Undone (2019)
Amazon Prime series from the mind of Raphael Waksberg and Kate Purdy, respectively showrunner and writer on Bojack Horseman, done in rotoscoped animation and starring Rosa Salazar of Alita: Battle Angel Fame. Part drama, part comedy, part supernatural mystery, all new age mumbo jumbo. Undone follows Salazar's Alma, a jaded young woman in her late 20's with a hearing disorder, a controlling mother, an overachieving younger sister and a dead scientist father. Following a car accident, Alma finds herself experiencing hallucinations that may either point towards her developing schizophrenia, or psychic powers and the show makes a point of leaving open which one it is or whether there is a difference between those at all. Most prominently, her father, played by the always delightful Bob Odenkirk, seems to be reaching out to her from the spirit world, offering to teach her to project back to time of his mysterious death and perhaps find a way to alter the timeline to prevent it. Which, you see, is where the mystery part of the story comes in.
This doesn't appear to be a very popular opinion, but I felt that there was a lot wrong with Undone. I liked Bojack Horseman a lot, as a show that found a succesful balance between mostly effective satire on the american film industry and, often times very earnest and grounded, interrogation of its many troubled personalities. On principal, I was on board with what is, effectively, a season long extension of the abstract, introspective bits that each season of Bojack usually did for its penultimate episode and Undone definitely has its moments of that. Alma and most of her supporting cast are very much in line with Bojack's surprisingly three dimensional cast, while being much less cartoonishly exaggerated. As a matter of fact, while it has a few moments of levity and witty dialogue, Undone isn't really a comedy at all. And it's definitely at its best when it's a character driven family drama. What I absolutely couldn't get on board with is what it's central hook was meant to be.
Bojack Horseman provided an impressively succesful depiction of characters suffering mental problems of varying type and and severity. Some of the same people trying to tell a story about a woman struggling with hereditary schizophrenia trying to hold on to her wits after an accident was an ambitious, but potentially very compelling premise. But then they decided to also make it supernatural.
I am, broadly speaking, still with them on their decision to immerse us into her perspective by keeping it ambiguous whether her visions are just products of her deteriorating mental state or actual, well, visions from a higher plane. The problem is, the show really seems to suggest that she might be psychic when some of these visions turn out to contain information she couldn't possibly have known. Now, if Undone is at least strongly implying that its supernatural elements are real, it's handling them more than poorly. In trying to elaborate on them by evoking both Alma's fathers research into quantum physics and shamanistic mysticism from her indigenous heritage on her mothers side it mixes two different flavors of woo into a concoction of highly potent super-woo that causes intense headaches on exposure. I wager you need to live in California and attend yoga classes to be able to even remotely take any of its more fantastical elements seriously. Straight up, it's some incense-scented, granola flavoured new age nonsense that make Sense8 look like hard sci-fi, and Undone expects us to at least entertain the idea that it might be legitimate. And boy, did it lose me there.
I feel like Undone is trying to do two absolutely irreconcilable things at once. If it were a drama about a mentally ill woman who thinks she is developing psychic powers after an accident, it'd be a potentially very interesting story. If it were about a woman with actual psychic powers it might still be a potentially solid premise. But Undone trips over its own ambiguity and especially when it starts to theorize that perhaps schizophrenia might just be an expression of psychic abilities in general I was out. Undone comes extremely close to romanticizing a crippling mental condition and no matter how coy it plays about the veracity of its supernatural plotpoints, bringing up the possibility that, maybe, schizophrenics are actually psychics and just leaving it hanging is an irresponsible thing to do. And frankly, the entire plot, which is, as of yet, open ended, hinges on that possibility.
I stand by what I said, there's a potentially compelling character driven drama in there, the acting, mainly from Salazar and Odenkirk, is really good, it has a unique artstyle that it occasionally uses to great effect, I just wish it would drop all the weird spiritual woo and tacked on mystery and would actually focus on the struggles of a woman with schizophrenia and how her family and friends cope with it. Legion has shown that you can effectively incorporate psychological elements into a supernatural mystery story, but Undone is just not like that.
And that's really the problem, Undone is a show that would rather do two things poorly than one thing well. It's not an effective character study dealing with someone losing their sense of reality because it refuses to outright discredit a supernatural explanation of the hallucinations Alma experiences, yet it's also not an effective supernatural thriller because all the elements of one are framed through a portrayal of semi realistic mental illness.
What's left is uncomfortably ambiguous and way too deeply invested in its own bogus pothead spirituality to engage me in any meaningful way. Undone preserves some of Bojack Horseman's sharp characterization, but fails to ground it with intelligent satire or relatable drama. There's another season coming out this week, maybe it'll manage to redeem itself, but the first one sure didn't do anything for me.
