Undone S1E1-2

This review was commissioned by @Aris Katsaris


"Undone" is a 2019 animated series that came out on Amazon Prime. I think I've heard mention of it periodically, but no specifics. Today I watched the first two instalments of the show's sixteen episode run, and now I'm surprised no one recommended it to me at any point in the last five years.

This shit is the good shit.


Visually, "Undone" really buries the lede. The pilot episode, "The Crash," had me wondering why this show bothered being animated at all. The characters are all detailed motion capture, and the environments are nearly all rotoscoped. The subject matter is family drama and personal demons in an urban USA setting that would be much easier to just film without much of anything being lost.

Then the second episode, "The Hospital," rolls around, and oh. Oh, now you see why this isn't live action. Now it all makes sense.

You could do a live action version of "Undone," but it would be a lot more demanding on the SFX, and even then I don't think it would fit the mundane and magical (or, perhaps, hallucinatory?) with such unbroken visual fidelity.

The story might be similarly burying the lede on the nature of its main character. Possibly. The first two episodes leave off on a highly ambiguous note, and it's not clear how much - if anything - about the protagonist is going to be completely reframed by future revelations. Or, frankly, how much of what we were shown about her in the first place, in the mundane-seeming pilot episode, is reliable at all.

The first episode is basically dedicated to Alma Winograd-Diez being the most unsympathetic protagonist ever. She's not a bad person in the sense of being dangerous, or criminal, or having any kind of exciting skeletons in her closet. She's a bad person in the sense of being your least favorite relative. We're introduced to Alma being miserable, discontent, and put-upon about her terrible life, and to be fair she has things pretty rough. For instance, she lives in a fairly spacious small house or large apartment with a sexy boyfriend who loves her. She didn't finish college, and has some understandable midlife angst about that, but her work at a local daycare seems to be rewarding and fulfilling for her as long as no other adults are looking. Worst of all, she has a sister who she lives near and is on good terms with, but that sister has the audacity to have a life of her own. Hell, she's even planning to get married now. To a guy who Alma doesn't like very much. The sheer nerve!

Our establishing character moment for Alma is in the opening scene, when she's meeting her sister Becca at a bar and is so busy complaining about the soul-crushing ennui of having to choose which brand of canned beans she likes best at the grocery store that she can't notice the engagement ring that Becca is desperately trying to get her to react to. Becca is disappointed, but completely unsurprised, when Alma only notices the ring when Becca is practically beating her over the head with it. And also when, after about three seconds of congratulations, Alma starts shit-talking Becca's fiance, her fiance's family, and the entire concept of marriage.

The marriage-aversion isn't purely reactive to her sister's good news, though. It's also a preexisting thing with her, that current events just bring to the surface further. After letting Becca get her drunk and force her to have fun at the bar, Alma comes home, playfully wakes her aforementioned hot boyfriend, and makes him promise her that he'll never, ever try to marry her.

And that if he ultimately does want to be one of those lame squares who wants to like, get married, and have a stable career, and reproduce, and other dumb bullshit like that, then they should break up right now because she's just a waste of his time.

Tellingly, she never makes it clear what it is she DOES want out of life, only what she doesn't. As far as the audience can tell, Alma's life already is exactly the thing she claims to want to avoid, just with less longterm planning and official acknowledgement. And, while the bar scene had her brooding over how much she hates having to do demeaning things like "work" or "buy groceries," she once again never indicated what the hell it is she would rather be doing.

Over the course of the rest of the pilot, Alma proceeds to hijack her sister's engagement dinner party at their mother Camila's house in the guise of doing a petty act of rebellion against said longsuffering parent (but that actually has the "accident" effect of making Alma herself the center of attention at Becca's expense), try to abandon said party the moment after the shock of her behaviour wears off, and then - the following evening - goes into a total insecurity spiral, breaks up with her boyfriend, then goes and gets Becca drunk and goads her into cheating on her fiance, and then tries to convince her it was her own idea the next morning.

And then surreptitiously rubs her face in it when they (as a family gesture) meet their mother at church.

Just softly making double-edged comments and giving her knowing half-smirks, in front of their unknowing mother and in front of a priest, with all the weight of the sisters' long-suppressed Catholic guilt being rallied at Alma's command.

Anyway, Alma's finally pushed too far. Her sister finally gives her the righteous denunciation she deserves, and proceeds with her marriage plans despite the guilty secret. Alma has sabotaged her own relationship, and failed to sabotage Becca's.

Like I said, Alma is that one fucking family member of yours.

...

Apparently, this show was made by a bunch of the same people as Bojack Horseman. It definitely shows.

...

Woven throughout all this bullshit are a pair of...well, I'm not sure if they're quite subplots yet, but paths of foreshadowing. One of these breadcrumb trails consists of repeated references to Native American cultures and worldviews. Alma has something of an interest in her family's indigenous Mexican heritage. Much of the time she just cynically exploits it for grievance points, often at the expense of her own equally indigenous family members (jabbing her mother about colonizing herself all over again by going to Church, implying her sister is a race traitor by marrying a white guy despite their own late father having been white, etc), but at least some of it appears to be genuine. For instance, when we see Alma working at the daycare, there's a scene where she draws on (exaggerated, but still heartfelt) Native American views on nature to calm a difficult child.

There's something Alma says here, about how the appreciation that children in some premodern cultures were raised to have for the world around them that modern people can't even conceive of, that makes me reconsider some of her own behavior. On one hand, Alma herself is the poster child for not appreciating what one has, and I feel like there was a lot of projection in what she said. On the other, her rejection of what most people consider to be "adulthood" does speak to a deep alienation, and that might be as much society's fault as her own even if she's doing a terrible job of managing the symptoms.

Additionally, seeing Alma interact with this kid, and how much satisfaction she's obviously drawing from calming and teaching her, really calls attention to her aversion to ever having children of her own. She likes kids. She's good with kids. Helping kids learn and grow seems to make her happy in a way that nothing else we've seen does. But she won't have them. The reason for this actually becomes evident in short order, and it relates directly to the other line of foreshadowing I mentioned.

Alma and Becca's father, Jacob, died when the girls were in elementary school. We aren't yet told what exactly he did professionally, but he seems to have been some kind of fringe philosopher or mystic on top of his day job. His family has a long history of mental illness, with his mother - Alma and Becca's paternal grandmother - having died in an asylum after years of suffering with schizophrenia. His widow has been keeping as much of that side of the family secret from her daughters as possible, but Alma in particular has been doggedly snapping up whatever loose details she can.

Cutting ahead to the second episode a little bit for now, we learn that Alma and her father were especially close. The way she goes about connecting with the children she cares for at work are very evidently learned from her father, rather than the mother she's long had a strained relationship with. And, as far as anyone knows, Alma was also the last person to have talked to Jacob before his bizarre death.

He took Alma trick-or-treating in a neighbourhood some distance from home, where the decorations and candy were both more impressive. Becca didn't come with them for reasons that aren't entirely clear yet. Jacob and his daughter were just having a spirited conversation about The Wizard of Oz when suddenly he got a phone call. We only hear his side of the conversation, but it's very suggestive. "Are you sure? No, DO NOT call 9-11, I will be right there!" After hanging up, he tells his gradeschool-aged daughter to stay right here on this street corner and wait for him to come back, before dashing away.

This is one of the only mundane scene backgrounds that doesn't appear to be rotoscoped. Like it's foreshadowing something visually as well.​

Alma stayed there into the predawn, when she started passing out from cold and exhaustion. The police brought her home, where she was informed that Jacob died in a freak accident.

Apparently, this wasn't the first time he abruptly vanished on Alma (and possibly his other family members) in a hurry without warning. Just the most inopportune time, and also the last time.

Alma has since grown up with a fear of mental illness. That she either already is low-key insane, or that she might suddenly lose it. This is heavily implied to be her reason for not wanting children, and - at least according to her - why she doesn't want anyone else to get too invested in her. She also tries to tell Becca that she should approach life the same way, but that seems much more like misery loving company than it does like genuine concern for her sister's future family.

Like I said, some of this information only comes to light in the second episode, but enough of it comes in the first to give us the general picture of what Alma's damage is in terms of her father's legacy. This is important, because "The Crash" ends with Alma - after being denounced by Becca after the church service - going on a reckless, tear-soaked driving spree passed every stop sign and red light in the neighborhood. Just as she seems like she might be snapping out of it, Alma suddenly sees a vision of her father standing on the sidewalk, staring at her vehicle with a haunting expression. Which distracts her for the extra second needed for her car to get T-boned into the nearest lamp post.

Her head hits the steering wheel, and the episode ends. Hence the title.

The second episode, with the similarly self-explanatory title of "The Hospital," is where the lede gets unburied. It turns out that "Undone" isn't a dark family dramedy after all. It's...well, there are a couple of things it could be. It's either a psychological thriller about Alma's long-anticipated descent into madness, or it's a supernatural adventure about the awakening of a latent shaman. One of those two. Either way, not what it initially seemed.

As Alma recovers in the hospital, the visits she receives from her mother and sister start to...well, I don't know. On one hand, the way Alma has been treating them justifies some resentment on their parts. At the same time though, the way they both act about her accident and recovery seems off. Really off.

I have much more understanding and sympathy for Becca's behavior here than I do for their mother's. After all, Camila never found out about the thing that Alma pulled the previous night. And yet, while Becca is resentful of Alma choosing to have a car accident right in the middle of her own wedding plans, and somewhat suspicious of the factors leading to her having said accident (no seat belt, driving recklessly, etc), their mother is outright hostile. How dare Alma not keep herself safe when her sister's about to get married. How dare she be in the hospital when her family needs her. Can't she just not make everything about herself for once in her life?

So, yeah. Even assuming that this is decades of frustration all exploding out at once, Camila isn't making herself look very good right here. Even if there's a kernel of truth to how and why the accident happened, doesn't that mean that Alma is suicidal and needs urgent mental health help? Maybe a sign that she should have been getting it a very long time ago?

Well, Alma wouldn't have ever agreed to treatment, I don't think. And this also relates to her father's legacy, and to the burgeoning theme of indigenous worldviews versus modern expectations. Or...well, it might just be indigenous worldviews as seen through the fetishizing lens of alienated, self-aggrandizing modern individuals. Alma is not, after all, a reliable narrator. Even before the hallucinations and deja vu start turning her world inside out.

In a manner reminiscent of "Slaughterhouse 5" and "All Night Laundry" in almost equal measures, Alma starts finding herself moving back and forth through her personal timeline. Conversations with her mother and sister interrupt each other, with the other party alluding to events in what Alma perceives as her future as if they haven't happened yet. When she starts reacting to future events in past conversations herself, well...is she actually seeing the future, or just hallucinating new versions of the recent past?

As she shifts back and forth repeatedly through a number of scenes over a number of days in the hospital, some of them changing in location and other details in response to her own changing actions, Alma starts seeing manifestations of her father more and more often. He often doesn't seem able to see her back. Sometimes he just repeats old childhood memories of hers. But then, occasionally, he'll randomly answer one of her rhetorical questions, or otherwise interact with her in a way that influences her decisionmaking.

In one particularly All Night Laundry-ish scene, alternate decisionmaking causes two versions of her to be in different places at the same time. Resulting in her briefly encountering and lending herself a hand getting the hospital elevator working despite her first instance hallucinating the buttons to be covered in eldritch wingdings.

Or, well, "hallucinating." Maybe the eldritch wingdings are just what Arabic numerals look like on a higher spiritual plane of existence.

In her gradually longer and more coherent interactions with the spectre of her father, the latter gets frustrated with Alma when she demands to know what's going on, or how to "fix" herself, or tries to either push her mother and sister away OR ask them for help with her spiralling perception of reality. She only gets a proper, uninterrupted, face-to-face conversation with Jacob once she's gone through a full cycle of these scenes and done everything "right." Telling Becca and Camila what they want to hear, and in so doing both removing attention from herself and starting the long process of mending her strained-to-broken relationships with both of them. Even getting Becca, who had stopped just barely short of saying Alma was dead to her an episode ago, to embrace her and share a genuine moment of love and tenderness between siblings.

It's not clear if Alma is actually learning a lesson here, as opposed to just learning through trial and error what she needs to say to get the best outcome. The reassuring, conciliatory things she says to Becca and Camila don't seem completely honest in all cases, but nor do they all seem completely fake either. Perhaps she's playing the role of the person she know she should be. Or perhaps she's playing a role that she still holds in contempt from behind gritted teeth. Maybe both at once.

Her final meeting with Jacob, after doing everything "right" and getting herself out of the hospital and into physical therapy without arousing any suspicions about her mental health or further alienating her family and friends, is...well, it's something alright. He tells her that her family has a long history of shamanic ability. His own mother, the madwoman, underwent a process similar to what Alma is going through right now, but it overwhelmed her and she lost her sense of time and place forever. Some societies, he tells her with frustrated insistence, knew what a shaman was, and how to treat and acclimate one, but the modern imperial core does not. Awakening her powers required a near-death experience, he describes it as "having a foot in the door to the other side." He also tells her that her accident was not an accident; he mustered the spiritual power to appear to her proactively and distract her, knowing that such an event was the only way to enable communication.

As for why he was willing to go to such lengths to awaken her, well, he claims that his own death wasn't an accident either. He was murdered, and he needs her to solve the case. WHY he needs the murderer caught isn't clear yet; it might just be vengeance, or it could be some sort of epic battle for the fate of the world.

Alma is understandably unhappy with him, for at least two very good reasons, but he offers two conciliatory gestures. First, he assures her that she has the freedom to say no. She can tune out the visions, learn to process her personal timeline linearly again, get whatever treatment she needs, and return to her normal life. He won't hold it against her, and he won't bother her again. Second, he tells her, the alternative he's offering her is "a life without limitations." It is here that the visuals go fully fantastical, with visions of distant planets, spiritual beings, and morphing landscapes moving backward and forward through time.

We don't hear Alma's answer before the episode ends, but the fact that this is the beginning rather than the end of the series makes the implication clear.

What's much less clear, of course, is what it actually is she just chose. Or even if there was anyone talking to her at all.


Everything about Alma's psychedelic experience at the end says schizophrenic delusions. At the same time, the circumstances of her father's death very much read like the setup for an urban fantasy plot. The question of which of these two things we're actually looking at is also, to an extent, a trial of Alma's character.

I'm not going to victim-blame and say that people choose to be mentally ill. Obviously. But in at least some cases, there's an element of...how to put this...

I've been psychotic. Like, full-on paranoid delusions psychotic. It wasn't very long lasting, but it was pretty serious business while it lasted. And, while I didn't choose it, or invent it, I distinctly remember there being a few key moments, during some (though definitely not all) of my episodes, where I submitted to it. And a big part of that submission was the fact that the delusions felt emotionally correct, even if they were totally irrational and nonsensical. I've had some conversations with other people who have been in and out of delusion who, either openly or implicitly, admitted to having had similar moments where they could have clung on, but were *tempted* into letting go.

Looking at Alma, with her self-centered, childish view of her place in the world, her passive-aggressive and self-serving approach to her mixed race and class background, and her unresolved issues with her father, well...it all just feels too perfectly Faustian. She can get validation for all the self-sabotage and inadequacy, confirmation that her father had good reasons for everything he did and that happened to him in turn, and that the reason she can't deal with the world is because she's too special and spiritual for it. All she has to do is sign her sanity away on the dotted line and shake on it.

But then, on the other hand, some of Camila's behavior in particular during the hospital sequences feels less like a longsuffering mother finally losing patience, and more like a subtle abuser who might have been pushing her eldest daughter into this from the beginning. Making it unclear how much of this is really Alma's own fault even if we're still rejecting any possibility of a supernatural explanation.

And, for that matter, taking the exact opposite view: even if the magic is real, Alma might be a terrible person for reasons unrelated to being a latent shaman. In that case, part of her arc might be learning that her spiritual powers are neither an explanation nor an excuse for how she's spent much of her life acting, and that she needs to work on herself and mend her relationships *in addition* to doing magic detective stuff with ghost dad.

For now, at least, the ambiguity is a big part of the show's allure, and that allure is very strong.