The Umbrella Academy and Trying to Fix Things
The moral case for making sure you don't make things worse by trying to fix things.
Author’s Note: I posted more on my comic book if you’re interested, check it out here. Like I say, I’m still figuring out exactly how and what to post there. Feel free to offer suggestions. My next one at the end of the month is another idea I’m playing with.
We all have something we want to fix.
Whether it's ourselves or other people in our lives or some injustice in the world or something as simple as a childhood toy. There's something we want to fix. In part because we feel as though it's broken in some way. If only we could find a way to fix it, things would be better. Part of us hopes that we would feel complete if we had that one thing we thought we lacked. After all, feeling broken isn't a very comfortable way to be. We spend our lives searching for this piece of us which is missing, many of us never managing to find it. Knowing this is one of the most painful experiences people can have in their lives.
People come up with all kinds of ways to find this piece of ourselves. Things like therapy and spiritual guidance from either organized religion or less structured kinds. Most of them are designed to try and provide that thing we think is missing from our lives. For the more practical among us, we take on the more obvious idea of repairing things like cars or building things like furniture. There's a tremendous amount of fulfillment that can be gained from any of these activities. All with the ultimate goal of making us feel whole or at least functioning properly.
The problem comes when we try to fix things which aren't necessarily broken. Or things which are resistant to being fixed. No matter how much we might want to, we can't make other people into the things we want them to be. They're not something you can mould to your own preferences or desires. You might see them as broken but that doesn't mean they are. Maybe they are broken, just not in the way you think they are. Unfortunately, in trying to fix things for other people, you're likely to make things worse and not better. You can make people more broken instead of less in your attempts to fix things.
The Umbrella Academy is very much about wanting to fix things. Luther, Alison, Klaus, Five, and the rest of the Hargreeves family, as played by Tom Hopper, Emmy Raver-Lampman and Robert Sheehan, are all trying to fix something. Whether it's someone else in their family or something they find missing in themselves. They all feel broken in some way and if only they could get that one thing, the world would make sense and they could be happy. The problem is that most of their attempts to make things better never end well for any of them. More often than not, it leads to the destruction of everything and everyone they love. Usually through the end of the world.
Only by realizing how what they're doing is making things worse can they actually achieve what they're looking for. That final moment where each of them can feel complete. As if they aren't broken in some serious way. Not when they have each other to rely on in the most important moments of their lives... the end of the world.
Do yourself a favour and check out how trying to fix things can go terribly wrong through The Umbrella Academy as soon as you can.
You can watch the show on Netflix.