Language: English
A wise-cracking time-traveller believes going back far enough into the past will undo the trauma that has extended from one generation to the next in her family, and reconfigure the present for the better. No, we are not talking about Season 2 of Russian Doll, but Season 2 of Undone. Yes, the metaphysically-minded twins do have a lot in common: both debuted in 2019 and have returned for a second outing within a couple of weeks of each other; their self-destructive heroines, Natasha Lyonne's Nadia Vulvokov and Rosa Salazar's Alma Winograd-Diaz, use humour as a defence mechanism against their emotional wounds and existential dread; the space-time tourism doubles as a metaphor for the schizophrenia and depression that run through their families and the anxiety over inheriting them; and both Nadia and Alma firmly believe healing their forebears' wounds will heal theirs and their family's too. But the differences lie in their form and execution.
For starters, Undone's use of animation makes it an entirely different kind of head-trip. The hand-drawn rotoscoping, which evokes the feeling of a waking dream, is fundamental to the show's trauma therapy. As Richard Linklater proved with Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly and more recently Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood, it's a style that lends itself well to dream logic. For Undone director Hisko Hulsing, it functions as a distinct language to mediate the memories of trauma, as a soft buffer from the hardness of a painful family history. In an artful marriage of form and function, the show takes an intuitive approach to time travel, not too concerned by the rules or logic. If things get twisty and chaotic, it is to put us inside Alma's headspace.
If Season 1 saw Alma embrace her time-travelling abilities and use them to bring her father back from the dead, Season 2 finds Alma diving deeper into her family history to search for the ground zero of their lineal trauma. So, this is as much a prequel as a sequel. Being half Jewish, half Mexican, Alma is carrying intergenerational baggage specific to her mother's journey to America and her grandmother's, and whatever they were forced to leave behind. The rotoscope animation thus has a liberating effect, allowing the show to engage with parts of the Winograd-Diaz history the family would rather bury deep and forget.
While they do work as companion pieces, Undone is more than just an animated counterpart to Russian Doll. In Season 2, creators Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Kate Purdy contrive a fresh journey for Alma, give her a partner in crime, play fast and loose with quantum physics, and help a family heal some old wounds too. For such a thematically heavy show, Undone still keeps its comedic edge intact, with the odd jibe from Alma or the chirpy interplay between Alma and her father or Alma and her sister. Salazar's willingness to be vulnerable, funny and a bit of a jerk at times is inextricably linked to the show's appeal. The animation and the humour create a couple of degrees of separation, distancing the viewer just enough without compromising on the show's cathartic value. This is territory Bob-Waksberg and Purdy, both of whom are BoJack Horseman alumni, have obviously navigated to some success before to say the least.
The last time we saw Alma, a car crash had her questioning her entire reality as the ghost of her long-dead father Jacob (Bob Odenkirk) guided her through past memories to uncover the truth behind his death. While Jacob had Alma believe she has time-travelling abilities, her mother Camila (Constance Marie), her sister Becca (Angelique Cabral), and her boyfriend Sam (Siddharth Dhananjay) maintained she's just mentally ill like her father and his mother. But the experience of reconnecting with her father left Alma thinking she could actually change the past and bring her father back to life. Season 2 rids itself of the ambiguity: not only can Alma time-travel, Becca can too. The two band together to dig deeper into the past to unearth a mystery their mom has been hiding which is entwined with their grandmother Geraldine's (Holley Faine).
If the ambiguity in Season 1 came from being solely aligned to Alma's point of view, Season 2 encompasses the whole family's. Alma and Becky's strained relationship in Season 1 smooths over their newfound abilities, as the two free-fall into the depths of their Mexican-Jewish lineage, past orphanages, asylums and bolted doors to find answers that may heal all their wounds. Watching the two partner up, with Alma guiding a reluctant Becca through the temporal madness like Jacob guided Alma in Season 1, is the emotional fuel that propels this season's existential engine.
Underneath all the time-travelling, Undone is still about a woman dealing with trauma. Passed down from generation to generation, trauma can embed itself deep and manifest in different ways.
Despite the distance of time, the fallout continues to ripple through. As the season progresses, Alma becomes so fixated on fixing the past and things usually beyond our control because she believes it will fix her too. But some of what she wants to fix about herself will require her to take responsibility for things within her control — which is an issue for Season 3 to worry about. Watching the two seasons of Undone so far has felt like being witness to Alma's therapy sessions, peeling layer by layer of her subconscious to get closer to the deeper truth about herself, reaching the end of each time-travel adventure akin to a breakthrough. With BoJack Horseman and now Undone, Bob-Waksberg and Purdy have really mastered the art of cathartic TV.
All eight episodes of Undone Season 2 release on Amazon Prime Video on 29 April.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru.
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