Undone had a pretty complete first season, although its cliffhanger did leave things open-ended as to whether or not Alma, the protagonist who could travel through time, actually had powers or was suffering from schizophrenia. The second season is an expansion that goes in a different, yet appropriate direction, before ending at a place that brings Alma back to where she started at the beginning of the season, but this time, she’s more equipped to accept her circumstances and move forward.
The season begins with Alma (Rosa Salazar) still waiting for her dad (Bob Odenkirk) to walk through the passage of a pyramid in Mexico. Eventually, she walks through the passage herself and ends up crossing into a different timeline where her father is alive and well. Here, Alma is a college professor who spends most of her time teaching and preparing her dissertation. Soon, she grows restless with the mundanity of her life and latches onto the apparent unhappiness and shiftiness of her mother. When she finds out that her sister, Becca (Angelique Cabral) also has time-travel powers, she persuades her to go on a trip to Mexico to uncover family mysteries.
Created by Bojack Horseman writer Kate Purdy and creator Raphael Bob-Waskberg and animated using rotoscoping technology, Undone is smart to not repeat itself with its second season.
This time, we are uncovering generational trauma, as well as Alma’s need to keep running and looking for new problems to fix with her powers.
Like with the first season, the animation depends on the ability of the actors to convey their emotions through facial expressions and body language, and that is something Rosa Salazar accomplishes very well. Drawing on her experience with depicting heightened emotions in Alita: Battle Angel, she expertly conveys her humanity and draws empathy from the viewer.
This time, the show takes a more straightforward approach to time traveling, and focuses more on the family dynamics and buried trauma of characters such as Alma’s mother, Camila, and Alma’s paternal grandmother, Ruchel/Geraldine. The show doesn’t explore its surreal, otherworldly elements as much as it did in its first season, but we still get a decent amount of exploration of the past and the mental mindscape of Geraldine in particular.
The main question Undone is concerned about in its second season is that we shouldn’t be focused on fixing the past, but instead making peace with the present.
While the penultimate episode seems to end on a happy note, everything unravels in the finale and Alma realizes she has to confront what she had been running away from for the whole season.
The ending brings Alma’s story full circle, although it did make me miss the character development of all the characters we saw in the previous episodes. Like Alma, we must also leave those greener pastures behind as she decides to move on and make do with what she has.
