If you could travel back in time and heal the ancestral wounds responsible for your family’s generational trauma, would you? Hw would that healing influence your relationships going forward? Amazon’s second season of Undone explores these questions and more, all with the snarky sibling squabbles and parent/child ragging we’ve come to know and love from Bojack Horseman’s Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Kate Purdy’s animated sci-fi thriller dramedy.
Season 1 leaves us with Alma (Rosa Salazar), staring into a cave, certain she’s realigned the timelines and saved her dead father Jacob (Bob Odenkirk) from the horrible fate they’ve spent the entire season desperately training her to help him escape. In that moment, Alma has finally committed to wholeheartedly believing this time-traveler identity Jacob has been revealing to her all season long. In choosing to come to this cave in Mexico, by way of stealing her worried mother Camila Diaz’s (Constance Marie) car instead of heeding Camila’s pleas that Alma get help for her down-spiraling mental health, Alma has put so much at risk to believe that she is indeed a powerful time-traveler. As we watch her stare into that cave, we pray just as hard as she does that she’s right, because if she’s not, the ensuing grief of confronting the alternative feels all too overwhelming.
If Season 1 was Alma’s time-traveling origin story, Season 2 follows what it’s like once you’ve claimed a part of your identity and have begun to realize, "Oh wow, there’s a lot more shit I still need to unpack and confront in my psyche." Continuing its impressive and inventive use of rotoscope animation, the writers behind Undone’s second season lean even further into pairing the wild creativity of a sci-fi allegory for dealing with mental illness with the subtlety of a nuanced dramedy. The performances between these talented actors made possible by this style of animation add a tonal warmth and camaraderie that balances well with the thriller storylines weaving in and out of dark, depressing, and at times violent terrain.
As previously stated, up until Season 1’s final moments, we’re still not sure whether Alma is truly a time traveler or if she’s instead suffering a mental break. We certainly have a great deal of evidence for the former, but the juxtapositions between Alma's scenes training with her father, paired against the destructive effects her paying him so much attention has on her relationships with her mother Camila, her sister Becca (Angelique Cabral), and her ex-boyfriend Sam (Siddharth Dhananjay) keep the story grounded in a reality we as the audience recognize. Season 2, though, fully embraces the time travel such that we lose sight of that driving tension from Season 1 that kept us grounded — around whether this is all real or a delusion in Alma’s mind, catalyzed by her accident. Without that dichotomy, the new season loses some of its dynamic balance.
In place of this missing tension between what is real and what isn’t, secrets abound throughout Season 2. Characters withholding key pieces of information become the driving mechanism propelling the plot forward. Alma and Becca unravel Camila’s troubling past. The family ventures even deeper down Jacob’s lineage, exploring his mother Geraldine’s (Holley Faine) past to better understand the ripple effects her traumatic upbringing has on their present reality. While there is variation in the specifics of the backstories explored, the similarities in cadence of a family member withholding the truth as the narrative drive can tend toward redundancy.
The dramatic questions driving the narrative arc of Undone Season 2 feel far more binary than those driving Season 1. Instead of consistently calling into question how trustworthy of a protagonist Alma is, this new thriller chapter wrestles with more backstory-specific questions, whose answers are far more tangible than whether Alma is schizophrenic. Either we’ll learn the details of these backstories, or we won’t. While this certainly makes character motivations more concrete, it also makes for a more simplistic story than we were treated to in Season 1. Simpler, though, doesn’t necessarily mean worse.
While Undone Season 2 has a different cadence than Season 1, in many ways, that new rhythm parallels the nature of reaching new levels of self-exploration in therapy. Where Season 1 is all about Alma accepting that she operates in a different way mentally — be that as a time-traveler or as someone living with schizophrenia — in Season 2, we’re seeing the floodgates open so to speak as Alma dives deeper and deeper into not only her own self-exploration but into unpacking where the shortcomings within her psyche and her relationships stem from in connection with her epigenetics. In this sense, of course, the season feels different. We are watching a very different Alma in a drastically different environment dive much deeper into her healing journey. Looking at the show in this way, some redundancies begin to feel less like storytelling missteps and more like the plateaus one might reach in therapy, as unraveling a certain feeling requires a one step forward, two steps back approach.
A great example of this is Alma and Becca’s relationship. Season 2 sees their connection blossom from an antagonistic stand-off with Becca constantly giving Alma a hard time for ruining her life — be that from Alma encouraging Becca to hook up with the cute bartender Tomas (Nicholas Gonzalez) or Alma teasing Becca about not really loving her fiancé Reed Hollingsworth (Kevin Bigley). The sisters are very often at each other throats. Yet in Season 2, we see them instead more like partners in crime, helping each other shoulder similar challenges and grow closer than we’ve ever seen them before. Salazar, in particular, as our eyes into just how different Alma’s Season 2 reality is from Season 1, does a beautiful job carrying the gravity of the past for Alma alongside the profound gratitude she has for the new ways her relationships are able to blossom when she continues unraveling the secrets behind her trauma. And while their sisterly dynamic is not without its hiccups, getting to see Alma and Becca fighting less and creatively tackling challenges together instead by letting each other in and supporting one another’s steps forward certainly feels like an earned next step in this narrative.
This new season continues doing what Undone does best, beautifully weaving stories of different cultures together, painting an interesting landscape of healing trauma in a variety of backgrounds and circumstances. While the narrative’s driving force may feel a bit different, the characters we know and love are evolving, demanding a different kind of story, and effectively offering a more nuanced look at the conversation around how we heal.
Rating: B+
Undone Season 2 is available to stream Friday, April 29 on Prime Video.