What Happened To The Umbrella Academy's Other 36 Kids?

Seven down, 36 to go?

Netflix's hit series The Umbrella Academy, which first dropped onto the streaming platform in February 2019, tells the story of an estranged family of superheroes comprised of seven adopted siblings, all born on the same day in different parts of the world. There's just one problem: both the series and the comic it's based on talk about 43 children who share the same miraculous birth circumstances. If seven were adopted into Sir Reginald Hargreeves' superhero family, then where exactly are the other 36?

First and only warning here: we're about to get into spoilers for the first season of The Umbrella Academy and the Umbrella Academy comics.

The first season of The Umbrella Academy didn't delve into whatever happened to the rest of the kids, but the comic series by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba has given readers some clues regarding their whereabouts. 

It's made clear in the Umbrella Academy comics that at least a few of the 36 others died — probably something to be expected when a bunch of women of various economic backgrounds spontaneously go into labor after having zero time to prepare for it. Even still, there should be some of the 43 original kids kicking around in the world. And considering the fact that not every child born is born in a hospital with proper documentation, there's a good chance that Hargreeves wasn't able to track down each and every one.

As it turns out, that's a very real possibility — and one that's hinted at in the most recent comic arc, The Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion, which began its run in October 2018. A lot of Hotel Oblivion's story has delved into Hargreeves' penchant for keeping secrets. One such secret is the fact that all of the superpowered villains the Umbrella Academy took care of in their youth had been transported to an inter-dimensional prison called the Hotel Oblivion. At some point, however, the baddies are freed from said prison and returned to Earth, leaving the Umbrella Academy vastly outnumbered.

In the final Hotel Oblivion issue, a new group of heroes arrives to save the Umbrella Academy — one that wears near-identical uniforms and works together in the same sort of way as our favorite group of misfits once did. They tell the Umbrella Academy that they're going to "take control" of the situation, and they seem far more equipped to do so than the original Academy is.

At this point, we're not sure who exactly is responsible for this second team. It could be Mother, the Academy's self-aware robot matriarch, or possibly another individual like Hargreeves, who was confirmed to be an alien early on in the comic series. (The TV show hinted at this reveal during the season 1 finale.) But there's also the chance that Hargreeves did track down more of the original 43, and spent an equal amount of time quietly raising and training a separate family somewhere else in the world.

If that's the case, then how many other Academies are there? It's been made pretty clear that Hargreeves isn't above experimenting on his own children, and any decent scientist knows you need more than one group to successfully conduct an experiment. That said, it's completely within the realm of possibility that Hargreeves has more than one (if not several) superpowered families hidden across the globe.

It may be a while before we see this storyline play out on the small screen, given The Umbrella Academy ended its premiere season with the literal end of the world. Number Five (Aidan Gallagher) successfully transported his siblings out of the current timeline, saving them from dying in Vanya's (Ellen Page) apocalypse. But where exactly did he take them? Could it have been the Hotel Oblivion? Maybe, but maybe not. The first season of the series pulls from the Apocalypse Suite and the Dallas volumes of The Umbrella Academy, and there's still a whole lot left to explore before we get into the events of Hotel Oblivion, should that be where the showrunners are headed.

Either way, the chances that we'll be seeing at least some of the other 36 kids sometime down the road are pretty high. Whether they'll be friends or foes to the seven Umbrella Academy members seen on the series thus far is still up for debate.