Undone's first episode starts and ends with a car crash. It's the same car crash, but after we've flashed back to the day before the wreck to see what was on the other side of the street the moment Alma (Rosa Salazar) swerves into oncoming traffic, the scene's context takes on an entirely new significance. This, in a nutshell, is how all of Undone plays out. It's a cosmic sci-fi adventure that invites you to rethink everything you're seeing, but in a way that's somehow never frustrating. It's streaming right now on Prime Video, and it's one of the best shows of the year.
Created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Kate Purdy (BoJack Horseman), Undone follows Alma after the crash, who finds that time keeps skipping, stopping, or even moving backwards. On more than one occasion, she experiences the same interaction with her mother several times over, with varying degrees of success. Oh, and her dead dad (Bob Odenkirk) appears to her now, encouraging her to train and amplify her newly unlocked "gifts."
Is this real, or is it all the delusions of a brain struggling to deal with trauma—old and new? That's one of she show's main questions, and also one of the most irrelevant. For the most part, the viewer is invited to be Alma during Undone, and to her, both things are equally as real and not-real. Anyway, who's to say anything you feel, see, or believe, even if no one else does, is not real? Are we dealing with a journey through time and space, or are we inside the mind of a thoughtful, frightened young woman? Undone invites us to ask, what's the difference?
Bob-Waksberg has, obviously, explored similar ground throughout his tenure as the creator of Netflix's most popular bummer horse cartoon, but it's Purdy's hand clearly guiding the wheel here. Comparing the shows—other than noting how good both are at exploring the painful joy of living—is redundant, but for my part, I like Undone a lot better.
A lot of that is thanks to Salazar, who is one of the best actors working today, and who gives Alma so much life, so much power, and so much humor, even as she finds herself increasingly helpless and terrified in a new reality she may very well have constructed herself. Odenkirk, too, is always gonna Odenkirk. He's witty and charming as ever, with that undercurrent of darkness that's made him such a dependable actor across genres over the past decade.
The performances are across-the-board tremendous, really, with Angelique Cabral and Constance Marie as Alma's sister and mother, respectively, doing great work. What's more, all this great acting has to contend with the fact that, as much as this is a live-action show, it's also an animated one.
Undone employs the still quite niche, and understandably very expensive technique of rotoscoping, in which live-action footage is then drawn over by hand. This not only makes the show gorgeous—characters walk, laugh, and argue in front of backdrops that look like legitimate watercolors—but it also helps the show's segues into moments of astral projection and time travel more.... credible. Rotoscoping brings us into a world that is, from the very beginning, both entirely recognizable and fascinatingly alien, much like the world Alma now navigates. Even when it's relayed by an animator, Salazar's eyes tell a whole story in so many scenes. At one point, we even fly directly into one of them.
To say much more about the actual plot or trajectory of Undone would be cruel: it's something to be experienced in your own time and in your own way. Without loading the dice too heavily, most will find a brilliant, funny, scary, and richly mythologized story about the biggest and smallest questions it's possible to ask about humanity, and how similar those questions ultimately are.
How the reigning king of emo discovered his love for purses, amassed a fortune of jawnz, and became a fit-pic hero.
And it plays over WiFi, too!
