Admittedly, I had not heard of HBO's "The Undoing" until late last week when one of my clients raved about it and how the finale was a few days away. I decided to binge it over the weekend and was left underwhelmed. I wasn't exactly hooked on the first episode, it just didn't grab me. But I stuck with it thinking there must be a reason people were losing their minds over how good it supposedly was. This is fixin' to be a spoiler-heavy post.
"The Undoing" revolves around a married New York couple, Grace and Jonathan, who have a 12-year-old son named Henry who attends a ritzy $50,000 a year private school. A group of mothers at the school meet to decide what items will be involved in a yearly auction that benefits scholarship students at the school, but you get the sense they do so to meet minority requirements and make themselves feel like they do good in the world. It doesn't come from a place of wanting to actually help people. Never is that more apparent than when the Latina mother of one of those scholarship kids attends the meeting with her baby daughter. All of the other mothers side eye the hell out of her, except Grace, who is a psychologist that counsels married couples. Grace compliments the mother, Elena, on how cute her baby is and tries to include her in the meeting. A short time later, Grace is in the locker room of her gym when Elena walks up stark naked and starts having a conversation with her. Later, both women attend the auction, Grace accompanied by Johnathan who is a pediatric oncologist, and makes note several times of how he has to catch an early morning flight to Ohio for a conference. Elena attracts the attention of several men at the auction and seems in some other type of distress, prompting Grace to ask her if everything is okay. Elena says she's fine, she just needs to go home and pump milk for her daughter. Before leaving, she thanks Grace for her kindness and gives her a slow kiss on the lips. Shortly thereafter, Jonathan leaves the auction, saying he has an emergency with a patient. He returns home later that night and leaves early the next morning before Grace wakes up. That same day, Grace learns via a text sent out by her son's school that the mother of a student was murdered overnight and she soon learns the identity of the victim from another school mom, who is a lawyer. The cops and the media soon come calling, the police seeming to take special interest in Grace (who tells them nothing of the gym incident or the kiss on the night of the murder). Simultaneously, Grace is dealing with the fact that she cannot find her husband. He does not return her texts or calls and later that night she discovers his phone in the drawer of their dresser. The cops are also eager to find Jonathan after they learn he had an affair with Elena and is the father of her daughter, something Elena's husband had suspected.
All of the above is supposed to set up a classic "whodunnit". The problem is that I never suspected anyone but Grace and Jonathan. "Clue", this was not. But apparently it was for a lot of people on the Twitter who were all seemingly shocked by the twists, turns and outcome of the show. I'm not sure if any of the red herrings in the show were intentional or just forgotten plots. We see Grace have first person flashbacks of the moment Elena is murdered. We see her caught on street cameras in the vicinity of the murder at the time of the murder. The cops repeatedly tell her they believe she's hiding something. I wondered if it wasn't the psychologist who did it in some kind of mental state, or something along those lines. Jonathan, swarmy and unlikable from the gate, has been hiding not only the affair, but the fact that it cost him his job three months prior. Elena's son developed a rare tumor and Jonathan was his oncologist. He and Elena began an affair and didn't try to hide it and after three warnings about his behavior, the hospital finally terminated him. He claims Elena became obsessed with him and forced him to get her son into the school, then she proceeded to stalk his family. His alibi is that he left the auction to tell her to leave his family alone, but ended up having sex with her. He returned to break off the relationship and found her bludgeoned to death, then fled to upstate New York. He swears up and down he couldn't have done this because he loved Elena and her son, even going on TV for a pre-trial interview that apparently swings public opinion on the show, but I didn't find all that convincing. My first instinct was that he definitely did it, but I hoped the obvious wouldn't be where the writers went. And then they did. Grace is the one who lays the framework to convict Jonathan and it is her testimony that sinks him. He knows this and on the day of the verdict, he kidnaps Henry and threatens to throw himself off a bridge. But narcissistic sociopaths don't kill themselves, so instead he lets the kid go and is arrested and that's when the credits roll. And so did my eyes.
If done correctly, telling your audience, "Hey, here's the killer" in the first episode and then cementing it in the last one can be great. But "The Undoing" was not. Jonathan constantly showed narcissistic and sociopathic tendencies. If he lost his temper with his son, he made a comment about that person not being him and you could see him settling himself back into his facade. He lied for years to Grace about a story involving his dog getting out of the house and being hit and killed by a car. It turns out it was his 4-year-old sister who was killed that way and, according to his own mother, he did not mourn her at all. He visited Elena's husband before the trial to proclaim his innocence, apparently trying to charm him into believing him. His "love" for Elena came out of left field when he needed to pour it on for the cameras. During a fight in the prison yard he needlessly bites the finger of another inmate and continues to hold on even after the fight is over. All of these clue you in to just what kind of person Jonathan really is. All you had to do was pay attention and you knew he was the killer. In the end, it turns out he went to see Elena for a hook up and when she began talking about blending their families, he flipped out. He told her if she ever came near his family again, he would kill her. She doubled down by saying she knew he could never hurt her and he shoved her to the ground. She came at him with a sculpting hammer and he intercepted it and hit her once, and then repeatedly. The answer was what we were told it was all along. I hate that kind of predictability.
At the end of "The Undoing" I had more questions than answers. Jonathan borrowed $500,000 from his father-in-law, what happened to that money? I suppose he could've paid off Elena but she wasn't staying away from him and was not exactly living in luxury. Why was Grace having first person visions of the murder if she didn't do it? What we see her flashback to is the exact same shot we get when we see Jonathan committing the murder. Why was Elena relegated to being just a background character? Given her level of distress in the first episode (the only one in which she was alive), it seemed like there was going to be an explanation given at some point. Jonathan's claim that she became obsessed with him may have actually held some merit in that Elena's husband admitted on the stand that she had been receiving psychiatric counseling. We never hear what for or what kind of treatment she was getting. It could've been as simple as dealing with her son's illness, or it could've been that she was a crazy ass stalker. But we never hear anymore about it. We also hear nothing about how Elena called Grace several times (she didn't answer, assuming it was junk) or the nude portrait of Grace that Elena had hanging in her studio. It's like they drop breadcrumbs about her maybe being crazy and then just ignore them. When Jonathan's high powered attorney asks him if he has any other dirt swept under the rug, he confesses to having had one other affair before Elena. The way this is done is a bit cliffhangery, as if who the person was will be revisited later and their identity will be a shock. But it's never revisited. Nor do we ever hear how Jonathan spent his time in the three months he was unemployed, or where exactly he was planning to go the morning after the auction. He was quite insistent that he had a flight to Cleveland in the morning, moreso than anyone actually going to a conference would be. Was he just going to go to a NY hotel with Elena? Again, not answered.
My biggest gripe with this show is that it never really mastered putting forth other suspects. I'm not sure if that's because the point was to just let people wildly come up with their own theories, or the writers just weren't interested in focusing on anything but Grace and Jonathan. Jonathan's lawyer accusing Elena's husband of the murder is thrown out at trial, but never fully explored. He's shown as a hothead in flashbacks of fights between he and Elena, but the idea that he had to have left an infant and a 10-year-old alone in his apartment and somehow magically dodged all the street cameras never felt possible. Grace's dad was apparently a suspect for some people, probably because Donald Sutherland is a big name to play such a bit part. But I never suspected him. He's rich and ruthless, no doubt, but never struck me as a killer. The focus of the show was clearly Grace and Jonathan and Grace's coming to terms with what she had actually married. That's all it should've been about. The one thing it did do was make me appreciative of writers who are not lazy. Thankfully, it was only six episodes.
