned after being arrested outside Lee Harvey Oswald’s house. Even though anybody who’s ever seen a sci-fi movie knows that messing with history like this is a huge time-travel no-no, Diego is hellbent on stopping Oswald, while Five is now worried that saving JFK may be the event that messed up the timeline and caused the nuclear apocalypse.
Things get a lot more complicated, though, after Diego and Five discover overwhelming evidence that their father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves, is involved in JFK’s assassination. Specifically, Diego finds a photograph that shows Hargreeves on the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza holding an umbrella. This is significant because it references a very real conspiracy theory about JFK’s murder.
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Who is The Umbrella Man?
When Diego and Five confront Sir Reginald over dinner, Diego shows him the umbrella photograph. “Well, I suppose you’ve solved it. You’ve singlehandedly unearthed my nefarious plot,” Sir Reg sneers at his future son, before telling him he’s delusional.
But Diego’s not the first person to notice an unusual umbrella-wielding figure on the grassy knoll—unusual in large part because nobody else was seen carrying or opening an umbrella that day, and the weather was sunny. “The Umbrella Man” shows up in a number of real films and photographs from that day in Dallas, and also appears in the infamous Zapruder footage showing the moment of Kennedy’s assassination. The figure is seen opening the umbrella and holding it up as Kennedy’s motorcade approaches. The Umbrella Man became such an object of fascination over the years that Errol Morris made a six-minute documentary about him for The New York Times back in 2011.
As Morris explains in the documentary, the Umbrella Man’s gesture led to speculation that he might have been “signaling” Kennedy’s assassin, or even somehow using the umbrella as a long-distance weapon. The Umbrella Man was later identified as Louie Steven Witt, who testified to the House Select Committee On Assassinations that he was holding up the umbrella as a sign of protest—not to the president’s policies, but those of his father, Joseph P. Kennedy. As ambassador to the U.K. in the 1930s, Joseph Kennedy had been an ally to then-British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, and had supported his policy of Nazi appeasement. Witt said he was protesting against this by wielding the umbrella, which was Chamberlain’s signature accessory. It’s fair to say Witt’s meaning got a little lost in translation.
What do aliens have to do with JFK’s assassination?
In another scene that’ll pique the interest of conspiracy theorists, Five overhears a meeting between Sir Reginald and a shadowy cabal of other old white guys, during which they seem to be plotting the president’s assassination as a means to keep him quiet. One man notes that JFK “keeps making enquiries into Roswell and other crash sites…we cannot allow him to get his nose into our business.” In case you didn’t get the Roswell reference, in 1947 a flying saucer was supposedly discovered on a ranch in New Mexico, giving rise to a conspiracy theory that a UFO had crashed in the area, and that the government had covered it up.
In The Umbrella Academy, Sir Reg and his cohorts seem to want Kennedy dead because he’s getting too close to the truth—that is, that multiple spaceships have crashed on earth, and that extraterrestrial life exists on Earth. This mirrors a prominent conspiracy theory that suggests Kennedy was silenced for precisely this reason.
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Later in the season, it’s revealed that Reginald has been supplying rocket technology to the U.S. government in order to help them beat the Russians to the moon. He’s furious when Kennedy is assassinated—as it turns out, he didn’t want the president harmed—but the head of Majestic-12 nonchalantly says Kennedy had “pissed off too many people” to be kept alive, and threatens to “tell the world who [Sir Reginald] really is” if he rocks the boat too much. In response, Sir Reg calmly peels off his own face, which appears to be just a horrifyingly realistic mask, and tears the conspirators apart. We don’t get a good look at his true form, but…is he an alien? A question for next season.
Does the gang prevent Kennedy’s assassination?
They do not. Diego breaks into the Infinite Switchboard, a room at The Commission where any moment in the world’s entire timeline can be accessed via old-timey video screens (look, just go with it). There, he discovers the timeline has already been messed up. Moments before Kennedy is supposed to die, the FBI building in Dallas explodes a few blocks away from his car, prompting the entire motorcade to immediately drive away with Kennedy safely inside. The Soviets are blamed for the attack on the FBI building, and this is what sparks the nuclear war that ultimately causes Doomsday.
But it’s actually Vanya (of course) who destroys the FBI building, after being captured, tortured and drugged with a hallucinogen that triggers her powers. This time, the Hargreeves sibling are able to stop her—shout out to Ben (Justin H. Min), the dead-but-not-forgotten sibling who finally gets his moment to shine—and Diego is thrilled. Now that he knows preventing JFK’s assassination isn’t what causes Doomsday, he’s free to protect the president.
Diego arrives at Dealey Plaza just in time to see The Umbrella Man getting into position as the motorcade draws close, and races over to punch his father in the face…only to discover that he’s a decoy. In the distance, Diego hears shots being fired, and realizes he’s failed to change history. Which, if you know anything about time paradoxes, is probably for the best.
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