Helunar1 - LUNA

clairvoyance (out of context)

((for @sunriseseance !! thank you for all the clairvoyant!klaus theories))

Something I find fascinating is that the show implies that Five was the odd one out among the children who Reginald did train, that he was one whose potential Reginald actually fostered but who he couldn't keep under control the way he did the other six.

Three seasons in, we have a pretty reasonable idea of what Reginald did to each of the children. Klaus and Ben were terrified of their powers and hated using them. Viktor was unaware of his, because Reginald kept him medicated and subdued. Diego was constantly being undermined and made to feel inferior to Luther, while Luther was both bolstered as a leader but also kept small and docile by Reginald through constant criticism. Allison used her powers to get away with things, using them indiscriminately to get what she wanted, and she remained content with that for a pretty long time, being the last one to leave the Academy, save for Luther. And Five was an arrogant child striving to push his power to new heights - he was not afraid of it, he relished what he could do and wanted to do more.

It seems like Five, different from the other children apart maybe from Allison, was not stifled in developing his powers, but instead was pushed by Reginald to develop both his powers and his mind, as he did need a substantial understanding of maths and physics to be able to apply them. Indications for this are littered throughout the seasons. Luther saying Five always thought himself better than them. The implication that Five would use his teleportation powers as much as possible as a kid. Reginald giving him five stars on his performance report. "Five cheated!" "He adapted." Reginald being fascinated first and foremost by Five's powers at the tiki bar. The implication that things got even worse in the household once Five had gotten lost.

The implication is very much there that Reginald treated Five differently, did not quite nip him in the bud like he did with most of his siblings, and once that had backfired spectacularly on him, he tightened the grip on the siblings that were left, making them even more miserable than they already were, a situation that spiraled further with Ben's death.

Reginald not keeping quite as tight a lid on Five led to Five being less afraid of him, more willing to openly rebel and defy him, a trait that keeps up all the way through the show. Letting Five's natural curiosity and thirst for knowledge develop what I assume to be reasonably uninhibited also meant that Five did not adhere to Reginald's authority as strongly, because he had an inherent trust in his own abilities that the other children did not have. And it went wrong for both Five and Reginald, with Five overestimating his own abilities and their long-term consequences and Reginald overestimating how obedient Five would be to him, and so Five got lost, never to come back in Reginald's lifetime.

For all intents and purposes, Five should have been Reginald's golden child. He is very powerful - which I think is the key reason of why Reginald treated him the way he did, someone who can control time and space can be useful in many different ways - and he had an inherent drive to explore and better his powers. But he never was, because Reginald could never really figure out how to fully control him. His influence is still stark, but Five is inherently unpredictable and adverse to authority. He genuinely rattles Reginald in every season at least once, and it's all because Reginald raised, as he so nicely put it, "an arrogant son of a bitch".

Just a small addendum about the comics, but this characterisation in the show is interesting to me especially because it is also in the comics, albeit in a much sharper way, like most things taken from the comics. There's the three attached pages from Dallas here below, which is genuinely one of my top three favourite scenes from the comics, it's so good and such clever foreshadowing while also nailing down the dynamic between Five and Reginald within just a few pages. In this passage from the final installment of Dallas, Reginald wants to present Five to brag to some fellow-minded rich dickheads, and Five sabotages it on purpose to embarrass him, and Reginald knows it. And it goes even further, with Gerard Way saying in an interview that Five is called Five because he called his father's bluff about the numbers, that he understood that they are meaningless and chose to adopt his number as a name rather than a rank. In the comics, there was a genuine power play between these two, and it'd be really fun if the show headed in that direction as well, I think it would be incredibly interesting to explore.

the umbrella academy | season 2 | 2020

More Ben and Five hugs pls