Aidan Gallagher’s Five best acting moments from The Umbrella Academy

4. Episode 207, “Öga for Öga”: Five murders the Commission board members

In this scene, Five murders the members of the time-traveling Commission where he used to work. The scene is just brutal, but somehow, Aidan Gallagher gets us on Five’s side. This moment is as crowd-pleasing as it is terrifying.

Let’s take a closer look at exactly what was happening here. The Handler (Kate Walsh) has struck up a deal with Five: if he kills all the board members of the Commission to help her with a coup she’s trying to pull, she’ll give him a briefcase so he and the other Hargreeves siblings can go back to their time. I mean, you gotta do what you do, right? It is the freaking apocalypse, after all.

So Five travels to the 1980s to do his job. The actual scene involves Five jumping and teleporting around as he slaughters all the board members one by one during a meeting. And don’t worry, he takes a moment to down some water and have a snack or two along the way, because this is tiring work.

So this scene involves comedy, action, conspiracy, blood and gore. The Umbrella Academy is excellent at mixing together different tones, and in Aidan Gallagher it’s found someone who can play all of them at once. He’s great at shifting between different moods and grounding even the most ridiculous sequences — like this one — in some kind of reality.