Undone: Season 1

I wanted to absolutely love this, and for a little while, I did.

There's something inherently dreamlike about rotoscoping. Yeah, maybe it's just that Richard Linklater used the method in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, forever linking the animation style to dream logic in so many minds, but also, it's a perfect fit for dream logic in the first place. Straight animation makes abrupt swirls and background shifts commonplace and loopy, far too absurd-looking and harsh to pass for something plausible. Rotoscoping, on the other hand, looks just real enough to pull you in, so when time stands still or a person starts flying, it's not like, "ah, geez, okay, those are just visual effects" the way it would be in live action, and it's not "well this is a world unbound by physical laws and constraints anyway" the way it is in most other forms of animation. Instead it's this weird hybrid of the two - right on the line between unreal and surreal, sort of in its own uncanny valley.

Anyway, all this is to say, this show looked amazing. And for at least a few episodes as it slowly introduced its characters and built its world, I was all in - not only on the story this show was telling, but the way it was being told. The first episode introduces our protagonist, shows us the rut she's stuck in, gives us the overall baseline reality we'll be using as a context going forward, and ends with a car accident. The second episode has our same heroine stuck in a hospital bed, communicating with her dead father, stuck in some sort of time loop. We see that classic thing where, in a panic, she runs into a future version of herself, also in a panic, and they speak gibberish at one another, and only later in the episode do we see the context behind the second version's gibberish. And then for a few more episodes as her life returns to normal, we get a better idea of hwo she's getting by after the accident (not well!) and there are a few touching moments with her sister and with her ex-ex-boyfriend. But honestly, the show started losing steam here in its midsection, slowly ceasing to be about this woman's quest to discover, through time travel, what happened to her father twenty years ago, and starting to become more of a mystery regarding her overall mental status. I mean, I get that, and I get why and how it's poignant to compare a woman's conviction that she has superpowers to, you know, an insane person's delusions of grandeur. I just never felt like the show went anywhere with that. I felt like the show slowly petered out and got less interesting, rather than snapping puzzle pieces into place as it went on. And, sure, we can have the same old discussion about whether open-ended non-conclusions are cop outs or not, but it just really seemed at first like Undone was going to be a dryly comedic and enjoyably-cast time thriller, complete with butterfly effects and parallel outcomes. I don't even like time thrillers much anymore, and still I was looking forward to that. Instead, it ends up hinging on whether or not this woman was sane and correct or delusional and crazy all along. And it doesn't even really explore what either outcome would mean.

Look, it's an easy watch and at eight half-hour episodes it's still well worth your time. I had just been hoping for something more, is all.