The Umbrella Academy’s Hotel Oblivion is way cooler in the comics

polygon.com:

The Umbrella Academy TV show has always been a very loose adaptation, but the core premises of the first two seasons — stopping Viktor from ending the world and trying to stop the JFK assassination — correlate directly to those of the comics’ first two volumes. But in season 3 of the Netflix drama, showrunner Steve Blackman orchestrates one of the biggest deviations from the the Umbrella Academy comics yet by giving us a completely new spin on the third volume’s titular Hotel Oblivion.

[Ed. note: The following contains spoilers for both The Umbrella Academy show and comic books.]

The comics’ Hotel Oblivion isn’t a hotel at all. It’s a prison for the most infamous villains that the Umbrella Academy has ever defeated. It’s a twisted place where every sentence is a life sentence, a single cockroach serves as dinner, and prisoners are often driven mad. Since Hargreeves built Hotel Oblivion on a distant planet in a pocket dimension, it’s (nearly) impossible for the inmates to escape.

The only ways in and out of Oblivion are to fly through an unexplored portion of the universe called afterspace or to use a televator, a teleportation device Hargreeves invented that’s common throughout the world of the comics. However, in order to make it safely from the hotel to the televator, you have to avoid the notice of the Scientific Man, a clear riff on Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, who watches over the prison from space. The Scientific Man appears to be one of Oblivion’s inmates as well, but has seemingly garnered special privileges in exchange for playing warden. And judging by the bones of massive creatures riddling the planet’s surface, if the Scientific Man catches you outside the hotel, he’ll do a lot more than kindly ask you to