As we continue to analyse each member of the team and what specifically occurred to them in the just released third season, we are back with another Umbrella Academy video. One of the umbrellas we have discussed—out of all of them—has actually fallen off the horse.
He may be referred to as Sir Reginald’s prodigal child because he yearned for all the world’s hedonistic pleasures, including drugs, cults, and women. Klaus Hargreeves, who wears Umbrella Number 4, is there. Klaus, also referred to as The Séance, possesses a sinister power. In spite of everything, it seems that Klaus actually has a trick under his sleeve. What is that, do you ask? Keep an eye out!
Who is Klaus Hargreeves?
An Amish woman named Rachel Herschberger gave birth to Klaus Hargreeves at noon on October 1, 1989, despite not being pregnant at the time. He was adopted by the eccentric millionaire Sir Reginald Hargreeves. Hargreeves’ Number Four, Klaus, has the ability to communicate with the dead.
He started using drugs at the age of 13 after learning that they restrict his skills shortly after being imprisoned in a mausoleum as a young child. It is still unclear exactly when the child’s abuse and isolated training started, but it must have started when he was at least 8 years old. His adoptive father severely mistreated him as a child. In the series, his problems with drug abuse and addiction are amply displayed.
Klaus exits rehab in the first episode of the show. After being freed, he immediately leaves to get narcotics and discovers that his adoptive father passed away despite being revived in an ambulance. He immediately looks through his father’s office for valuables when he arrives at the Umbrella Academy. His sister Allison finds him, but she does not force him to put anything back. Luther, though, does. He pulls out a box containing his late father’s papers. He places the papers in the trash after taking the case to a pawn shop. The cash is used to buy more drugs by him.
Afterwards, during the family gathering, Luther asks him to speak with Sir Reginald’s ghost. Klaus tries, but he can’t succeed. Klaus smokes while Sir Reginald’s funeral is taking place, and he concurs with Diego that their father was an evil person. Klaus tosses a fire extinguisher through the portal that Number Five creates to return to his past. He then departs with Diego, and it is shown that while being high, he is still capable of communicating with the ghost of his deceased brother, Ben.
In the episode titled Run Boy Run, it is revealed that Klaus is plagued by ghostly voices when he sleeps or possibly just has nightmares about them. He wakes up drunk and starts conversing with Ben’s ghost, who chastises him for using drugs.
He was also kidnapped by intergalactic assassins Hazel and Cha Cha at one point. Hazel and Cha-Cha torment Klaus throughout this time to elicit information from him. He is waterboarded, beaten, and strangled. These strategies don’t work. Klaus starts hearing and seeing spirits around him, particularly a Russian woman, as his withdrawal symptoms worsen. He finally escapes and takes a briefcase hoping that it would have money for drugs but upon opening the case, he is transported to an unknown place.
He also becomes a cult leader at one point in time and amasses quite the large cult following, which makes him quite rich and famous. He lays off the drugs during this time however, the moment he reunites with his family, things spiral once again.
Klaus has revolted against his father by declining to be the hero his father intended him to be. He is a wounded, frail man who hides his grief with self-deprecating humour and cynical hedonism. He adopts the persona of an untrustworthy, unapologetic leech and drug user, so his siblings frequently disregard his viewpoint. He is revealed to have more intelligence than first thought, and he has even demonstrated that he can speak sense into his family’s rash judgments. To the annoyance of people around him, he frequently cracks jokes out of desperation as a coping mechanism for his tragedy.
However, despite all this, he also seems to be the only one who thought more positively and healthily about their early years. He recognises that their early years were difficult and keeps moving forward without overly reflecting on it. It is revealed that the leading cause of his addiction is the horrifying, terrifying visions of deceased people that relentlessly call out to him that is brought on by his powers. The only things that can control his powers and stop the visions are drugs and alcohol. His behaviours demonstrate his loyalty to his brothers, especially Diego and Luther, even if he behaves like any other sibling by mocking and bickering with all six of the other Hargreeves kids.
The way Klaus looks is very different from how he appears in comic books. While in the comics, Klaus had naturally light brown hair and blue eyes, in real life he had long sandy brown hair and green eyes. In the comics, he also religiously wore sunglasses.
Powers and Abilities
Klaus might not be the most powerful amongst all his siblings, but his powers are definitely the most intriguing. He has a variety of powers and almost all of them have to do with the realm of the dead in some way or the other.
The first power we’ll discuss is that of mediumship. While sober, Klaus has the capacity to speak with spirits and other people from the afterlife. Ironically, because he fears the dead, he turns to drink and narcotics as a form of self-medication to keep his abilities in check. Although, often during the series, Klaus is shown chatting with his late brother, Ben, who appears to be the one spirit he is not terrified of. Klaus was informed by Sir Reginald in the afterlife that he had only begun to tap the full potential of his ability. Thus, he can commune with spirits and interact with them.
Klaus is also capable of summoning ghosts and bringing them into the physical realm via his power of evocation. Klaus claims he couldn’t summon Sir Reginald at the burial in his first attempt because he was high. Additionally, Reginald was difficult to control due to his obstinacy.
Klaus made the first physical contact with Ben’s spirit thanks to his renewed efforts to stay sober. Later, this developed further to the point that he was able to temporarily materialise Ben’s spirit into the physical universe. He was able to summon fallen American soldiers to battle Soviet soldiers in a different 1963. Lila’s energy wave knocked Klaus back, but Klaus was able to summon two spirits to grab him in their grasp. Hence, he can summon and conjure spirits at will and often does to get himself out of sticky situations.
Further, Klaus has the power to control and also exterminate spirits. He was successful in destroying spirits who were pursuing him in the cemetery in the episode “Auf Wiedersehen.” He can also hear the voices and whispers of dead people while he does about his life. This definitely cannot be comfortable so it is not a surprise why Klaus does what he does to take the edge off.
One of his most impressive powers is retroactive immortality. When Klaus does meet his death, he won’t stay dead because he is actually immortal. The outcome of self-resurrection is this. In the episode “The Day That Was,” Klaus pursues his inebriated, helpless brother Luther in an effort to prevent him from experimenting with drugs. He discovers him high on drugs at a rave dancing with a woman, leaving his boyfriend upset. Jumping onto the man’s back, Klaus is knocked off and suffers a head injury.
He is shown to awaken to what appears to be a girl/God in the afterlife, and she tells him that she does not like him since he simply doesn’t rub her in the correct way. His father verifies that he is “already dead” after she dupes him into seeing Reginald, but he subsequently awakens on the dance floor after being brought back to life. Later, Klaus learns that he can actually never die because he always comes back to life. While first it took him about 22 minutes to return from the afterlife. Klaus can now almost instantaneously revive himself thanks to his father’s training, taking less than 4 minutes.
Additionally, every time Klaus returns from the grave, all wounds to his body—including bone fractures and internal damage—will gradually heal. In the event that his body is reduced to dust, he will create a new one when he awakens from the grave.
In addition to his natural abilities, Klaus is a great fighter. Klaus, like all of his brothers, has some level of physical and martial training, but he is one of the least skilled fighters. In addition, Klaus is an expert lockpicker. He boasts that he can pick locks with just his teeth. Klaus definitely is someone with significant powers but they are of such a nature that they often get to him and he cannot do anything but numb them out to feel normal for a while.
Klaus in Season 3 and Achieving Immortality
Season 3 was quite eventful for Klaus and he played a major role in taking down Sir Reginald Hargreeves in the end. It is also in this season that we get a good look into his power of immortality.
In The Umbrella Academy season 3, Klaus Hargreeves elevates his trendy spiritualism act. The big question is, how does it work and what does this mean for the future. Klaus Hargreeves, played by Robert Sheehan, is a always-partying grumpy cult leader who has a remarkable ability to put his physical body through the wringer while evading severe consequences. The Umbrella Academy’s third season explains how and why Klaus keeps getting away with so many deathly lethal Looney Tunes-esque antics.
As we already know, Number Four had the ability to communicate with ghosts throughout The Umbrella Academy’s first two seasons, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes not. Klaus was able to periodically produce these spirits in the actual world while sober and focused.
In the third season of The Umbrella Academy, Klaus Hargreeves visits Stan in the White Buffalo suite of the Hotel Obsidian and finds himself on the fatal end of a harpoon, which accidentally spears him straight through the chest. However, after a brief visit to the hereafter, Klaus awakens as Diego and Stan carry his unquestionably dead corpse down an elevator. It turns out that Klaus has once more eluded death and is now fully recovered and writhing around, but not due to inebriated luck or absurdly long durability. All of this is a result of his peculiar Umbrella Academy talents.
In The Umbrella Academy, Klaus learns he has the ability to become immortal after a discussion with his birth mother and a brutal training session with Sir Reginald Hargreeves of the Sparrow Academy. Even a harpoon through the chest turns out to be no problem for Klaus as he adds an entirely new aspect to his afterlife toolbox.
The realisation that Klaus was always immortal in The Umbrella Academy is even more surprising for fans, than his immortality. Klaus is unable to die; this is not a power he is aware of or can turn on and off. Number Four has reportedly died 56 times in total, starting with dark and damp mausoleum experiments undertaken by Sir Reginald Hargreeves and progressing to inebriated party events and drug overdoses, according to Rachel Herschberger, who has been watching over her son from the Void.
Even after falling at a rave and hitting his head, Klaus magically recovered in The Umbrella Academy season 1. Now that we know the Séance was actually dead during this scene, we can see why it, like every other time before, fans and Klaus himself misunderstood an occasion where he actually died for a “near-death experience.”
The third season of The Umbrella Academy demonstrates that Klaus has some degree of control over his immortality, despite the fact that it is unavoidable. Every time Klaus passes away, he is transported to The Umbrella Academy’s peculiar afterlife void, where he is left to roam mindlessly before resurfacing in the physical world.
However, there might be a certain limit to how much harm Klaus can endure before recovering. The alien master manipulator had said that his parallel son’s ability was “near-immortality,” according to him, while Klaus was training with Sir Reginald at the Sparrow Academy. Reggie is the expert on the superpowers of the Umbrella Academy, thus it stands to reason that there are probab;y some wounds Klaus cannot heal. Klaus emerges from the Void alive and healthy one episode after everyone is completely destroyed by the Kugelblitz in The Umbrella Academy season 3’s “Seven Bells,” so they’d have to be absurdly severe.
Apart from the realisation that Klaus is immortal, he also plays an important role in defeating Sir Reginald and becomes the hero that fans thought he could never be. Reginald Hargreeves brutally murder his “Number One” son Luther as he slashes him across his chest near the end of “Seven Bells,” the penultimate episode of season 3. Yes, as was previously stated in season 2 and reiterated here, Reginald is a space alien.
When Klaus is about to follow his brothers into Oblivion, Reginald tells him, “You’re just more trouble than you’re worth,” and proceeds to close the portal since he is still not satisfied with his snide behaviour. Klaus decides to kill himself rather than wait for the kugelblitz to claim him by impaling himself on one of the taxidermy’s horns in the unique hotel room. Thus, Luther and Klaus thus pass away. Fortunately, death is not as permanent as one might believe in the world of The Umbrella Academy, and Klaus in particular is a good example of this.
Klaus and Luther are revealed to be together in the afterlife after passing away. Luther tries to restore Klaus so that he can return to Earth to tell Sloane about Hargreeves, but Klaus rejects travelling back, and the two begin to fight. However, Klaus returns from the dead and meets up with his brothers in Hotel Oblivion after much prodding from Luther. Luther travels with him as well, but only for a short while and as a ghost. It is through Luther’s ghost that Klaus reveals Sir Reginald’s true nature to the rest of his siblings.
It is only after this that all of them attempt to face Reginald Hargreeves and this incident effectively sways Allison who had a deal with their father but finally ended up killing him instead. It can definitely be said that if Klaus had not come back to life and brought Luther’s spirit with him, Allison would have never betrayed Reginald.
At the end of season 3, the entire world gets reset and we get to know that none of the Umbrellas have their powers anymore. Now, this can be extremely good for Klaus because he has always been scared of spirits and the afterlife and effectively has been tormented by his powers his entire life. However, actor Robert Sheehan has predicted that season 4 will probably see Klaus battling with familiar demons as he learns to live in a world without his powers.
The Séance – Number 4 in the comics
The comic book series is an integral source for the Netflix series, and it is no surprise that the characters are quite heavily adapted from them. Here is how Number 4 was in the comics.
We know that he was born to a woman who did not show any signs of pregnancy prior to the moment of giving birth and was one out of 42 children to be born that way. He was then adopted by Sir Reginald Hargreeves to be trained as a member of The Umbrella Academy.
Klaus, who Hargreeves designated as Number Four, possessed psychic talents and could communicate with the dead. He was gloomy and anxious, and Sir Reginald thought he looked like an extra from an Ingmar Bergman movie. Klaus was a kind and sensitive child. He, however, was the subject of many experiments by Sir Reginald. In fact, he was experimented on by Sir Reginald more than any of the other kids. The incident affected him, prompting him to become crueller in Vanya’s opinion in the comics.
The Umbrella Academy made its public appearance approximately a decade after their adoption. They were sent to combat the dangers presented by the Zombie-Robot Gustave Eiffel and the ravaging Eiffel Tower in the heart of Paris. During the struggle, Klaus was a member of the group and sought to utilise his psychic powers to speak with an engineer in the afterlife to get assistance on how to deal with the rampaging Eiffel Tower. Eiffel’s death and the ascent of the Eiffel Tower into space marked the end of the conflict.
After Sir Reginald’s passing, Klaus went back to the Umbrella Academy. Klaus planned to approach Luther and Allison outside and try to make contact with their deceased father to express his displeasure at having his stipend taken away. (Remember how I called him the prodigal child before?) And then, following Number Five’s explanations of how he was able to travel back in time, Klaus attended Sir Reginald’s burial ceremony on the Academy grounds.
His powers in the comics included telekinesis, conversing with the deceased, primarily via ouija boards, channelling the dead, conversing through airwaves, possessing individuals, levitation, and most importantly, immortality. In fact, it is believed that he might have easily transformed into an invincible force of nature to save humanity, but his excessive drinking and habitual drug use greatly reduced his strength.
He also fought alongside his siblings in the Vietnam War and returned to the Umbrella Academy in 1980 to halt the end of the world. In the comics, he is also the only Academy member to have passed away and then resurrected himself.
Thus, Klaus like all of his other Umbrella siblings has major demons that he has been fighting for the entirety of his life. A major portion of his demons can be attributed to the fact that his power literally allows him to communicate with spirits and he also hears them when not actively communing with them – that is already enough to drive a man crazy. However, another factor that also contributed to his sad state was the cruel treatment meted out to him by his adoptive father. He is arguably one of the most troubled out of all his siblings.
His power of immortality as well can be seen as a double-edged sword because as a result, he can never die and never escape his demons. What do you think about Klaus? Can he one day become a stable person who has come to terms with his powers? Let us know in the comments section below!