Undone Season 2 premieres on Prime Video on April 29, 2022.
“It’s never too late to change things.” In its various journeys through time and space, Undone, the psychological sci-fi comedy created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Kate Purdy (Bojack Horseman) and directed by Hisko Hulsing, takes this statement quite literally, as its main character changes the world around her to try and heal some yet undefined emotional wounds. The prospect of genre television vaguely being “about trauma” has become cliché thanks to the phrase being overused on press circuits, but Undone is an impressive marriage of form and theme regarding its protagonist’s state of mind.
When we last saw Alma -- played by a rotoscoped Rosa Salazar (Alita: Battle Angel, Brand New Cherry Flavor), her world was more uncertain than ever. She’s caught between a spirit of her deceased father (Bob Odenkirk) telling her that she has the ability to move through time, and her mother and sister (Constance Marie and Angelique Cabral, respectively) insisting that it’s part of a schizophrenic episode. And the new season picks up immediately where the last left off, with Alma waiting in front of a cave for something, anything to tell her which world she resides in, while her family panics about her state of mind. One startling discovery later, and Undone completely undoes and reconfigures itself in thrilling fashion. And the journey -- through time and through the process of self-reflection -- begins again. The new season of Undone is less a sequel than it is a second half to round off the story left unfinished by the first eight episodes -- not a repetition of what came before, but a completion of its emotional journey. All that, with a new twist regarding Alma’s powers.
With some new help, this time around, the show’s metaphysical trips examine the festering wounds in Alma’s family tree as well as within Alma herself, doubling down on its surreal premise on a new non-linear journey that creates puzzle pieces of their personal histories. It becomes, by one character’s words, a “rabbit hole that never ends,” a fascinating and cascading series of problems and quick fixes that introduce more problems of increasingly melodramatic nature. But they’re issues fascinatingly connected to immigrant generations and, as in the previous season, deaf communities as well, and the interweaving of these different interpersonal histories through Alma’s time-tripping is still one of the show’s strongest elements.
Though the season’s latter half gets a little tied up in those various branches of the dramatic family tree, for the most part, the more soap operatic elements don’t feel so egregious alongside its naturalistic aspects. Perhaps this part of the show feels at home because of its fantastical animation, but it’s also because of how the story remains focused on the believable relationships established in the previous season. Getting the answers she was looking for, of course, does not immediately fix her life nor the problems that have festered within her family since before Alma’s father disappeared. If anything, regaining the relationships she feels has been missing places her on the outside once again, as she steps into yet another, unfamiliar new world.
But despite the new status quo of her life, her restlessness continues -- the same visual loop of dissatisfaction as seen in the first season repeating itself in a new context, her emotional journey still incomplete even as she theoretically gets what she wants. The obsession with changing things, with fixing everything through this non-linear interaction with time, continues, but this time through the conduit of her relationship with her sister as well as her father, the former also dealing with a feeling of incompleteness.
Even as it explores the less fantastical, quite upsetting problems of the Winograd-Diaz family, the show deftly alleviates the heavy material through the sheer charm of its key players and their rapport and wit. Heritage, history, and their contemporary mental health all intertwine on the show’s cosmic journey -- but that journey only adds context and self-understanding rather than the clear and simple solution that Alma seeks. And it’s a relief that Undone embraces complexity, a character study rather than a “message,” at least for the most part.
What was great about the first season of Undone holds true for its second season as well; its astonishing and malleable use of the animation technique of rotoscoping. New viewers might draw comparisons to Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly and his earlier film Waking Life -- with which Undone shares a producer -- but the show’s style is all its own. The first season of Undone, with its “living painting” art direction and gorgeous presentation of spiritual, psychological, and emotional time travel, was perhaps the platonic ideal of what rotoscoping can achieve in animated storytelling.
The painterly expressionism of its environments mixed completely naturally with its real performances, the most outstanding of which is, of course, Rosa Salazar’s. She delivers Alma’s acerbic, hyper verbal wit with aplomb, bringing a very human empathy that stands out even amongst the show’s wild and expressive visual touches. In a sense, it feels like a continuation of how her performance in Alita: Battle Angel still worked through that digital facsimile of her own face -- even with a layer of remove and hand-created artifice, the humanity is still there.
The constant shimmer of the characters gives every scene a unique sense of liveliness, as well as embodying Alma’s restlessness and the surreal and constant motion of her world after her car accident. It’s a malleable world, one that matches Alma’s attempts to work out how she fits within it and how she responds to it. But this effect exists without compromising the humanity of Salazar’s performance, as it captures the physical specificities of her reactions and demeanor.
It helps that the voice acting is natural and engaging too; its snappy and funny but also incisive dialogue allows room for subtlety afforded by the nuances of each physical performance. There can sometimes be a layer of distance between drawn characters compared to live-action performances, but Undone found a happy crossover point between these two mediums of performance. Sometimes the illusion breaks and it tips a little too far into looking like live photography, but with an experience this aesthetically bold, there’s little to complain about. The ever-shifting world in which these characters reside is gorgeous as well, full of tableaus that shatter and shift and melt away at a moment’s notice, memories and the present day literally overlapping as it swerves into a new perspective. Alma’s surreal adventure and emotional journey is also characterized by a swirling, Philip Glass-esque score from Anne Doherty, one that never feels too overpowering.
The show’s experiential version of time travel is inextricably linked to Salazar’s performance of Alma’s mental health. And so in its questioning about what’s real and what’s not, Undone’s best answer is that it’s real to Alma, so it’s real. In the new season, the time travel element takes on a couple of fascinating new twists, becoming an extension of a perpetual dissatisfaction in the characters’ lives. “It’s never too late to change things” after all – the question of Undone Season 2 is the terror of rocking the boat, of the harm that the process of change can bring.
The question of whether or not Undone’s very premise is a figment of the imagination can be frustrating one, in part because of that innate desire to want things to work out for characters endeared to you, but also because of a gut reaction to wonder if any of it matters. Undone insists that it does, but also that neither Alma nor us, the viewers, can remain in the fantasy forever, something that brings about mixed feelings – though that is indeed the whole point. It’s at this point when Undone tips too far into being a life lesson rather than a story, compounded by a habit of saying its themes out loud. But, until that time, it walks the line between wish-fulfillment and therapy with enthralling momentum. It wonders about where the line lies between things that need to be fixed and things that can’t, or shouldn’t be, and worked through instead, digging down into the cause of Alma’s compulsive need to fix something, finding a solution that avoids self-reflection.
It’s in no small thanks to Salazar’s performance that Undone holds together in the way that it does, in that it feels like a complete character study as well as an aesthetic experiment. It’s “adult animation” because of its thoughtfulness and not because of strong language or violence. It has a unity of theme and form that can often feel rare, its wild visual journeys out of body and mind serving to paint a clearer picture of the woman underneath those layers of expression.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/Goht5WF
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