Umbrella Academy Season 3's Grace Is A Massive Plot Hole

In The Umbrella Academy season 3, Grace (AKA “mom”) plays an important role. Unfortunately, this creates a plot hole that has a knock-on effect.

Warning: Contains spoilers for The Umbrella Academy season 3.

In The Umbrella Academy season 3, Grace (Jordan Claire Robbins), AKA “mom” plays a major role, but she actually creates a massive plot hole. In a story where time travel is a part of the standard narrative arc, plot holes might be expected to be common. However, The Umbrella Academy has been remarkably consistent about how things work and when time travel paradoxes are created, they serve as major plot points and are not simply story errors that are forgotten.

In The Umbrella Academy TV show, Reginald Hargreeves built a robot and called it Grace to serve as the primary caregiver and adoptive mother to the seven children that he adopted. This idea is taken directly from the comics where The Umbrella Academy’s mother often makes reference to needing to put her limbs on before appearing in public. However, Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy departed from the comics as season 1 killed the robot Grace when Viktor tore down The Umbrella Academy, and season 2 revealed that the robot was modeled after a woman that Reginald Hargreeves had known in the 1960s who was also called Grace.

Grace’s presence in The Umbrella Academy season 3 creates a plot hole because the season is set in a new timeline where the original seven members of The Umbrella Academy were never born and Reginald created The Sparrow Academy instead. Netflix’s The Umbrella Academy revealed that the reason Hargreeves built Grace was that Viktor continually killed the human nannies with his powers whenever he was mildly inconvenienced. As none of the Sparrows appear to show this same sort of power and Viktor does not exist in The Umbrella Academy season 3 timeline, Hargreeves should never have needed to build Grace and would have simply continued to employ other nannies.

The Grace Plot Hole Means The Sparrows Shouldn’t Have Names

The plot hole around the existence of Grace in The Umbrella Academy season 3 creates a strange secondary issue. As established in the comics, and confirmed canon for the Netflix show by the TV series creator Steve Blackman (via Reddit AMA), Grace helped the children to choose their names. As The Sparrow Academy shouldn’t have a Grace, they also shouldn’t have names at all beyond their numbers as Reginald Hargreeves never expressed interest in their names and happily referred to them by the numbers even after they have secured names. This is made especially strange as Grace refers to the children by their numbers. Even if they were given traditional names for some reason outside of Grace’s influence it makes little sense that Ben would have the same name in both timelines.

These inconsistencies in The Umbrella Academy season 3 story could be explained by Reginald having decided to build Grace for some other reason rather than continuing to hire human nannies. However, given that it took the death of multiple human nannies before Reginald Hargreeves built Grace/mom, it is hard to imagine what would have pushed him to create her without those deaths. He’s always been happy to solve problems with money in the past, so if he could have found a reliable human to fill the role it seems unlikely that he would have built Grace. Although there might be viable explanations for why Grace exists in The Umbrella Academy season 3, the show fails to provide one and leaves her presence as a plot hole instead.