At the end of the superb first season of Amazon Prime Video's Undone, it was still unclear whether Alma Winograd-Diaz (Rosa Salazar) really had the power to bend space and time or if she was dealing with mental illness. The final episode of the season, from creators Kate Purdy and Raphael Bob-Waksberg, captured such a beautiful sense of hope in the face of adversity that it almost didn't matter whether Alma had truly been communing with the consciousness of her late father Jacob Winograd (Bob Odenkirk).
The first episode of Undone's long-awaited second season begins immediately where the last season left off, and it settles the question of Alma's sanity immediately and definitively. Although that undercuts a bit of the magic of the first season, it also opens up a lot of new storytelling possibilities, and it shifts the perspective that Alma and her immediate family members have about each other. There's still plenty of tension this season, but the dynamic between Alma and her various relatives is less antagonistic.
While the first season of Undone focused on Alma learning secrets about her dad, who had died in a car crash when she was young, this season shifts that focus to Alma's mother, Camila Diaz (Constance Marie). Alma and her sister, Becca (Angelique Cabral), team up to learn about their mother's past to heal emotional rifts in the family. Even though Alma finds herself with an entirely new life at the beginning of the season, it eventually becomes just as repetitive and deadening as her old life. She obsesses over the possibility of "fixing" everything wrong in the family by traveling through time and manipulating past events.
Alma is more confident this season, but that also makes her more likely to cause trouble, especially as she ropes in Becca and Jacob to her plans to get to the bottom of what's troubling Camila. Despite its short episodes, Undone isn't exactly a comedy, but Salazar continues to bring appealingly sardonic humor to her portrayal of Alma, whose morbid disposition cuts through the potential pretension of Undone's metaphysical premise. The central cast members have warm, easy chemistry as a family, especially Salazar and Cabral as the bickering but loving sisters.
Siddharth Dhananjay makes only brief appearances this season as Alma's boyfriend Sam, and the emphasis is squarely on the family dynamic. While Undone's first season took place essentially inside Alma's head, this season gives the rest of the family members more screen time, to the point that Alma sometimes gets left behind. The creators delve into Alma's parental background on both sides, spending time with Camila's Mexican Catholic family and with Jacob's Polish Jewish family, especially his mother Geraldine (Holley Fain). Geraldine is the source of the family's legacy of both power and trauma, and she proves to be the key to setting things right.
Undone has a lot in common with fellow comedic sci-fi drama Russian Doll, another show that uses heady philosophical ideas as a jumping-off point for an intimate character study. Like Russian Doll, Undone expands its scope in the second season to take on generational trauma via a main character who has trouble accepting that sometimes bad things happen and can't be changed. At one point, Alma even suggests deliberately creating a time loop, like the one that Russian Doll's Nadia is stuck in during that show's first season, so that she only has to experience the good parts of her life, over and over.
Undone's second season is ultimately a journey of acceptance for Alma and the other characters, replacing the uncertainty of Alma's mental state from the first season with larger existential uncertainty. Sometimes it seems like Purdy and her fellow writers are taking on too much, especially with episodes that only run about 22 minutes. The season ends with plenty of questions, although not on the kind of cliffhanger that closed the first season. Major plot threads are introduced and resolved in short amounts of time that can feel like they don't do justice to the heavy concepts.
Even if the storytelling occasionally feels rushed, the performances are always sensitive and engaging, with the actors' facial expressions and body language coming through beautifully underneath the rotoscope animation. The visual style allows the performers to remain expressive while the creators can place the characters in fantastical settings, easily whisking them through time periods and from reality into dream worlds. Although this season often comes off more like a family drama than a sci-fi story, director Hisko Hulsing, who once again helms every episode, brings imaginative touches to even the mundane interactions. Late in the season, when the characters explore Geraldine's fractured childhood, Hulsing uses gorgeous lattice-like structures to represent the various branches of her life.
Alma's journey in this season of Undone is a bit more circular, and the message about generational reconciliation isn't as powerful as the first season's exploration of mental illness. However, Undone is still an emotionally affecting and visually stunning series, unlike anything else on TV. It was worth the wait for this second season, and it will be worth waiting even longer to see Alma's story continue further.
The eight-episode second season of Undone premieres Friday, April 29 on Amazon Prime Video.