The Broken Physics of “The Umbrella Academy” Finale

Not long ago, Kat and I got around to watching The Umbrella Academy’s first season on Netflix.  I thought it was pretty good!  It was a decent mix of good decisions and bad decisions by people in the story, I liked most of the characters and their portrayals, and I thought the narrative arcs came to good places. Not perfect, but good.

Except.  I have to talk about the finale, people.  I have to get into why the ending, the very last few minutes of season one, just didn’t work for me.  And in order to do that, I’m going to deploy, for the first time ever, a WordPress Spoiler Cut™ on this here blog o’ mine, because this post is spoilerrific.  Ready?  Here we go.

Okay.  So, Vanya bleaches out, bad plans are executed, the sound of a gunshot somehow nullifies Vanya instead of charging her even further, magic energy beam somehow hits the Moon.  And then, a little less than two minutes later, this.

Now hold on just a damn second.

You know all the coolio particle trails behind the BMF and tails behind the other impactors?  Yeah, no.  There’s no atmosphere in space to cause things to fall off and slow down.  Anything that “fell off” would fly in close formation with its parent body, slowly drifting further away but moving at the same velocity.  And they most certainly wouldn’t drop back and then speed up to match velocity with the parent body like some kind of magical space fairy dust.

But that arguably artistic problem aside, let’s talk about the problem of distance.  That ejected Moon fragment takes, according to the Netflix video player clock, just under 110 seconds to get from the Moon to the Earth.  That’s really, really fast.

How fast?  Well, let’s find the slowest possible case.  Assume Vanya accidentally zapped La Luna at its moment of perigee, which is 356,400 kilometers.  The ejected fragment doesn’t have to traverse that entire distance, though; it only has to reach the Earth’s surface.  (Perigee is a measurement between the centers of mass of the two bodies, not their surfaces.)  The Earth has an Equatorial radius of 6,378.1km.  And what the heck, even though it makes no physical sense, let’s be overly generous and subtract the Moon’s 1,738.1km equatorial radius.  This means the Big Moon Fragment (hereafter BMF) has to cover 348,283.8 kilometers.

Moving that far in 110 seconds means a speed of 3,166 kilometers per second (km/s).  That is just a hair over 1% the speed of light in a vacuum.  Even if we assume there was some editing lossage and its traversal time was a half-minute longer, at 140 seconds, we get 2,488km/s, which is about 0.83% c.

I don’t care how massive a fragment of the Moon got ejected, instantly accelerating it to ~0.01c is not going to leave you with one large chunk.  I’m not even sure it will leave you with solid matter, but I’m not inclined to do that math.  Maybe someone who’s good with matter and energy can leave a comment.

But again, remember, we’re talking about speeds in the vicinity of 3,000km/s.  Which leads us to the next set of problems: the observed movement of the BMF is nowhere close to that, and the visible effects aren’t consistent with its size or its movement.

In the impact scene, the Earth’s limb is notably curved.  That means the BMF is enormous.  I did a sizing comparison using a full-Earth image, and determined the BMF is approximately the size of Germany: 650km by 800km.  (In the cross-section we can see, that is.)  As it happens, the BMF takes about one second to move its own width across the screen, which means a speed of about 600km/s.

At that speed, it should have taken 580 seconds, or 9 minutes 40 seconds, to reach Earth.  Assuming it somehow stayed intact after being instantly accelerated to such speeds, that is.

(Yes, it’s true that the mutual gravitational attraction between Earth and the BMF would have sped it up a bit, but at these speeds, the difference would be negligible.  If you’re already traveling at 600km/s, another km/s or three isn’t going to move the needle all that much.  And anyway, that means it left the Moon slower than its impact velocity, granting even more time.)

But wait!  The BMF is closer to the camera’s viewpoint than the Earth’s limb, which means it’s probably smaller than first assumed.  Let’s say it’s about two-thirds the previously-claimed dimensions; that would make it about 430km by 550km.  That size reduces its speed to around 450km/s, which adds another three minutes to the trip, for a total of 12 minutes 54 seconds.  Cut it to half the initially measured size, and you get around 300km/s, or 19 minutes 20 seconds.

But wait again!  As the BMF comes in for landing, a plasma front develops in front of it as it pushes through the atmosphere.  Let’s assume, wildly generously, that this plasma front first forms right at the Kármán line, which is 100 kilometers above the Earth’s surface and is taken by some as the boundary between Earth and space.  Given that assumption, the BMF is reduced to about 100km × 150km, which means it’s moving at around 100km/s.

At which speed, the BMF would have taken 58 minutes to reach Earth.  With that kind of time, the Academy might’ve been able to avert the Apocalypse after all — wake Vanya, apologize profusely, and ask her very nicely to put the Moon back together, maybe.

Now, given the observed visual size both at ejection from the Moon and at Earthfall, there’s no way it could be as small as 100km across.  I could maybe see 250km, but 350–450km is much more likely. (Which is around the size of Ohio, as it happens.)

Even if we go with 100km across — who knows, maybe enormous pieces of it flew away somehow and left only a 100km core, sure, why not — the BMF is up to ten times bigger than the Chicxulub impactor that wiped out the dinosaurs.  Just that single BMF impact and all of the superheated ejecta that would rain down worldwide, never mind all the other smaller chunks shown slamming into the Earth, would dump so much energy into the atmosphere that Number Five should have jumped into a literal Inferno, not a rubble-strewn landscape filled with still-flaming gas mains, intact newspapers, and, you know, breathable air.

There is also the question of exactly how the BMF managed to so precisely target Earth.  Contrary to ego- and geocentric expectations, the Earth is not the center of the Universe, so things do not just fall towards it by default.  If you want to start at the Moon and head straight toward Earth, you have to cancel the Moon’s orbital velocity, which is just over one kilometer per second.

Since we’re talking about hundreds of kilometers per second of velocity for the BMF, we can simply assume the fragment was ejected at an angle just slightly behind a straight line to the Earth, perfectly cancelling out the Moon’s orbital velocity and putting the BMF on a precise impact trajectory.  The odds of its ejection angle being that precise are (ahem) astronomically small, but at this point, it’s the least impossible thing about the physics involved.

Oh, and did you know that seismic waves move through the Earth’s crust at around 5km/s, whereas airborne shock waves start out supersonic but quickly fall into the subsonic range, which is 0.33km/s?  What I’m saying is, long before the flamefront reached the Icarus theater, gargantuan earthquakes should have reduced every building to shards and pebbles.  But, I dunno, never mind that, I guess?

If you’ve made it this far, well, I salute you.  And you might be thinking, “Dude, it’s a superhero comic book show, just suspend your disbelief.” But the thing is, once the magic superhero stuff’s effects have ceased, the side effects of the superhero magic operate in the context of the regular physical world.  Unless the narrative established that this is a Universe where the Moon is ten times close to Earth than it is now — and imagine those ocean tides — we’re left with several irreconcilable observations.  They’d have done better to have Vanya just conjure a massive, fast-moving, Earth-targeted asteroid out of nothingness.

I’ll let Number Five’s expression sum it up for me.

• The Broken Physics of “The Umbrella Academy” Finale was published on Tuesday, April 30th, 2019.
• It was assigned to the Commentary, Culture, and Rants categories.
• There have been eleven replies.