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Undone

Entry updated 15 January 2024. Tagged: TV.

US animated online series (2019; 2022). Amazon Studios, Minnow Mountain, Submarine and Tornante Company. Created by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Kate Purdy. Directed by Hisko Hulsing. Writers include Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Lauren Otero and Kate Purdy. Voice cast includes Angelique Cabral, Siddharth Dhananjay, Constance Marie, Bob Odenkirk and Rosa Salazar. Sixteen 23-minute episodes. Colour.

28-year-old Alma Winograd-Diaz (Salazar) dislikes the routine her life has fallen into and rails against those close to her who embrace conformity: her soon-to-be-married sister Becca (Cabral), her boyfriend Sam (Dhananjay), who is content with the stability of their relationship, and her traditional mother Camila Diaz (Marie). They, on the other hand, are concerned she is exhibiting the schizophrenia (discussed under Paranoia) that afflicted her father and his mother. Alma's father, Jacob Winograd (Odenkirk), died in a car crash when she was a child.

However, a car crash of her own brings unwanted change: the world shatters and reconstructs around her; events repeat (see Time Loop) with alterations; her father, a theoretical physicist (see Physics) interested in shamanism (see Anthropology), appears and suggests that "the accident has shaken your temporal understanding of time and space and somehow given you the ability to see things in a non-linear fashion ... or it's all just some fever dream, morphine drip, head-trauma type thing": she can tune out these experiences with medication, or try a life that does not have limitations. He suggests the latter, but admits to an ulterior motive: he wants her to discover who murdered him and prevent it. Alma is deaf: her father likens her understanding of her new state to when her hearing aid was fitted – experiencing an incoherent noise until it became structured and comprehensible. She eventually does get to the night of her father's death, to find it was Suicide following his wife kicking him out and his lab assistant filing a complaint over his experiments on his daughter. Her father had believed schizophrenia is a different way of seeing the world, linking it to the shamanistic experience, and used the young Alma to test this hypothesis.

From Alma's perspective, she is able to move in time and adjust events by making different decisions (see Alternate Histories); to others she appears distracted and unstable. The ending, with Alma waiting for her saved father to appear, is ambiguous: it is left open as to whether her experiences are true or illusions due to untreated mental illness. Events have been balanced to reasonably allow either interpretation. This concern with the Perception of reality recalls Rog Phillips' "The Yellow Pill" (October 1958 Astounding) and the works of Philip K Dick.

The second season was released two and a half years later. Alma now enters the cave into a timeline where her father is alive (and remembers his earlier ghost-like interactions with her) and she is a professor at his college. She has slipped into the consciousness of that version of herself, gradually assimilating its memories. But though this version of her was content with their life, our Alma's restlessness now manifests itself. Discovering that Becca has the ability to enter memories (see Psi Powers) and that her mother has a secret, she persuades her reluctant sister that they should investigate. Before her marriage Camilla had an affair leading to the birth of a son: later, when she was considering adopting him into her new family, Jacob's mother (with whom she was close) said she should not burden her family with her past. This was because she carried her own burden: as a child in 1930s Poland her Precognitive abilities, along with being Jewish, had caused problems with the local fascists. She had managed to hide and emigrate, but her parents were caught and killed, for which she blamed herself. Jacob tries to change events: it fatally affects his health and he fails to save his grandparents, but down the line his mother now accepts the adoption of Camilla's son, who grows up with Alma and Becca. Alma returns to her original timeline.

At the show's core are the relationships between Alma and her family: they all act badly (sometimes very badly) and interfere in each other's lives, though they also clearly love each other; these relationships are handled well and are not sentimentalized. Though this is not a comedy, there are many amusing moments to lighten the intensity. Undone was an significant series; engrossing and emotionally convincing. It was animated using rotoscope, giving an uncanny-valley appearance to characters, probably intentionally. [SP]

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