What I love about Number 5 is that he’s an old guy in a young boy’s body.
I probably need to start wording that better, but I don’t think anyone can deny that Aidan Gallagher completely nails the complexities of the time-travelling character.
But what are his hopes, his dreams?
Well throughout this video we’re gonna be giving you the lowdown on Number 5 including his full backstory and powers.
Obviously, there will be heavy spoilers here so if you haven’t had a chance to check out both seasons of The Umbrella Academy then I highly recommend that you turn away now. We will be talking about some spoilers in the comics too such as his time at the temps and also a twist that hasn’t been revealed yet so you have been warned.
Five’s Powers
Five was born on October the 1st 1989. In Umbrella Academy lore this is a special day as it signalled the arrival of 43 children all blessed with amazing abilities.
Five is no exception to this and the character can dissolve and reform his own matter at will. This gives him the ability to not only teleport but also allows him to move backwards and forwards through time.
Five can sometimes use this on those around him and because of his powers, he was able to journey back to the sixties with the rest of his family. He also at one point switched out a criminal’s gun with a stapler, showing that he may possess the ability to move objects too though he rarely uses it.
Because Five is actually 58 years old, he’s managed to pick up a wealth of skills over his lifetime and these have moulded him into a master combatant. Five is a skilled assassin that uses his knowledge of warfare to easily dispatch his foes and because of this, he’s not someone that you want to trifle with.
So basically Five is Nightcrawler from the X-men with the ability to time travel.
Why Does Five Look Like A Child?
Now whilst his temporal powers sound like a really cool thing to have, with them comes several consequences. After every jump through time, Five creates an alternate reality that tends to lead to the apocalypse. In addition, due to his inability to fully control his Chronokinesis, rather than moving through time, time moved through Five thus he ended up becoming trapped in his younger body which he has remained in since jumping to 2019.
Now in the comics, Five doesn’t age at all, he remains stuck in his ten-year-old body and just doesn’t grow.
It’s revealed in the comics that because he was their greatest assassin, the Temps actually experimented on him and made it so that he wouldn’t age. This is why when he goes back to his younger self he just doesn’t grow up.
However, I think due to Aidan Gallagher ageing more and more as the seasons go on, the show will have him growing up once more and ageing as normal with him essentially just restarting his life.
In my opinion, this is why the experimentation hasn’t been mentioned in the show but let me know if you disagree.
In addition to this, the Temps also took every major killer in history, and placed their DNA into Five which is why he never feels any remorse or guilt over his killings.
That’s pretty much the lowdown on the character and though he’s the longest living of the Hargreeves siblings, we still don’t know that much about him.
Five’s History
When Five was young he was quite arrogant with his powers and he ignored the warnings of his father who instructed him not to jump through time until he knew was he was doing.
When testing his abilities, Five found that he could jump ahead in time and he tested this by making several leaps. However, the character jumped too far ahead and found himself caught on the other side of the apocalypse.
Five was unable to jump back and thus became stuck there, wandering the wasteland for decades.
Now with this comes several caveats. Because Five did not grow up with the rest of the Academy, he did not eventually leave them and form his own identity.
Thus, whilst the other members of the group shed their numbers in favour of their actual names, Five became stuck with his and therefore still dons the moniker Number Five.
Though we know what happened to him, to the other members of the group, Five appeared as a missing person and he could be seen as instrumental in the rest of the family’s decision to leave the academy.
This is because, upon Five’s disappearance, Sir Reginald actually remarked that his absence was no great loss and thus the Academy likely saw themselves in the same light.
They slowly moved out of their childhood home and onto bigger and better things whilst Five became lost to time.
Five Returns
Five returned and explained that he had managed to travel back in time. However, Vanya did not believe him and instead believed that time travel had just messed with his mind.
Initially, no one believes his story until the Temps Commission show up and we learn the truth about what really happened.
Five pretty much spent the majority of his life wandering the wasteland of armageddon and at this point, he came across a mannequin named Dolores whom the character fell in love with.
Let’s be honest, we’ve all woken up to worse, but slowly this sent him slightly crazy.
Five treated Dolores like she was a real person and he became overly protective of her. Upon joining the Temps, he left Dolores behind but he did visit her in her department store, saying his goodbyes and telling a worker to pick out something nice for her to wear.
I’m not crying you’re crying.
Joining the Temps Commission
As we’ve mentioned, Five was recruited by the Temps and he was offered the deal of working for them for five years in exchange for being able to retire to a time that his heart desired.
Quickly he rose through the ranks and became one of their best assassins, completing job after job with ease due to his ability to appear and disappear seemingly at random.
We learn that Five actually killed Lila’s parents and under the direction of The Handler, he was chosen to assassinate JFK.
It’s at this time that he learned of the apocalypse and decided to attempt to avert it to save his family.
Now a lot of people have wondered why Five actually did this, especially because he hadn’t seen his family for years and due to his personality he was pretty much a sociopath.
Well, this is actually hinted at in the comics. This is a big spoiler for Five’s origins so if you don’t want to know anything then I suggest you skip ahead.
Spoilers from here
Are you still here?
Good.
In the comics, it’s revealed by Carmichael that Five’s mother actually gave birth to twins. Now though that might be a big shock to you and it could potentially leave room for an evil version of Five down the line, we learn that Five’s twin is actually Luther. I’ll give my thoughts on how this might be changed in the show later but that’s an important thing to bear in mind.
Ok, It’s Safe
What Caused the Apocalypse?
Upon returning to 2019 they tried to trace back the source of doomsday and after an investigation, they discovered the root of the problem…
Vanya was the one responsible for ruining the world and though the Academy initially tried to lock them away, they realised that what they actually needed was kindness and love.
Awww.
The group showed up to calm things down but Vanya ended up going full supervillain and this destroyed the moon and sent an asteroid hurtling towards the planet. Allison was able to sedate Vanya, and Five, with his family, travelled back to the 60s.
Unfortunately, due to still not having proper control of his powers, the family were dropped at several points throughout the decade and Five himself was transported to 1963.
Second Apocalypse
Here Five discovered that there was another Apocalypse once more caused by Vanya.
It’s revealed that the FBI had taken Vanya in for questioning after believing they were a Russian spy. During torture, Vanya went into overdrive and triggered by the memories of her childhood, set off a blast at their headquarters that destroyed a large section of it.
This just so happened to take place as JFK’s motorcade was passing and thus he suspected that the Russians had committed a terrorist act and declared war on the country.
Hazel arrived to help Five avert this and together the two travelled back to a time before the apocalypse so that Five could avert it once more.
Unfortunately, he was killed by The Swedes but Five was able to unite his family.
The Handler
It’s at this point that Five was approached by The Handler who gave him the time and place of a meeting between the board of the Temps Commission.
In exchange for killing them, The Handler promised to avert the apocalypse and give them a temp briefcase which will allow them to return back to their 2019. Thus Five carried out the mission however, The Handler tricked him and only gave the character 90 minutes to unite his family and return back to the right time period.
Five realised that there was a version of himself in the past that also possessed a briefcase and thus he went and met him. This version was the Five we actually saw back in Season 1 just before he jumped across time and space. Five said he would give him the correct calculations to remain in his older body in exchange for the briefcase and the two made a deal.
However, both as paranoid as the other, they ended up fighting and the younger Five jumped through the portal which also destroyed the briefcase.
Though we don’t know what happened to him, this created another alternate timeline in which there was a version of the first season that had an older Five rather than the one stuck in his younger body.
Now at the end of the season, Five and Co not only stop the Temps Commission but also Vanya from wreaking havoc on the planet.
Five and the Umbrella Academy are almost killed by the Handler but Five remembers advice given to him by Reginald. This was to travel back in minutes rather than decades and he manages to go back to before her arrival and stop her dead in her tracks.
I’m not sure if this creates an alternate timeline too but if it does then that means there’s a universe where the Hargreeves were all killed at this point…Season 3 is cancelled.
Returning to 2019
The new director of the Temps arrives called Herb. He says he can stop the apocalypse in the future and gives them a briefcase to return to 2019.
Now though they keep their end of the bargain, it becomes a situation of ‘be careful what you wish for’ as upon arriving back in 2019, they find that Reginald selected other children to be part of the Academy and this is shown in the Sparrow Academy.
Now we’ve already done a full breakdown of the members of this group which you should definitely check out if you wanna know more. They’re basically the same as the current academy power wise and there’s an opposite to Luther, Allison and pretty much every member has someone in this group that’s the same.
Because of this I actually think that this box dude might be Five’s opposite and it is possible that just in the way that five was able to jump through time, this character was able to jump through dimensions.
If he was then it would make sense that there would exist a realm in which everyone was a cube and this character may have ended up trapped in this form upon attempting to jump back, similar to how five became trapped in his younger body.
Either that or he went so far ahead into the future that humans had transferred their consciousness to boxes because let’s face it, be there or be square.
The show might also do a change up and he may be the big twist that we talked about earlier in the video that I can’t ruin here in case people who skipped ahead are watching it. You know what I’m talking about anyway do you. I knew that.
Anyway, there’s definitely a lot that we could take from this cube guy and I can’t wait to see what interactions he and Five have in the future. That’s assuming it’s a man, it could just be a cool little box.
Anyway, that’s everything you need to know about Five and the 101 on the character.
Your Thoughts
Now I’d of course love to hear your thoughts on Number Five and if you agree with my theories or have any of your own. Make sure you comment below and let me know and if you want something else to watch after this then check out our breakdown of Sir Reginald Hargreeves. We go over the big bad dad of the Umbrella Academy and including his origins and powers.
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