WARNING: the article contains spoilers on the second season of Undone, the series with Rosa Salazar and Bob Odenkirk available on Amazon Prime Video!!
There are some invisible threads that bind individuals together. Threads that run between us, that pass through us, beyond time and beyond space. The strength of those ties, the trajectory of those ropes that we squeeze tightly from one end to the other until our fingers wear out, encloses the sense of our being in the world. We live to immerse ourselves in a network of relationships that help us survive and find ourselves. We come into the world to put down roots, to intersect with others, to cross other trajectories, weave different destinies. Our life is one big canvas with frayed pieces and vulnerable structure. The traumas of reality shake its framework, leaving it to falter to the point that re-grasping the strings and the sense of our destiny seems impossible to us. Undonethe animated series of Raphael Bob-Waksberg e Kate Purdy – the creators of BoJack Horseman, of which we still remember the last moving lines of the characters – it’s a bit of an impervious path drawn between the thousand obstacles of life. The story of Alma Winograd-Diazplayed by Rosa Salazarhas already landed on Amazon Prime Video for several months and is there, waiting to be crossed only when you are ready to do it, only when you are sufficiently prepared.
Undone is a visual experience that unfolds between the dreamlike and the earthly dimension.
The technique of rotoscopio serves the director Hisko Hulsing to create a story halfway between sci-fi and magical realism with a South American imprint. The animations that appear on the screen give a feeling of Suspension to the whole story, as if it were a confused dream, a memory of the past, a vision with indefinite contours. Beyond the technical choice, the rotoscope also has a semiotic function of no small importance here: the animated dimension, the intermediate level between the stark acting and the two-dimensional cartoon drawings, softens in a sense the impact with reality, with the trauma that the protagonist goes through, and makes it more bearable, less excruciating. Because the confusing journey of Undone he doesn’t look too far forward or even too far back: he looks more than anything else inside, in the chasms that open between our sensitive perception and the confused magma of our subconscious. It’s continuous look inside and try again. Try again every time. Time and space travel are also the focus of the second season of Undone. The protagonist crosses different time spans, moves from one point to another in a confusing way, transits towards parallel universes, but her odyssey is not aimed at saving the world, at destroying an enemy, at saving humanity from a external threat. The sole purpose of her wandering between dimensions is find herself. And save her.
There is an evolution between the first and second seasons of the Amazon Prime Video series.
The plot of the last few episodes becomes more coherent and defined, much more focused on the objective than in the first season. We had left Alma sitting in front of a cave, waiting to find out if she and her father had managed to reverse time and give themselves a second life. The young protagonist, after having ended up in the hospital due to an accident, had discovered that she had some side chases which allowed her to travel through time and space and to connect with people through thin threads that confusedly linked one dimension to another. The first episode of the second season opens with the discovery that everything she and her father had been preparing for Jacob (Bob Odenkirk, the extraordinary Bob Odenkirk who later Better Call Saul came back with Lucky Hank) finally paid off. Both have had fulfilling and fulfilling lives. A life in which Jacob is still alive and is an integral part of the existence of the two daughters. From here, however, starts the exploration of Alma, who also lives this version of her life with a sense of dissatisfaction which he cannot give a precise name. You should make the most of this life, because it’s beautiful the way it is, the people who are next to her suggest. But Alma knows that there is something wrong, something broken that needs to be fixed, that needs to be fixed. To improve the reality of her and that of others. To find herself and in the relationship with the people around her.
The second season of Undone focuses on everything background familiare of Alma’s family: her mother’s secrets, her relationship with her hidden son, her grandmother’s trauma, her father Jacob’s childhood. The parent-child relationships, the heavy legacy that passes from one generation to the next, gradually make the family framework in which we move clear. The creators of the show have chosen to start from a common problem – every family has one – to address universal themes. Issues that invest each of us in the relationship with others. The message of Undone seems to be to say that, if the knots of the past are not untied, it is difficult to be able to find each other again. It’s hard to accept yourself. For this reason she Alma she never manages to stay still in one place – or at one time – and to enjoy her life that she is reserved for her. Hers His restlessness, the restlessness that looks like perennial dissatisfaction, is the spy of a small short circuit that upsets her from within, which prevents her from easing her anxiety. L’self acceptance it is the focus on which he concentrates Undone, especially with its second season. I cry because I can’t be who others want me to be, says Alma in one of the opening scenes. But the solution to the problems that grip her life can be found nowhere else than behind the dark corners of her fears. Along with the character of Bob OdenkirkAlma tries first of all to get better, to improve the quality of her life starting from the relationships with the people who love her. And what’s the best way to do it? Face yourselfwith all the roundup of traumas, bereavements, shocks and bruises of the soul.
Bob Odenkirk’s arc intertwines with Alma’s as part of an indivisible wholeconnected, concatenated. Even the character of Becca it acquires a depth that it didn’t have in the first season. Each family member explores their wounds to emerge from the storm with the tools to take cover. What the series would like to show is that as much as the world is a magical place where everything is possible, bad things sometimes just happen and there is no time travel, blast from the past, transmigration into a parallel universe that can avoid them. L’mourning processing is the topos from which we started with the very first episodes of Undone and each episode was a way of going around it, a preventive expectation of the irremediable which sooner or later would have swallowed everything, giving vent to a pain that cannot be stemmed, but only accept. Undone it’s a series that you should only watch when you’re really ready to. Because, if you really let yourself be carried away by its absurd time travels, it manages to soothe some invisible scratches. Self BoJack Horseman he had looked inside, Undone it went further, providing us with the tools to understand the meaning of our being here, of our intertwined threads and how to handle them to improve ourselves. For the quality of our existence and for the good of our relationships.
