Summary
Powerful and beautifully done, “Rectify” will bring goosebumps and perhaps a tear to your eyes.
This recap of Amazon’s Undone season 2, episode 7, “Rectify,” contains spoilers.
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Undone season 2, episode 7 recap
The episode opens with a little girl with short red hair opening that infamous door. It is Geraldine, the girl’s grandmother, and Jacob’s mother. They ask her how she got there? She put herself there, is her reply. Jacob asks her to tell him what that means? She takes Becca’s hand and is going to show him.
She shows them where she grew up—a snow-coved village with men and women speaking Polish. An officer approaches her house and speaks with Geraldine’s father. He wants to talk to his wife. There are rumors she can see the future. She initially turns him down because it is only for friends and family and never for money. However, the officer intimidates the family into the wife making an exception.
She is a mystic that uses water to focus her powers like in ancient cultures that used reflecting pools to achieve the same success. She has been training Geraldine to be one. After the officer leaves in frustration, Geraldine sees something horrible in her reflecting pool. When the gang of three asks what she sees, she tells them she does not remember. But she walks them to the cliff, points to the emerging fog, and says the Geraldines are all in there. As the mist dissipates, they see Geraldine’s collage — all live images of her memories connected that represent her subconscious.
Alam then brings up an insightful point. The last piece that Geraldine has refused to place in her art therapy to finish her collage represents that last piece. The memory she has buried deep inside. Alma surmises it must have to do with why she told Camila not to adopt her son. If they can go back, it will fix everything. (This is usually when Lucy pulls the ball away just before Charlie Brown kicks it).
The next memory is her climbing off an ocean liner, presumably from Poland, and she is by herself. A middle-aged American woman sees she has no family and asks what her name is. She looks down at the card, “Geraldine Ocean Liners.” She tells the woman, “Geraldine.” As the group moves through the interwoven memories, they know the mystery they need to solve is why she came over alone and where is her family?
The compartmentalized memories break off, disappear, and reform when they keep visiting memories that remind one of Dark City or Inception. Most of them are from Jacob’s mother when she is in a mental hospital. One exception is when they visit Geraldine, who snaps at her son and breaks some glass. So Jacob’s father won’t be sent back to that hospital. He throws a baseball at the television and breaks it. He will take the fall for it.
Jacob immerses himself in his young self to unlock Geradline’s memory of that day. He begins to ask his mother questions about how she ended up in America. They see a picture of Geraldine wearing her mother’s red coat. She has no memory of this. This is a still, floating photo. Perhaps this is the missing piece to finish her collage? When she reaches out to touch the picture, it leaps into the center of the room and unlocks what she saw in that reflecting pool. It’s of that officer pulling her mother out of her home, accusing her of cursing him.
This time Jacob take matters into his hand. They go back to the scene where his grandfather, Geraldine’s father, breaks the reflecting pool. In a Groundhog Day-like sequence, he tries to take over his body a half-dozen times but is continuously thrown out of the immersion, and the bowl is broken. Finally, he takes over the body and hides the entire family in the shed before the officer comes and grabs them. Of course, you cannot tempt fate. The officer hears the family in the shed and now takes them away.
Now things have changed. By trying to save his mother, Jacob is destroying himself and is now trying to take over the officer’s body (along with Becca). When Alma runs for a piece of the collage/memories breaking off over the change in history that Jacob has now triggered. She informs Geraldine, who plays at the piano and Alma befriended, that she needs to save her son.
The ending
Geraldine and Alma come to Jacob’s side. Jacob’s mother convinces him to stop trying to protect her, and this is something he cannot change. As Becca and Alma bring out their grandmother’s younger self, she gives her closure that her parents wanted this for her. She is giving this to the most youthful version of Geraldine, giving closure to all of them.
In what may be the most remarkable scene in the series and one of Amazon Prime’s best, all of the Geraldines for the collage of memories appear in front of Geraldine’s childhood home. Geraldine pulls in her younger self, hugs her, and says we forgive you. The smaller one cries, and the dozens upon dozens of Geraldines from the various timelines, along with Jacob, Becca, and Alma, embrace each other as if to heal one another.
The final scenes show how things changed in the timeline. Geraldine is no longer in a hospital. They adopted Alejandro, and all of them grew together and even celebrated the anniversary of the passing of Jacob’s mother a year later.
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