10 Small Details You Only Notice Rewatching The Umbrella Academy
3. ... But The Past Ain't Through With You
In an attempt to restore the timeline, and send himself and his siblings back to the modern day, Five makes a deal with The Handler in which he travels to a clandestine meeting of The Commission’s board of directors, and slaughters them all with an axe.
In exchange for this dirty deed, the bloodied assassin is given a briefcase to orchestrate the team’s quantum leap home, only for the plan to go awry when half of The Umbrella Academy members fail to show up.
Frustrated, Five exclaims “All they had to do was be there. It’s not like they had to defeat a giant sea serpent”.
This might sound a random attempt to be glib, and did initially have us thinking again of The Watchmen comics, but after mulling it over for a while we realised it’s actually an allusion to “...But the Past Ain't Through With You”, an Umbrella Academy short story in which the siblings literally do go to war with a pissed off sea serpent.