Warning: This story contains spoilers from The Umbrella AcademySeason 3. 

The third season of The Umbrella Academy deals its titular misfit family a particularly rough hand. Between a deadly rivalry with the Sparrow Academy, a kugelblitz that threatens to swallow the universe whole and Klaus Hargreeves (Robert Sheehan) just dying over and over again, there’s a constant wave of pain plaguing the original Hargreeves family. But there’s perhaps no one holding in more hurt throughout Season 3 than Allison Hargreeves (Emmy Raver-Lampman). And her pain crescendos in the season finale, “Oblivion,” when Allison must make an impossible choice: destroy her siblings to get the happy ending she so desires, or turn on her deceitful father, Reginald (Colm Feore), thereby possibly sacrificing her dreams of returning to her husband and child in a different time and place. 

In the end, Allison chooses the Umbrella Academy. She kills Reginald, putting an end to his plan to use the Brellies (plus Sparrows Sloane and Ben) as human batteries for his universe-restarting machine. But Allison attempts to use the machine on herself. She thinks she’s launching the (remaining) Hargreeves toward a better future, but that’s never quite how things play out for this family.

In an impassioned moment, Viktor (Elliot Page) begs Allison to step away from the machine. Their seasons-long battle for sibling trust comes to a head when Allison convinces Viktor that she must press this button and see where it takes them. “She’s taking a leap of faith, and then she’s asking Viktor to also take a leap of faith in trusting her,” Raver-Lampman tells Tudum. “It was a very selfless moment that hearkens back to Allison and Viktor’s relationship [that] they’re always so desperately trying to get back. To where they are actually siblings, really close, and truly trust each other.” 

But this is a hard-fought step in the right direction for Allison: She spent the season in a dark, trauma-filled rage — a break from the optimistic moral compass her character was previously known for. Devastated by the horrific racism of the 1960s and the loss of daughter Claire (Coco Assad) and husband Raymond Chestnut (Yusuf Gatewood) due to shifting timelines, Allison spends this season in an emotional tailspin. She pushes away her remaining family, and she’s so blinded by rage that she kills Harlan Cooper (Callum Keith Rennie). Still, she ends Season 3 getting exactly what she wants by reuniting with Claire and Raymond in the Umbrella Academy’s latest timeline. And while fans may believe this is Allison’s happy ending, Raver-Lampman isn’t so sure. 

Allison goes through so much this season. What were your emotions entering this extremely painful road? 

It was really important to creator Steve Blackman and me — and all the writers — that we couldn’t gloss over the trauma that she’s going to be carrying with her having left the 1960s, and the fact that she was still alive to be found by her siblings when they did. It was, to be honest, a miracle. We would be doing her such a disservice to not address that and let that be a huge part of her journey for the season.

This is a new Allison. 

We were going into a season where, for the first time ever, she was not putting the family first. She was putting herself first and getting very narrow-minded in her goal and her objective and what she wanted and what she needed. It was really exciting to play a different side of her that we’ve never really seen before.

How did you deal with taking this character to such dark places? 

I’ve never really had the opportunity to portray a character that’s sitting in a very unstable emotional and mental space and is really in a point where the trauma has fully taken over — where this is the thing that is driving all of the decisions and all of the choices that are being made in grief and sadness. At the bottom of it, she’s utterly heartbroken — and then she’s also dealing with extreme PTSD. I read a lot of books. I did a lot of research on trauma, PTSD and how that manifests in the body and in the emotional space. 

Even my own personal therapy [sessions] turned into me asking my therapist questions about the ways trauma manifests. It was a lot of time, me sitting in this really deep sadness. But I actually learned a lot about myself as an artist and as an actor and also how to find my space.

Allison clearly channels a lot of her hurt into her decision to take adult Harlan’s life. What do you think pushed her to that point? 

Taking Harlan’s life was not the smartest decision. But none of [her] decisions have caught up with her because she was on such a one-track mind in Season 3. She was very goal oriented. At that point, it was like, “If you get in my way, I will actually kill you.” Nobody was taking that seriously until she actually did kill someone.

How do you think that colors her prospective future with Claire and Raymond? 

Allison made a lot of really bad decisions, a lot of really selfish decisions and a lot of decisions that are rooted in trauma, PTSD and grief. Yes, she has gotten her happy ending, but at the end of the day, she is still the Allison that we all met in Season 1. And she still has that loyalty to her family, and she still has that nurturing soul. She’s a kind and good person at her truest core. There’s just no way that the guilt of the decisions that she’s made aren’t going to catch up with her.

It would be really interesting to explore that in a fourth season. Once she realizes she doesn’t have her powers, she’s going to assume that everybody else [also] doesn’t have their powers — and that’s her fault. It could be an interesting journey for her to go on to try to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

How did you read Allison’s ending, where she’s alone with Raymond and Claire while the rest of her siblings are stuck in a park together in less than optimal circumstances? 

This is something that I’ve toyed with trying to figure out: Is this even real? Because [creator Steve Blackman] doesn’t tell us anything. I genuinely wish I had the answers, but he holds all his cards very close to his chest. Part of me hopes that it’s not real.

There are so many questions. Are the Brellies stuck in this weird time-warp bubble of make-believe? Is it Reginald’s imagination or this alternate universe that he created? Who knows?

Allison has already gone through so much. Anything could happen next. 

The beautiful thing about our show is that we can go wherever we want because we’ve passed the source material. We’re venturing out into the unknown. It could truly be anything, so I think it would be more exciting if this latest timeline wasn’t real. At this point, I’ve stopped even trying to guess because I couldn’t even if I wanted to.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.