Amazon's Undone Season 2 ending explained

Reversed was made for me. Set in San Antonio, Texas, the series focuses on Alma, a Mexican-American woman whose life is turned upside down, sideways and upside down after an accident causes her to awaken with time-altering powers. It’s Latinidad and sci-fi, but more importantly, the series has maintained a keen eye on mental illness, trauma, and grief.

Alma’s life is extremely familiar to those who have lived it (or some version of it). She was raised by a Mexican mother and a white father, the former always making sure their daughters fit in. That means Alma and her sister Becca don’t speak Spanish, and their mother, Camila, is quick to point out that their ancestors were Spanish, not Spanish Nahua. Additionally, Alma is pushed to get a cochlear implant and go to a hearing school being ripped out of her deaf school and community to be “normal.”

On the other side of assimilation life, I see myself in Alma. My mother actively discouraged me from speaking Spanish, chose the “whitest” name she could think of, and taught me to hide my disability and mental health issues from those around me. To survive I had to bury parts of my culture and myself and find excuses to just be me. This is the gist of Reversed Season 1, but that’s not the end of the story. Rather than choosing to simply reject assimilation, in season 2 the series looks at how to heal from it.

[Ed. note: This post goes into full detail about the end of Undone season 2.]

Alma is seated at the entrance of a cave we are looking out of

In the beginning, Alma was in pain, torn with grief, and dancing on the edge of manic episodes, terrified of seeing her mental illness for what it was. Her father saves her – he shows her that her mental illness is not a curse but a superpower, and Alma begins to grow into it. As much as her time travel is about saving her father’s life, it’s also about fixing whatever she regrets. Alma confronts everything she doesn’t like about herself and makes it her mission to undo it. And when she can’t completely erase it, she undoes enough to at least make all her pain worth it.

Reversed‘s Sci-fi elements and time travel are an option, but one that may be more imaginative than reality. The show constantly plays with the idea that everything is in Alma’s head, a choice that extends to the rotoscope animation style. As Season 1 ends, Alma sits alone in front of a cave waiting for her dead father to come out and prove to her that she has power, that she can change the ugly thing in her life and undo all the pain that lies in it .

When Reversed season 2 starts, it feels like a whole different show. Alma walks through the cave and finds that she has fixed everything. She reversed her father’s death, creating a new timeline in the process. But no matter how idyllic this new reality is, it brings its own pain. Only now has the purpose of the series changed. It’s not about escaping the past and undoing it, it’s about reconciling it.

Plus Season 2 unpacks the guilt borne by the series’ mothers: Camila and Geraldine, Alma’s paternal grandmother. Both women felt compelled to change, to completely reject elements of their lives that connected them to their past. And her trauma runs through Alma’s life in a way she can’t handle, driving her to try to make things right.

For Camila, she left an illegitimate child in an orphanage in Mexico. Struck by the sadness of having given him up but plagued by the fear of losing her current family in the United States, she chose to hide him and occasionally sent him a maternal card for vacation and money. She effectively hid that part of herself and hid it from everyone, hoping to live her American life and live up to everyone’s expectations.

Camila's face was reflected in a shard of glass on the floor. The shard of glass is surrounded by other pieces and has someone's feet on it

Alma stands behind her grandmother, Geraldine, who is playing the piano

This choice is heavily influenced by her mother-in-law, Geraldine. After fleeing WWII era Poland, Geraldine imprisoned who she was before leaving the boat. As the last surviving member of her family and having obliterated who she was before, Geraldine is quick to tell Camila to leave her child behind. And while it initially feels like Geraldine is overly protective of her son by telling Camila to forget her child in Mexico, the truth is she doesn’t know how else to live. Geraldine doesn’t know how to accept the past or the pain that comes with it. Instead, she knows that survival means assimilating and pretending it doesn’t exist.

The last episodes of Reversed season 2 Delve deep into Geraldine’s subconscious and try to free her younger self behind a locked door. Every time Alma and her family come close to having adult Geraldine with her childhood selves, they are turned away. Again and again, Geraldine rejects her past, rejecting her Jewish identity and Jewish name.

Geraldine’s story, and the way it seeps through her family, is one familiar to many marginalized people – the story of locking away your past life in order to embrace a new one, out of apparent necessity. Many families changed, anglicized, or Americanized their surnames to give them every opportunity. And in some cases, like Geraldine’s, the past is viewed not as a family legacy to be preserved but as something to be thrown away, leaving many with more questions than answers about where they fit in.

But if Reversed Season 1 taught us all that Alma is an unstoppable force. And her desire to cure her family’s illnesses brings the season home by healing everyone. Camila welcomes her son into her life and he joins the family as a beloved brother and son. Geraldine never denies her identity and teaches her family about her past. The season’s happy ending comes from the acceptance both women give each other. Alma healed the pain by helping each member of her family accept who they are.

Undone animation becomes surreal as Rosa Salazar floats through the blue void

alma, jacob and becca as the world collapses around them

This healing and acceptance is something Alma chooses for herself as well. When faced with staying in her hard-won timeline of a loving family where the guilt and pain have mostly been undone, or going back to her own, she makes a choice.

As she’s discovered, even with time travel superpowers, the ability to undo bad decisions and make good ones doesn’t stop everything. That doesn’t stop Alma’s father from dying someday. It doesn’t make perfect, but it teaches Alma that healing doesn’t mean not suffering. It’s about accepting every part of yourself, the flaws and the pain and also the happiness.

Whether you see season 2 as validation of Alma’s powers or like me, you see it as proof that she doesn’t have them, the ending is the same: acceptance. Her choice is to return to the timeline where she is the quintessential loser fighting alongside her mother and sister. The timeline where she’s unemployed and an underachiever, where she hates herself — and most importantly, where she’s mentally ill.

But by helping her mother and grandmother accept their guilt and heartache, Alma can finally face her own head on. There is calm in the final moments of the season, a quiet acceptance of the pain and issues the entire series has been working towards. While Alma’s story is full of details about her parentage or her deafness, Reversed Ultimately, it goes beyond that with universal elements that appeal to all of us who wish we could just rewind our choices. Reversed sold as time-traveling sci-fi, but the healing it teaches goes beyond that. We are not who we are because of our triumphs or our joy. We are forged in the fire that breaks us from time to time, and rebuilt stronger than before. We are our struggles as much as our victories, and that deserves love too.