Umbrella Academy speculations: the narrator

[shadowscast]

Mr. Shadowscast and I were talking about The Umbrella Academy over dinner last night, and he posed an interesting question: is the narrator a character?


I hadn't even remembered that there was a narrator until I re-watched the very start of season 2 a few days ago (I was reviewing how one of the characters' powers worked).

But yes, seasons 1 and 2 are each introduced by the voice of a narrator. As far as I can remember, those are the only times that the narrator is heard.

And, well, maybe the narrator is just a narrator. This show breaks its internal reality for stylistic reasons in various places—with all those episode-opening umbrella appearances, for instance.

But what if the narrator is a character? Who might they be, and what is their role, and how do they know what they know?

I went back to S1E1 and S2E1 and took note of the narrator's lines.

At the start of S1E1:

On the twelfth hour of the 1st day of October, 1989, 43 women around the world gave birth. This was unusual only in the fact that none of these women had been pregnant when the day first began.

Sir Reginald Hargreeves, eccentric billionaire and adventurer, resolved to locate and adopt as many of the children as possible.

[Title card: HE GOT SEVEN OF THEM.]

And at the start of S2E1:

On April the 1st, 2019, the Earth was destroyed in a cataclysmic event. Billions of people were wiped out in a matter of minutes. Ironically, the six survivors of the apocalypse were the very siblings who brought it on.

So the narrator, if they are a character in the universe, is certainly well-informed. And standing somewhat out of time, one assumes, if they can know the details of the April 1st apocalypse while not being dead from it.

I'm saying "they" but it's a male voice, adult, with a British accent (I think; I'm not great at recognizing accents). I checked the IMDB credits for both opening episodes, and the narrator isn't credited, so no clues there.

So who might the narrator be?

First of all: probably not God. We've met God. God was a little girl.

Not that God couldn't probably take on whatever form and use whatever voice they wanted to, but so far, canonically, God appears as a little girl. So I'm ruling out God as the narrator.

Mr. Shadowscast mentioned that he'd briefly thought that the narrator might be Reggie Hargreeves himself (talking about himself in the third person? well, why not?) but we listened carefully and decided it's not his voice.

So I don't think that the narrator could be anybody we've specifically met, but there are a couple of possibilities that I see:

Maybe the narrator is somebody from the Commission. They have an outside perspective on the timeline, and could probably gather information about the 43 mysterious births, Reginald Hargreeve's actions, and the moon apocalypse.

Or, maybe the narrator is someone from Reggie's home planet. We still know pretty much nothing about that whole thing. Do they have anything to do with the 43 births? They could've watched the moon blow up from space, though I don't know how they would have known about the Hargreeve siblings' involvement.

Anyway ... idle speculation, as I said. Probably the narrator is just a narrator, outside of the universe of the story entirely!

PS: While re-watching the start of S1 E1 for this post, I spotted something I'd either never noticed before or had forgotten: just as the narrator says "Sir Reginald Hargreeves, eccentric billionaire and adventurer," there's a shot of a flying car zipping over the Moscow night skyline. Like, seriously: it looks like a Volvo with wings. Did anybody else notice that? Is that Reggie's flying car? Is that a thing in canon? Why did it never show up again? Did Diego and Klaus borrow the flying car when they were teenagers and fly it into the Whomping Willow? Has anybody written a fic about this? Should I?

Comments

[yourlibrarian]

You're not the only one who forgot completely about the narrator. I also would have assumed Reginald but I guess not. A Commission person would make sense. I took a quick look at a UA wiki but saw no mention of it.

I also don't recall seeing the flying car, although it's been some time since I saw that episode and at the time it wouldn't have struck me anyway given that I was being introduced to the verse.

[shadowscast]

I also don't recall seeing the flying car, although it's been some time since I saw that episode and at the time it wouldn't have struck me anyway given that I was being introduced to the verse.

Yes, exactly—right at the start of the first episode, we had no expectations yet about what would or wouldn't be in the 'verse.

It was only when I was re-watching after seeing the whole two seasons that the flying car suddenly stood out, like "What WAS that?"

I guess that was an early hint that there was something weird going on with Reggie, in terms of his technology level versus everybody else's! (Also see: his robot nanny, his uplifted chimpanzee servant, and the fact that he sent his son to live on a private moon base, I guess!)

[avrelia]

no idea. I didn't think about the Narrator at all, since he only appeared in the very beginning to set the stage. have to think about it.

I tried reading the comics, btw, and they are not going well. Cannot switch from the tv mode, and they feel too different

[shadowscast]

I haven't checked out the comics because a RL friend of mine who liked the TV show did try out the comics and was disappointed.

Actually I was talking to her about it again today, and she seems to be warming up to the comics now—but she says that you really have to think of them as an entirely separate thing, and not compare them to the TV show.