Why The Umbrella Academy's Briefcases Stopped Working
WARNING: Spoilers ahead for The Umbrella Academy season 3
Why don't the Commission's briefcases let Lila and Five time travel during The Umbrella Academy season 3? Laws of time have never mattered much in Netflix's The Umbrella Academy. Not only is Aidan Gallagher's Number Five capable of jumping through the vortex, but every single Commission agent has history at their fingertips. Unlike Five, Commission employees such as Hazel, Cha-Cha and the Handler all rely on portable devices to move between eras. Disguised as briefcases, these machines time travel far more accurately than Five, and also allow access to Commission HQ, which exists independently of time.
Annoyingly for our heroes, those briefcases completely stop working in The Umbrella Academy season 3. Problems begin arising when the briefcase Lila retrieved from inside the Berlin Wall starts fritzing during her shopping trip. One expletive-laden street tantrum later, Lila swipes the Umbrella Academy's briefcase from Hargreeves Mansion, but gets exactly the same result. As Five later admits, the odds of one Commission device breaking are remote; two is virtually impossible. What's going on with these barrier-breaking briefcases in The Umbrella Academy season 3? Maybe a kugel-wave simply fried them all, or perhaps a deeper explanation exists...
Related: Why They're Called The Sparrow Academy Instead Of Umbrella Academy
The Umbrella Academy has never fully revealed how the Commission exists, nor why agents are able to travel through time, but season 3's briefcase breakdown implies a salient detail - the Commission's technology relies on an interconnected network. Thanks to the grandfather paradox caused by the Umbrella Academy's presence in a timeline where Harlan
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