‘Undone’ Season 2 review: Time-bending animation of the best kind

Somewhere in the middle of the second season of the adult-animated show,  Undone, realization hits Jacob (Bob Odenkirk) that instead of looking at his mother, Geraldine, (Holley Fain) as a problem to be solved, he should have just spent time with her. 

That is at the crux of the time-bending animation show. This desire to fix things versus the wisdom of letting things be. At the end of season one, we saw Alma (Rosa Salazar) waiting outside a pyramid in Mexico for her father, Jacob, after moving timelines to reverse his death. After a near-fatal accident, Alma discovers that time has turned elastic for her and she has the ability to travel through time.

Becca (Angelique Cabral), Alma’s sister, travels to Mexico to watch out for Alma on the insistence of girls’ mother, Camila (Constance Marie). Alma’s family, including her supportive boyfriend, Sam, (Siddharth Dhananjay), believe she is mentally disturbed when she talks of being able to communicate with her dead father and travel through time. 

In the beginning of the second season, Alma realises that she and Jacob have been able to alter the timeline. Jacob is alive and Alma is a professor at the university where Jacob teaches. She is working on her PhD, while Becca is honeymooning with Reed (Kevin Bigley) and not in Mexico with Alma. All seems to be alright but Alma feels that there is tension between her parents with her mum hiding a big secret. 

Despite her father’s insistence not to go digging into her mother’s past, she does so, going further back into Geraldine’s childhood as well. Alma discovers Becca also has the power to visit the past through others’ memories. 

Alma’s constant desire to mend things is at odds with Becca who feels it is better to let events take their own course. By the end of the season, while Jacob has come to terms with this fact of life, Alma is only partially convinced of the wisdom of this course of action. 

Like the first season, this time around as well, the animation is gorgeous-looking, smart, heartbreaking and funny. The rotoscoping creates brilliantly-realised worlds widening the canvas to encompass Mexico and Poland. The cast from Salazar, Cabral, Marie and Odenkirk who reprise their roles, to newcomers Carlos Santos, who plays Alejandro with a mysterious connection to Camila, and Alma Martinez who plays a mystic helping Camila, are uniformly good.

Despite each episode being just over 20 minutes, there is nothing light-weight about the existential crisis that  Undone gives life to in vivid, surreal hues.  BoJack Horseman’s Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Kate Purdy have given us another show that is a feast for the eyes and mind alike.    

The second season of Undone is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video