Most time travel stories try to convince us their plotlines are somehow plausible. From Back to the Future to Interstellar, they establish rules, explain paradoxes, and eventually reveal how everything fits together. Undone, Prime Video’s remarkable animated drama, never feels like an explanation is necessary, and it’s all the more refreshing for it.
In it, a young woman named Alma awakens from a coma and appears to travel through time to reshape her destiny, while being guided by figures and events from her past. However, her situation is so ambiguous that we are left to question whether any of it exists outside her imagination.
A time travel show with a difference
Undone doesn’t comply with familiar sci-fi rulebooks
For the first few episodes, at least, Undone feels like a conventional sci-fi classic, as Alma begins experiencing visions of her late father (voiced by Better Call Saul’s Bob Odenkirk) and appears to be able to revisit past events. She begins to realize she can reshape how those events unfold, though the series never explains the mechanics that make this possible.
There’s no “flux capacitor” here or scientific explanations involving common household objects. Time is treated the same as memory and feels more fluid and emotionally driven. There is a distinct lack of structure, which is entirely intentional and drives the plot. We experience time travel through Alma’s eyes, rather than from a distance, and every episode feels entirely plausible, even though nothing is ever explained.
The mystery is Alma herself
The real enigma is in the protagonist, not the timeline
Due to the events surrounding Alma’s transformation, in this case a devastating car crash, we don’t question the viability of the time travel itself, so much as whether Alma can trust her own mind. As Alma’s father, Jacob, explains to her about her extraordinary abilities to alter the past, we are also made aware that she has a family history of mental illness, so physical trauma and schizophrenia are also possible contributors to her thoughts and surreal experiences.
Importantly, the series doesn’t treat either interpretation as “correct,” instead focusing on Alma’s journey and her loved ones’ reactions as she tries to understand this new reality. We are left feeling both compassionate toward her situation and skeptical of its authenticity, and the mystery becomes more about the person at its center than the events surrounding her.
Animation becomes part of the storytelling
The rotoscope format helps make everything believable
I first became aware of the lifelike quality of rotoscope animation through Netflix’s excellent war drama, The Liberator. The technique paints over a live-action performance, allowing the series to move between reality and surrealism. In Undone, the expressions are lifelike, yet the world around them continually warps and dissolves. Walls melt into landscapes, memories emerge from empty rooms, and impossible transitions happen in the blink of an eye.
Rather than relying on this technique as a gimmick, rotoscope animation is used to further the story, reinforcing the plot’s ambiguity and its detachment from reality. This artistic choice makes it even harder to distinguish a hallucination from a supernatural phenomenon while communicating the story’s themes of doubt, memory, and perception.
The uncertainty continues throughout
The finale of Undone is also deliberately ambiguous
Without giving too much away, Undone builds to a point where we naturally expect to be given all the answers, but the big reveal never comes. This is one of the series’ boldest moves, as it recognizes that uncertainty can be just as powerful and entertaining as certainty. We are never given a definitive answer on whether Alma is genuinely altering reality or whether her grief has led her to construct another reality as a coping mechanism.
Instead, we are given space to decide for ourselves which interpretation suits us best. Either scenario is no less intriguing than the other, which speaks to the series’ excellent storytelling. We accompany Alma on her emotional journey and are left reflecting on the outcome, rather than simply closing the book.
Nothing else on Prime Video feels quite like it
Undone writer/creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg also created the slow-burner Netflix show BoJack Horseman, a zany comedy about an anthropomorphic horse that explored themes such as addiction, mental illness, and personal accountability. The showrunners of Undone clearly understand how animation can be used as a powerful tool to convey deeper issues.
While the show flew under the radar for many, it has earned widespread critical acclaim not by adhering to storytelling conventions but by challenging them. Time travel is not the point of the story here, but simply a vehicle for conveying family drama, mystery, philosophical themes, and explorations of inherited trauma. This is what makes Undone one of Prime Video’s strangest and most rewarding original series.
Undone
- Release Date
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2019 – 2022-00-00
- Network
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Prime Video
- Directors
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Hisko Hulsing
- Writers
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Kate Purdy, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, Elijah Aron, Mehar Sethi, April Shih, Carmiel Banasky, Lauren Otero, Joanna Calo
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Rosa Salazar
Alma Winograd-Diaz
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Angelique Cabral
Becca Winograd-Diaz
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Constance Marie
Camila Diaz
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Bob Odenkirk
Jacob Winograd