The pilots I have covered so far in these kinds of posts have all had one thing in common: they’re all network series. What this means, is that they have all been structured around commercial breaks. When breaking down the episodes, these breaks lead to clearly defined acts.

What began with cable, and has become common place with the rise of streaming services, is the type of show that has no commercials breaks. If network shows are built around mini climaxes to keep people engaged enough to come back after commercials, how are streaming shows done?

Let’s answer that today by looking at The Umbrella Academy. What you’re going to notice right away is that, while I’m not explicitly calling them acts, I have still split the episode into sequences. Stories contain turns, points where the conflict rises and falls and changes. Because of this, stories have natural places to split them regardless of if there is anything concrete forcing them to do so.

The key differences between this and usual acts are two-fold. First, a sequence can be far more variable in length because they are not beholden to where commercials should go; in fact, there is a sequence here that is only a few scenes long. On top of this, the breaks are more subjective. I think for the most part this is an episode with pretty clear turning points, but this way of breaking things into sequences isn’t so strict that the scenes can only be broken down this way.

The Umbrella Academy – “We Only See Each Other at Weddings and Funerals”

Teleplay by Jeremy Slater

Created for television by Steve Blackman

Based on the Dark Horse comic by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá

Directed by Peter Hoar

Prologue – How it Started / How it’s Going

(A) A Russian woman, who wasn’t pregnant, suddenly gives birth in a pool.
(A) Hargreeves adopts/buys seven such children.
(A) Hargreeves returns home with his new children.
(A + B) Montage: Four of the remaining Hargeeves children learn about their father’s death.
(A) Vanya sees the news of her father’s death.

We begin the episode with a prologue. The first half of this sequence primarily takes places in Russia on October 1, 1989. First and foremost, it’s here to set up the basic concept of the series: on this day at noon, 43 women around the world gave birth, even though they were not pregnant at the start of the day. After this even, Sir Reginald Hargreeves, a very rich American, goes off in search of as many of the children as he can, offering money to the mothers. He gets seven of them.

Off the bat, we’re launching in with setting up the tone and the more fantastic elements of the series. The Russian woman who ends up giving birth, starts the scene flirting with a young man about her age. It’s played mostly with their action, and not any talking. We get little moments like him trying to kiss her, and the coach glares at them. In the end, she kisses him on the cheek, and rushes off to jump into the pool. It’s all incredibly cute, maybe even a little corny. But then, the pool water turns red where she jumped in, she’s screaming, she floats up to the surface and we see her belly has grown 9 months pregnant in the short time she’s been underwater. It’s the little fun moments juxtaposed to this kind of more bloody shock that starts to paint the picture of what this show is going to be like.

Then there is the scene of Hargreeves walking down the street followed by the parade of 7 strollers. When they reach his home, the strollers are no longer in a line but coming from every angle. It is a moment that chooses style over realism, a choice that is being established now and will continue in moments throughout.

Hargreeves isn’t the only major character this sets up. While it is by implication alone (I don’t believe it is ever made explicit in the series so far, though I could be wrong), Vanya is the most likely one to have been born in those scenes in Russia. This is an inference being based off the fact that she has a Russian name, but there is a narrative reason for coming to this conclusion as well. While this is an ensemble where each of the siblings have their own stories as the show progresses, Vanya is our main point of view in the majority of this episode. In all the flashbacks, even though Vanya is given very little attention, it gets revealed that they are from her POV, and because of this, it makes the most sense that this baby would be her.

In fact, what I’m labelling as the A story for this episode is essentially one of Vanya attempting to reconnect with her family after their adoptive father’s death. The fact that this prologue is primarily about her being born and adopted sets that up perfectly.

Jumping to the present day, it’s about seeing where Hargreeves and the babies have ended up. With the main point of this episode being estranged siblings coming together, we start things off in the present by showing that they are apart.

There is a montage of scenes with the five remaining Hargreeves siblings in their normal lives, interrupted by the news that their father has died. This montage is unbelievable. It’s in place to set up who these characters are now that they are adults and create a mystery around what happened to the other two. It shows how different Luther, Diego, Allison, and Klaus, and Vanya, have ended up. But what is most fitting for this episode that will repeat how non-special Vanya is, is that she isn’t really a part of the montage itself. She is the score to the montage.

She is given importance to the story by having it begin with her, by having it continuously cut back to her, but the events of the montage itself are entirely focused on her siblings. When she finds out about her father, it is after the montage has already ended. Even the bait and switch of it looking like she is performing this huge solo only to reveal that there is no one watching is perfect to get us into her head.

And already we get into the first example of how if you’re splitting this into sequences yourself you might do it slightly differently. There are arguments to be made about the stuff in the past and the stuff in the present being two separate sequences. The past scenes are the origin story, and the present scenes are about establishing these characters and the inciting incident. But I put them together here because they were written with such interesting symmetry.

If we zoom out a bit and look at what is being accomplished in the past and present scenes, both can be described as: a group of siblings are brought together because of their adopted father. The differences being in the details of the former being about their birth and adoption, while the latter is about his death after their estrangement, but even this birth and death contrast make the two fit so neatly together.

The Family Comes Together

(A + C) Vanya takes a cab to her childhood home.
(A) Vanya arrives home and it’s awkward; Allison is happy to see her.
(B) Luther investigates; Diego doesn’t believe there is a point.
(A + C) Vanya talks to Pogo about her book and Five.
(B) Allison flashes back to Hargreeves working in his study.
(B) Allison finds Klaus in Hargreeves’s study.
(B) Allison and Luther catch up.
(A + B) The five siblings come together; it doesn’t go well.

This next sequence is all about how the siblings come back together after hearing the news, but for the most part, we see scenes that play out with only two characters at a time, with a third coming in for just a moment in a couple cases. This builds until all five of them are in a single room together for the first time, and it goes so well that all of them immediately split up. This is a sequence building out the characters, their relationships (with each other and with Hargreeves), and showing how they aren’t just going to suddenly be a close family again.

When Vanya takes a cab to her childhood home, we have the opening credits going on over a series of images of that home. They play as if they are her memories, thinking back to the place she is returning to, and it is through these we see that two of her siblings are gone, but not what happened to them. When we first reach the house, it’s with Vanya, with the others having already arrived. We’re kept in her POV while she has an awkward but positive reunion with her sister, only to have Diego come in calling Vanya out for something we don’t know about yet.

The next time we see Vanya, she is looking through her father’s bookcase and finds her autobiography, which we come to learn is the reason her siblings have cut her out. From the inscription inside, we see that her father didn’t buy it, she gifted it to him. When she talks to Pogo, a chimpanzee who acts as a kind of Butler or assistant for the Hargreeves house, he doesn’t believe Hargreeves ever actually read the book. It is also worth noting that of all the characters, it is Pogo she is talking to here, not her siblings. Even with things going okay with Allison, she is still feeling apart from the rest.

What I’m labeling the B story is essentially how the rest of the siblings are dealing with the death of their father. For Luther and Diego this is about investigating it, as we see in their first scene together. Luther believes this must have been a murder and everything is a clue. Diego on the other hand is shown to have put the work in and already ruled this out. He claims it’s all just a normal death, but Luther won’t hear it.

For Allison, this comes down to remembering the old times, and for Klaus, it’s about finding things to steal. These two are the characters are the ones with the least to do in this particular episode and their so their presence is more about setting them up than really moving anything forward. This makes sense, there are seven siblings, Hargreeves, their mom, and Pogo, and that is a lot of characters to really give full attention to in a single hour. So, Allison is pushed to an area where we are wondering why she says she doesn’t want to use her powers anymore (or in the case of this sequence, what her rumor ability even is), and with Klaus it is mostly about his drug addiction fueled thievery. Both will become incredibly important as the season progresses but are only touched on here.

There is also the C story, which is all about the mystery of what happened with Five. In this sequence we only touch on it, setting up that he is gone, and has been missing for more than sixteen years. It is enough to make sure it known by the audience that it matters, but not around so much as to pull the focus away from what this sequence is about.

In the final scene of this sequence, it all comes to a head. As mentioned, this is where the five siblings come together in one room for the first time. It is a scene that is about planning for their father’s funeral, but quickly shifts gears when Luther wants to talk about investigating Hargreeves’s death. What really pushes them all over the edge, is when it comes out that Luther believes one of them is probably responsible.

And there we have it. This has them coming together only to really drive home why they are apart. Between whatever’s happening to their two disappeared brothers, their reactions to Vanya’s book, and whatever else may be going on between them, they just can’t trust each other. Just being in a room together for this short time is too much for them to handle. Through Luther’s work on the investigation, it starts to feel like it could almost become a story about how this mystery brings them all back together, but that’s not what this episode is about.

This is one key thing about Vanya being our main point of view here. She is the most outside the rest of them, the most rejected by them. Having most of our scenes so far played out with her has us relating more to her when Luther’s ideas could be targeting her. If the show were to be played mainly from Luther’s perspective at this point, it might flip our expectations entirely, and have us seeing Vanya as a much more likely of a suspect.

The First Mission

(A) The children stop a bank robbery.
(A) Vanya asks why she can’t be with the other children.
(A) Hargreeves announces the Umbrella Academy’s first class to the world.

17 years ago, Hargreeves sent the children out to stop a bank robbery. The robbery itself acts a scene to show off what nearly all the children’s special powers are, aside from Klaus who is almost just in the background. I can’t say for sure if Klaus being left out was a purposeful choice or if it is just because finding a use for Klaus’s powers in this scene would be tough.

This sequence is all about Vanya’s six siblings, and how she was kept on the sidelines while they were growing up. Even with her not being in the bank herself, we’re shown this is ultimately still her point of view, because she is watching the events take place. She is asking her father why she can’t join them, only to be told there is nothing special about her.

Right after this, Hargreeves steps in front of the reporters and introduces the world to the inaugural class of the Umbrella Academy. He explains that the world has changed, and some people among us have special powers, and how he has adopted six of them. A very heartbreaking number for him to say when we know Vanya is there. And when a reporter asks about the wellbeing of the children being put in such dangerous situations, Hargreeves simply says he cares about the fate of world.

This may be an short sequence, but it jams in nearly all of the children using their powers, the fact that Vanya has always been seen separate from her siblings, and even what will ultimately be the stakes of the show: the fate of the entire world. All this in what is essentially just three short scenes.

Five Returns in Time for the Funeral

(B) Klaus fails to speak to his dead father.
(A) The siblings all dance alone.
(C) The siblings go outside where Five comes through a portal.
(C) Five explains he’s been in the future.
(C) Five finds something to wear.
(A + C) Vanya confides in Five.
(A + B) Luther and Diego fight at the funeral.

In this sequence, Five’s story takes centre stage for the bulk of it, but it still circles back around to the main story surrounding Vanya’s distance from her family and Hargreeves’s funeral.

Klaus’s attempt to talk to his father reinforces this idea that it is something even possible for him, an ability that was quickly brought up in the scene where the siblings all came together. Theoretically, it is the next step in the investigation into his death, but really, this is mainly about character development. It is seeing Klaus attempting to work through something he doesn’t want to do and is too high to do.

Then there is the “I Think We’re Alone Now” scene. This is a fantastic show of character while also continuing to convey the tone this series is going for. While we move from sibling to sibling, seeing them all dance completely alone but all to the same music, it is showing this connection between them even when they are apart. It’s showing us that even when alone, they are family to each other.

Even the dancing itself is important because of how it reveals character. Luther is big and awkward but really getting into it. Allison looks like she is putting on a show. Klaus is slow dancing with the urn that holds his father’s ashes. Diego carefully closes the door so no one will see how into it he really is. And then there’s Vanya who comes off so constrained, she’s dancing, but keeping to such a tight space and being far less showy than any of the others.

The Umbrella Academy - Sequence 4 (Five's Portal).jpg

So, Five returns home, looking the same age he did when he disappeared so many years ago. Five is the character who will become a driving force behind the main plot of the season. Because of this, it’s worth asking why he doesn’t show up until around midway through the episode.

A key point to be made is that Five is not the main character of the show. As it progresses, it stops feeling like any of the siblings are really the main character, but for this episode at least, Vanya is our main point of view. If Five shows up in the sequence where the whole family is coming together, the mystery of his disappearance loses narrative weight, and the story would most likely put more focus on him. Just look at what his appearance does for this sequence. Though there is still talk of their father’s funeral, Five even commenting on their father’s death, his sudden presence completely disrupts things. The mystery of where he has been becomes more urgent than thoughts of the man who is already dead.

Before we get to the funeral itself, Vanya and Five get a scene together. This is important for a couple reasons. First, because it is our main POV character getting a scene with the character whose story becomes so important within this sequence. But the scene itself is not about what happened to Five, it is about Vanya. It is about her looking for family that might want her around, and Five disappeared before her book ever came out. Five has read it though, and he says it was good. He gives her the approval that none of the others will. She confides that they hate her, and he says there are worst things. And then we get a mention of Ben… With one brother back, we’re reminded of the mystery of another.

While we don’t know what happened to Ben, we do know he’s dead. When the funeral scene begins, the shot starts on the statue marking his grave. And with Five returned, and the funeral taking place next to Ben’s statue, the seven siblings that Hargreeves adopted are all together, in a sense, for his funeral.

So, the funeral – the main event of the entire episode – takes place. This is the thing that brought them all together, but it isn’t enough to keep them that way. After Pogo delivers a heartfelt speech about Hargreeves, Diego goes off on how Hargreeves really was. It starts a fight between him and Luther, which not only sends all of the siblings leaving one by one but leads to Ben’s statue being smashed. In essence, this scene plays a similar beat to the one in the den where they are all together planning for the funeral, but everything about it is cranked up. Now even Five is included (and Ben, symbolically), and it isn’t just an argument but a full on fist fight, with Diego’s powers getting involved (Luther’s powers are arguably involved from the start, but with him having super strength, it is less of an intentional choice from him than Diego).

And after all of this it is Vanya who attempts to talk to Diego. She calls him out, rightfully so, and he brings up her book again. That’s enough for her, she tried to be with her family, but this book is being thrown in her face again. She walks out like everyone else does.

Splitting Apart; Setting Up

(A) Hargreeves has the children run a drill without Vanya.
(A) Hargreeves has all the children get tattoos without Vanya.
(A) Hargreeves studies the children while they sleep; Vanya included.
(A) Vanya leaves; Pogo says she is always welcome.
(C) Five leaves to look for coffee.
(B) Klaus gets in Diego’s car before he drives off.
(B) Luther watches cars leave from his room.
(A) Grace gets plugged in.
(C) Five kills a group of people who are trying to capture him.
(B) Diego gets rid of the monocle; Klaus sees Ben.
(A + C) Vanya gets home; Five tells her the world is ending in 8 days.

It is in this final sequence that we get an interesting bit of continuity between the flashback and the present. While most of the flashbacks are about contrast, this one flows into the present in a more direct way.

These final flashbacks of the episode start on scenes that reinforce what we saw with the bank scene: Vanya is kept apart from the rest. This idea is pushed so much further here, especially in the scene where six of the children fight back tears over being forced to get an Umbrella Academy tattoo, while Vanya is left out, and draws one on herself.

But in the very last moment, these flashbacks take a turn.

The final scene from 17 years ago has Hargreeves connecting the children up to wires to have their brains scanned while they sleep. The major difference here is that this time Vanya is included. And not only that, the scene ends with a white light coming off of her.

This transitions into a scene with present day Vanya, where she is taking a pill. While the connection between the light and this pill may not be evident on a first viewing, the juxtaposition of the two moments draws an important connection between these small events. From this transition, to Vanya’s choice to leave without speaking to her siblings again, we get what this sequence is all about: setting up the mysteries that will drive this season, and showing that the funeral wasn’t enough to keep the siblings together.

After Vanya leaves, so does Five, and then when Diego heads out, Klaus decides to go with him. Diego even calls out that maybe they will see each other again in 10 years when Pogo dies, making it known that he has no intention of seeing his siblings regularly after this.

Allison doesn’t get a lot for her story in this episode, but this sequence does remind us that she is getting a divorce. It’s not much, but it keeps her involved in the setting up of ongoing mysteries.

From here we leave only Allison and Luther in the house, but we don’t see them anymore outside of a quick shot of Luther looking down from his window as he watches Diego and Klaus drive off. He looks to be hiding because of how Diego cut him, but this is possibly because of how his shirt is now ripped more so than the actual injury. The way nearly everyone commented on his growth since they last saw him, the degree of hair on his bulky arm, all mixed with how he seems to be hiding, is all hinting at his story to come.

Next up is a scene with Grace, the woman the siblings have all be calling their mom, getting plugged in. While it was hinted it during the funeral, this is the scene where we learn that Grace is a robot. While most of the episode could be read as Grace just being in a state of shock and unable to cope with the loss of Hargreeves, this scene reveals she may be malfunctioning to some extent. Again, set up for the future.

Skipping ahead slightly, we see Diego on a dock, holding the monocle that Luther has been talking about for the whole episode; the object’s disappearance is a major clue to Hargreeves death according to Luther. Again, it’s set up, what does it mean that Diego has this? What is his connection to Hargreeves’s death?

In the same scene, we get Klaus in the backseat of Diego’s car, but he isn’t alone. We get our first sight of present-day Ben, who Klaus is talking to, but Diego can’t see. This is also our first time seeing Klaus’s power in action, where he can talk to the dead. Diego tells Klaus he is dropping him off, splitting up their family further, while we wonder what it means that Ben is here.

And then we get to Five. Arguably the character who is made the most important in this episode, next to Vanya. His trip to get coffee leads to him being surrounded by armed men who are looking to take him in. But even with their guns, Five is too much for them to handle. He teleports around the room and murders all of them, before using a knife to rip a tracker out of his arm so more of these people can’t find him. Again, more questions are being brought to the surface, who are these people? What do they want with Five? What was he doing for the 35 years he was supposedly in the future?

In the end, we end just like we began, with Vanya. Five comes to her after his fight, because he believes she is the only one he can trust. At first, he claims it is because she’s ordinary, the thing she has been hearing her whole life, the thing that has isolated her from the rest of her family. But then, he says more kindly that it’s because she’ll listen.

Here we get a small amount of what happened to Five when he went to the future, and we learn what the major goal will be for the season is going to be. Five tells Vanya that he doesn’t know how it happens, but the world will end in eight days, and they need to stop it.

And that’s where we end the episode. This sequence is all about undoing the short-lived togetherness that came out of the death of their father, while building out what the characters will do next.

By the end, we’re left to wonder:

What is going on with that white light from young Vanya, and present Vanya’s pills?
Why is Luther really so big now?
What happened to Allison to have her give up using her powers, and what happened with her ex-husband and daughter?
Why is Diego hiding the monocle?
Why is Grace malfunctioning?
What does it mean that Klaus is now seeing Ben?
What even happened to Ben in the first place?
Why are people after Five?
What is about to cause the end of the world?
Was Hargreeves murdered?

In a lot of ways, the fight at the funeral is the climax of the episode and the whole of this sequence is the denouement, just showing us where the characters end up now that the main plot is done. But it keeps itself feeling more active by having Five’s action scene in here to disrupt the slower moving set up scenes.

Conclusion

I’ve made the point a few times throughout this post that breaking a show down into these sequences is more subjective than breaking down a network series into acts, and that it is possible that someone else might have split them differently. So, why does it make sense to try to do it at all?

The point of this kind of breakdown isn’t the exact moments the sequences move from one to the next. As important as an act out is to network television (that final beat before cutting to a commercial break), in a commercial-less series it is just important to see that the show does still split itself into parts at all.

Let’s look just at what each sequence is about in the way I laid them out, just from the A story:

Vanya and her siblings hear about their adoptive father’s death.
The siblings come together but don’t trust each other, and Vanya feels accused.
Flashback to Hargreeves claiming that Vanya’s siblings will save the world.
The funeral goes terribly, and Vanya is made to feel unwanted.
Vanya leaves, but ends the episode being told the world is about to end.

If we look at this just in these small descriptions of the sequences, we get a full story. The episode’s plot centres around that funeral, with it and the flashbacks in place to show how much of an outsider Vanya is, only for her to be the one Five comes to about the end of the world.

Even when a show – or any media – isn’t broken up into explicit act breaks, stories are always built out of smaller pieces coming together. With a series like this, it isn’t as important to know exactly where one sequence moves to the next, as it is to know that if you were to write this kind of story it is still helpful to break it into some form of smaller parts even if it isn’t structured specifically around commercials.

Long story short, there isn’t as huge a difference in structure as you might think when it comes to network versus streaming series. The sequences may be more varied in length, and the seams might be a little more transparent, but in the end, they are still there.

The Umbrella Academy - Sequence 4 (Dance).jpg

Structuring the Pilot: The Umbrella Academy