The Umbrella Academy Season 3 Mid-Credits Scene Explained

Contains spoilers for "The Umbrella Academy" Season 3

If you're reading this, you've made your way out of oblivion and found that the world of "The Umbrella Academy" is not what it once was. Congratulations! Didn't they all do well, what with surviving samurai guardians dodging a world-ending kugelblitz and double-crossing father figures? 

After facing off against the Sparrow Academy, with its Ben (Justin H. Min) being the only one to survive flying the nest, it now appears that the timeline has been reset. Good news, right? Wrong. While the hopes of Allison Hargreeves (Emmy Raver-Lampman) for a happy life have been restored even via slightly villainous means (no surprise, since The Umbrella Academy has done plenty of terrible things before) her siblings have been hit with the shocking discovery that they're now living without their powers. 

Could this be the end of the Umbrella Academy? Are the Hargreeves siblings heroes no more? So many questions and nowhere nearly enough answers have been left behind us to pick apart. Forget slowly collapsing realities and self-sentient cubes, this might be the worst timeline after all.

But wait — what's this? Not content with leaving us hanging, the anticipation levels were turned up when we were blessed with a chin-scratching mid-credit scene that gave us a dose of history repeating itself. Not particularly flashy in its execution, it nevertheless guaranteed that one of the cast from "Umbrella Academy" will put in twice the work whenever the show returns. The only question is will they get along ... or will tentacles get tangled up in the process?

After the screen rolls credits we are taken for a familiar ride. Ending on how this season began, we see a train carriage similar to where we saw Ben's biological mother give birth to him decades before. The difference here was that Ben himself was on board, minding his own business without super-powered worry in the world. But how can this be, as we just saw him storming off from his new stand-in family? Has the show shot us forward revealing he finally overcame his attitude problem and carried on with life? Not quite — as it turns out that this isn't even the same Ben.

The mild-mannered passenger with his nose in a book is the original Umbrella's Ben, seemingly with no knowledge of the life he might have lived (and died) had ruthless Reginald (Colm Feore) snatched him up for the Academy. This means that there are, in fact, two Ben's wandering around in the world, just as Five (Aidan Gallagher) suggested early on in this season before it was discovered the Umbrella Academy's parents had all been killed by Harlan (Callum Keith Rennie). Now we have a timid soul who never thwarted a bank robbery in his life and another that would actively go out and look for one. With this small dose of double trouble being factored in, what does that mean for the Ben's we've seen and the rest of the Hargreeves'?

While we clearly now have a spare Ben (depending on your preference), there's more than one way to tackle a timeline. Firstly, Ben might not be the only one we're seeing double of next season seeing as the Hargreeves' weren't present for the reset after being outside the timeline. That could make them anomalies, with no original slot in the space-time continuum to go back to. As a result, their doppelgängers might be wandering around the world just like Ben, never being enlisted to the Academy. Think of it like Marty's (Michael J. Fox) trip back to alternative 1985 in "Back to the Future Part II" that sees Hill Valley gone to hell, and everyone thinking he's in Switzerland.

That said, creatively it feels really similar to this year's season. In which case, they may have been returned where they left off, just with a different history behind them. This would explain Diego (David Castañeda) and Five being uninjured, and Luther (Tom Hopper) smaller and less hairy. That leaves us wondering what happened to his newly wedded wife, Sloane (Genesis Rodriguez), who wasn't present like her other Sparrow sibling, Ben, or why a Reginald Hargreeves from this timeline appears to be more Lex Luthor than cold-hearted Charles Xavier. 

One thing is for sure: We need the fourth season, and we need it today, tomorrow, or whatever point and time we can get to it. Please.