Undone (Spoiler-free) Review

Amazon’s new rotoscoped series Undone sounds pretty amazing on paper: strong cast (that includes Bob Odenkirk, Rosa Salazar, and Constance Marie), really awesome animation effects (seriously, the rotoscoping is smooth and cool), and strong pedigree in the form of co-creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg (who is also the showrunner and creator of the sensational BoJack Horseman). But after watching the five episodes Amazon screened for critics, I was left both wanting to see more and a tad disappointed in what I had seen.

There’s nothing inherently wrong or bad about Undone. In fact, I found myself enjoying the early episodes in the series. The show does a good job of setting up its central conceit: Alma (Salazar), is a rudderless Millennial, stuck in a dead-end relationship, still trying to come to grips with her father Jacob’s (Odenkirk) sudden death when she was a kid, and generally unable to be present in her current life. After a blow-up with her sister (Angelique Cabral, who is excellent), Alma nearly dies in a car crash and appears to gain the ability to control time.

It’s an interesting set-up, complicated by an important, but (deliberately?) under-investigated question: does Alma really have this new ability, or is she exhibiting early stages of a schizophrenia-type mental illness similar to the one her paternal grandmother was diagnosed with years ago? And, can she save her father’s life through this new skill or is she simply trying to cope with a trauma she never fully confronted? After all, isn’t it a tad convenient that someone who can’t stay present in day-to-day conversations and needs constant stimulus to engage in her life manifests an ability that causes her to jump through time if she isn’t constantly stimulated to ground herself?

And here’s the problem: The time traveling conceit comes up in episode one. There’s lots of discussion of it, including what exactly Alma can do and how she does it, throughout the next four episodes, as Alma flies in and out of different moments in her life, changing some, not changing others. She interacts with people while conversing with her (invisible to everyone else) father, slowly leading characters to assume something isn’t right from the car accident. But the series seems far less concerned with walking the line between mental illness or supernatural ability and has thrown nearly all its eggs into the supernatural basket, which is all well and good, but leaving that particular thread hanging (with small references to it throughout the first five episodes) means the audience is left waiting for the other shoe to drop rather than settling into this strange supernatural journey.

Supernatural powers are fun. And watching Alma attempt to grapple with her new abilities is interesting – to a point. After four episodes working through many of the same beats, the show starts to drag. This being a series partially from the mind of Bob-Waksberg, I’m expecting it to find its footing and pick-up a bit down the line (after all, BoJack is famous for suddenly clicking into place around episode seven of its first season), but it’s a bit worrisome that I found myself bored during episodes four and five, stopping the screener to get up and do something else and then forgetting I was even watching it.

This isn’t meant to be a pan of the series – there’s a lot to like here, and without knowing where things go, I also feel like I can’t fully endorse or reject Undone. And watching a series completely done with rotoscoping*, well, that’s a treat in and of itself. The performances are strong (and come through the animation well – particularly Salazar, who shows a strong command over a tricky character), and the characters feel real and lived in. It’s the story that worries me – whether it really knows where it’s headed after the mixed bag of the first five episodes.

*Rotoscoping is the animation process where in the actors perform the scenes in a studio (under specific lighting and with a lack of background walls/set), and animators take the footage and draw over the scenes, turning the images into the dreamy shots you can see in the images in this article. It’s pretty crazy and works great with this particular tale – which has one foot in the world of humanity and one in the supernatural other.

So, should you watch Undone? Yes. I’m certainly planning on finishing it out this weekend. Each episode runs around 23 minutes, so it’s not a major time commitment. I had high hopes for the show, so I’m a tad deflated that it didn’t manage to hit the heights I feel it could have, but there’s enough here to recommend a binge.

Undone premieres Friday, September 13 on Amazon.