WARNING: Spoilers ahead for The Umbrella Academy season 3
Temps Commission debuted in The Umbrella Academy as season 1's main villains. A clandestine time-hopping organization, the Commission's overarching purpose is to preserve the timeline's natural flow by secretly influencing history - a crashed blimp here, an assassination there, etc. Number Five spent decades working as a Commission agent, and hated every single minute before finally figuring out a path home.
The Commission - mainly just Kate Walsh's Handler - stood in the Hargreeves siblings' way yet again during The Umbrella Academy season 2's 1960s adventures, but eventually found new leadership under the kindhearted Herb, who promised to handle Commission business the right way. Sadly, poor Herb doesn't reign for long, since The Umbrella Academy season 3's grandfather paradox wipes out the Commission completely.
While Five and Lila are picking through the Commission's wreckage, they shockingly discover Number Five himself is the organization's founder. Now just an ailing century-old body sealed inside a breathing chamber, Five's wrinkly counterpart is the Commission's only survivor after The Umbrella Academy's season 3 kugelblitz debacle, and es a message to his younger self before promptly dying. When and why did Five establish the Commission, and how does this twist change The Umbrella Academy's past?
Why Five Created The Commission In The Umbrella Academy
Before understanding why Number Five started the Commission, one must first deduce which version of Five started the Commission. The Umbrella Academy finds the Founder as a 100-year-old man with one arm and an Oblivion tattoo upon his chest. Five gets the tattoo and impromptu amputation during season 3's shenanigans, but after Allison and Sir Reginald Hargreeves reset the universe, his missing arm magically reappears. Maybe Five carelessly loses his arm a second time in The Umbrella Academy season 4, but a more likely explanation is that Founder Five hails from a timeline where Sir Reginald's universal reset failed - a version of events where the Umbrellas and Sparrows entered Oblivion and Five lost his arm, but Allison never pushed the button.
This Five, of course, would've been left without a universe thanks to the kugelblitz... but he'd at least retain his time travel powers. Maybe the Commission began because Five desperately tried stopping the kugelblitz before it began, pruning and prodding history in an attempt to avert the universe's destruction. This would explain why the Commission recruits from across the pre-2019 timeline, and would also for Founder Five's final warning - "don't save the world." Meeting his younger self, the old man must've realized his Commission mission failed, and the only way to save the universe was letting Reginald hit reset. If true, this would mean the Commission was one big experiment designed to prevent The Umbrella Academy season 3's apocalypse from happening.
Another possible explanation is that Five creates the Commission simply because it's his destiny. After seeing his future tattoo in The Umbrella Academy's time-proof bunker, Five visits Pogo and gets the exact same ink to "close the loop." This creates a paradox, since the only reason Five gets the tattoo is because he already saw it. Now Five knows he's the Commission's Founder, perhaps he simply closes that loop too, starting the Commission just because he knows it should happen.
How The Commission's Origin Changes The Umbrella Academy Seasons 1 & 2
Knowing Five founded the Commission casts The Umbrella Academy's earlier seasons in a completely new light. For starters, it can't be a coincidence that the Handler personally recruited Five to the organization. This order must've come from Founder Five himself so that he'd understand the Commission's purpose before he actually made it. Though we can assume ordinary agents never met the Founder (Five & Lila certainly didn't), the Handler might have known the truth. That would explain her preoccupation with hiring Five, at least.
The Commission's main goal throughout The Umbrella Academy season 1 was ensuring the apocalypse caused by Viktor Hargreeves went ahead, and we must assume this aim was sanctioned by Founder Five himself. Perhaps he believed sacrificing Earth would prevent the kugelblitz's universal destruction further down the line, or maybe the Founder knew his Commission agents would fail, but their presence was necessary to make younger Five whisk the Hargreeves siblings back to 1963, allowing the Academy's history to play out as intended.
In The Umbrella Academy season 2, the Commission is effectively hijacked by a rogue Handler, who calls her own shots after disposing of AJ Carmichael and his fellow board . There's no mention of the Founder at this point, which could indicate the Handler was once again secretly following his orders. Maybe the Commission's secret leader was actively trying to kill Harlan here, thus removing the kugelblitz's root cause, or maybe old Five knew the massacre at Sissy's farm was a necessary evil to create the Sparrow timeline and keep history a-moving.
The ins-and-outs of Number Five founding the Commission in The Umbrella Academy season 3 are enough to give Neil deGrasse Tyson a headache, but we can be (pretty much) certain of one thing. All the time the Commission was trying to kill the Umbrella Academy, Five was orchestrating events from the shadows. Whether he knew his family would survive or whether he was actually trying to kill them to prevent the kugelblitz is a question only The Umbrella Academy season 4 can answer.
The Umbrella Academy is currently available on Netflix.