Russian Doll

Natasha Lyonne finds a way to make "Russian Doll" Season 2 feel different from and the same as Season 1 all at once.

But "Doll" is the rare show to come up with two seasons worth of good ideas. Trying to recapture old glory is often a fool's errand, especially in Hollywood where sequels, remakes and remakes of remakes wring every good idea dry. Great shows have been tarnished by ill-thought second seasons like HBO's "Big Little Lies." "Doll" didn't really need to come back, but Lyonne and the writers found a way to advance the story without ruining it. She enlists the younger version of her surrogate mother figure, Ruth (Annie Murphy, "Schitt's Creek") to help in her quest. Nadia sees this as an opportunity to change the past, undo her mother's biggest mistake (losing the family's money) and fix everything that was wrong with her unhappy childhood. But when Netflix announced the "Groundhog Day"-like series – in which Lyonne's Nadia and a man she meets named Alan (Charlie Barnett) live the same night over and over again, dying at the end of each loop – would get a second season, I figured I had to give it a second chance.

We finally get to see what Alan has been up to. A recap of Netflix's Russian Doll, season two, episode four, 'Station to Station.'

We don’t have a sense of how much time has passed since Nadia started on this quest or if the amount of time she spends in the past corresponds directly to the amount of time that lapses in the present. As Ruth tells her upon learning the Budapest trip was a bust, “We always think that closure is something we can find out there in the world, as if we can find it in another person or confession or an apology.” In the end, though, “nothing can absolve us but ourselves.” Hopped up on a German energy drink called Hell ( which is actually a thing), Nadia tracks down Kristof, the grandson of Marton Halász, the Nazi guard who issued the receipt for the Peschauer family’s belongings in 1944. In season one, Nadia had to confront things head-on, a lesson she seems to really have taken to heart. He’s living up to the “be there for others” pledge that unofficially came out of season one, but he doesn’t seem to have established any new relationships, romantic or otherwise. Why is he so worried about what people think of him that he prefers to hide out in the past? “It’s nice not to have to worry what people think when they see me,” he tells Nadia over their game of chess, which makes me wonder what the past four years have been like for him. After talking to Ruth, who grows more melancholy with every scene, she switches tack and jets to Budapest with Maxine, who leads a round of Fuck, Marry, Kill that Nadia finds equally deranged and straightforward. It turns out Alan has been spending some quality time as his grandmother Agnes, a graduate student from Ghana who studied for a while at the Berlin Institute of Technology (or some stand-in for it). He tells Nadia he didn’t know much about Agnes before he became her (or took over her body, All of Me–style) but he is loving it. That could be a sign that Agnes’s consciousness, like Nora’s, is still somewhat present even when Alan’s mind is walking around in her body (also All of Me–style); Agnes may be more naturally poised than her grandson. Instead of going on the dates his mother sets up in 2022, he hides out in the past, where he’s effortlessly charming and things just seem … effortless. Nadia saw him on another 6 train in episode two, “Coney Island Baby,” but “Station to Station” catches us up with his time-traveling exploits, which are initially much less mission-oriented than Nadia’s. We first see Alan soaking in a tub, grinning.

The first season of “Russian Doll” in 2019 was a time-scrambling absurdist comedy about how broken people can change. The second season, just released, ...

The time travel “Russian Doll” is instead about Nadia running away from herself — and the show running away with her. Important questions about Alan’s sexuality and gender are simply shrugged aside for more and more scenes of Nadia running about frantically to get nowhere in particular. In the first series, we learned that Ruth, a psychiatrist, stepped in to parent Nadia when Lenora had to be committed. Ruth, at various points in the timeline, is more central to the second season. The time loop “Russian Doll” worked because it was about Nadia and Alan circling compulsively around truths they didn’t want to face. At worst, her obsession with the past leads her to disconnect from those closest to her in the present. Stories about the relentless grinding of fate and injustice, and the inescapable reproduction of harm, are generally, as you’d imagine, downbeat. That’s most evident in the development of Nadia’s relationship with her chosen mother figure, Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley). Instead it tries to treat grim material with the same freewheeling kinetic hopefulness that powered the first season. In the second, though, her efforts to change her mother’s and grandmother’s fates are at best ineffective. Nadia discovers she can take the subway train to the 1980s. The first season of “Russian Doll” in 2019 was a time-scrambling absurdist comedy about how broken people can change.

'Russian Doll' makes its biggest journey yet: 1944 Budapest. A recap of Netflix's 'Russian Doll,' season two, episode five, “Exquisite Corpse.”

She knows the address of the cousin who offered to take Vera in after the war (his letter was among the things she took from Vera’s apartment in “Brain Drain”), so she knows when and where to send the map that will eventually guide her grandmother to her family’s valuables. Nadia revels in her success: “I think I finally fucking changed what happened, which could change what happened to Vera, which will change what happens to Nora, which will change what happens to me.” It’s the butterfly effect, right? Nadia has resigned herself to the past, but clearly the past isn’t through with her yet. She subtly shakes her head at the sight of all the china and place settings, the art and furniture; she’s at a loss for words for the third time in this episode, which contributes to the pensive tone. After all her efforts and time travel — and there’s no telling what she has neglected in the present — Nadia hasn’t changed anything. With just a hint of resignation, she tells an even younger Nora that she can only do “what was always done.” (This news will bum out Alan, who recently accepted that time travel isn’t just for fun and that Lenny may need saving.) In season one, Nadia had to learn to let go of the past; in season two, she has to dig further into it than she ever expected. But here, she and Vera are still young enough that Delia doesn’t try to talk Nadia-Vera out of looking for the family fortune, which is “stored” in a warehouse (the train will come later) where the belongings of Hungarian Jews are picked over by their former neighbors. But this can’t be right — if Nadia has changed the past, why is this exact scene happening again? Nadia tries to enlist her help in tracking down the Peschauer family valuables, which only upsets the woman, who, like Vera (before Nadia arrived), has been disguising herself as a widow. Her bluster was always a bit of an odd fit when she was in Nora, but as an adolescent Vera walking around in Nazi-occupied Budapest, it’s a potential liability. It was one of Nadia’s greatest fears in 2019, and, as we saw in “Brain Drain,” it’s one she hasn’t completely resolved. At other times, as we’ve seen with Nadia, the train travels even further into the past to a time and place where the person needs to be, even if they don’t realize it.

'Russian Doll' is back, and Nadia is still a 'time prisoner' — read our recap of the Season 2 premiere, and grade it in our poll.

She plays along and cuddles him in bed a bit before excusing herself to the bathroom again, giving herself a pep talk to get the money back. Back in 1982, Nadia gets to Chez’s and looks inside the leather bag, finding a stash of gold Krugerrands. She asks Chez where he got them, and he’s confused. She runs out of the apartment and back down to the subway, asking a fellow rider: “Is it 2022 in here?” It is, and she’s back to being Nadia again. Nadia goes back to the subway, and so does Alan — and when he does, the writing inside the car is all in German. Hmmm. Nadia excuses herself to the bathroom, and when she looks in the mirror, she sees… They walk to an apartment, and Chez finds the keys to it in Nadia’s pocket, going inside and finding a leather bag under a couch before hightailing it out of there.

It followed the trials and troubles of Nadia (Natasha Lyonne), a video game designer with a self-destructive streak, who kept dying after her 36th birthday ...

But it is so inventive, and creative, and original, that it seems petty to quibble. This is a truly gorgeous series, from its aesthetic to its script, and it feels incredibly rich. Once again, Lyonne takes the spotlight here and, by all accounts, the family-based storyline that runs through this season is personal. It is filled with directorial homages to 1970s cinema, particularly the films of Robert Altman, and there are lots of clever scenes involving mirrors and reflections. This is best enjoyed with no spoilers; even revealing which actors play which characters would dent some of the satisfying surprises that appear along the tracks. Fans will remember that Russian Doll resolved its time-loop crisis in the end, when Nadia and fellow frequent death sufferer Alan (Charlie Barnett) finally came together, which begs the question of what a second season could do.

Netflix's Russian Doll is back for season 2, and Natasha Lyonne's Nadia takes precedence over favorites like Maxine, Nora (Annie Murphy) and more.

In the first season of Russian Doll, Nadia got to cryptically share her existential struggles with her friends, and in turn, we got to learn more about them. Whereas Russian Doll’s first season asked: “Why is this happening to me?,” its second season asks, “Why am I like this?” We are all the products of those before and around us, collapsing inward in love and frustration. In lieu of their dynamic, the second season gives way to plottiness and complexity; at times, it felt appropriate to watch and take meticulous notes. Despite its twists and turns, its unfolding and refolding in season 2, Russian Doll is still the Russian Doll we know and love. It’s the kind of quiet, funny moment that is often lacking in the show’s second season. That Nadia is now capable of traveling back in time get a blink, maybe a double-take, before it’s time to move on. In fact, in the first episode of the second season of Russian Doll, a man on the street asks Nadia, “Do you believe in the future of humanity?” “Define ‘future,’” she snaps. The versions of herself, our Russian doll, unpack and unfold in front of the viewer. It’s true: for Nadia, the future is not of the utmost importance, and it’s true: in a life that becomes repetitive and routine, our minds give way to nostalgia. They are a distinctly Eastern European traditional artifact dating back to the 19th century, coming in all shapes and colors and clothing and expressions. A glitch in the Matrix? Is this a moral quandary? It is often easy to latch onto the central hook of Russian Doll’s first season: that Nadia is doomed — or maybe blessed — to die and wake up at her 36th birthday party over and over again.

After a nearly three year hiatus, Russian Doll is back, and things aren't looking much better for Nadia Vulvokov. But Season Two can't match the peaks of ...

And the last thing you want in a story about grief is the added grief of trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Nadia bops in and out of the past and present, considering (and attempting to rectify) the perceived mistakes of the women of her family—inter-family theft! The lingering message at the end about grief and how we process it is poignant, and Lyonne continues to prove herself as one of television's most versatile, comedic performers. What worked so beautifully in Season One was the contained chaos of Nadia and Alan's perpetual death. But where Season One meandered purposeful, Season Two is so convoluted and full of unnecessary red herrings that getting to the end doesn't feel worth the rigmarole. When we left Russian Doll's Nadia Vulvokov, she had died 26 times—electrocuted, shot, frozen to death, swarmed by bees (twice). You name it, it happened to her, all in the name of becoming better.

"Russian Doll" star Charlie Barnett told Page Six exclusively that he is engaged to set designer Drew Binder and planning a wedding at a ranch in Wyoming.

“Wyoming is a difficult place to find things. “There’s a deep, rich history, especially in Wyoming and Montana, lot of runaway slaves, but we don’t talk about them.” “It was a nice outlet from doing all this mental work, and I just needed to do something physical — build a fence, wrangle.

Get in, loser, we're confronting decades of generational trauma. A recap of Netflix's Russian Doll, season two, episode two, 'Coney Island Baby.'

So she prepares to take the bag of coins to Vera, but first, she leaves a message for Nora (in Nora’s voice, which is why she tells her to “be cool”) on her answering machine. Is that why she sees Alan? If so, is she unable to take a six train or any train in the past? Nadia gets on a train at the end, thinking she’s traveling in the past, but she ends up traveling back to 2022? • Max and Nadia’s relationship has always been a bit fraught, and the tension is starting to show. At this moment, Nadia’s — yes, Nadia, not Nadia as her mother — head clears, and she comforts the woman who was her mother’s greatest friend and her mother figure. The Ruth of 1982 was reeling from the loss of her husband but thought she at least had Nora to steady her. But when there are no mirrors and Nadia is, say, tailing Chez in 1982 to find out what he did with the gold coins, the line between the two women blurs. Ruth of 1982 barely even blinks before plunking down her engagement ring to help Nora secure the Krugerrands. This, after driving to the Alfa Romeo store to return the Alfa Romeo that the Nadia-less Nora purchased with the cash from the coins. In the four years since she last pondered their value (aloud, anyway), the Krugerrands have increased in value from $152,780.86 to $280,451.21. That’s enough for Nadia’s college tuition … and a racehorse. To be more accurate, she’s reliving her mother’s past as her mother and learning about the circumstances around her own birth for the first time. It’s not that the first eight episodes wrapped up all possible narrative threads (they didn’t) or that further exploration of Nadia’s and Alan’s lives was unwarranted (it most certainly was). It was more a question of how Lyonne & Co. would manage to capture lightning in a bottle all over again. Not to mention, time travel is very different from time looping (I assume; I haven’t read much about quantum immortality since the first season came out). Nadia’s death paradox was tricky enough, but how do you explain taking a train into your mother’s body?

Russian Doll star and co-creator Natasha Lyonne explains Rosie O'Donnell's credit in season 2.

"I really took it as a way of them saying, 'It's okay to dive even deeper and take a bigger swing,' and I wanted to try my best to do that." We were sort of running down the line, we're like, 'Rosie Perez, Rosie… Mike Rappaport. Who's doing this part?' And so I texted Rosie, and she just would start sending me these little voice memos," Lyonne recalls. For Lyonne, it was important that whoever did the voice work sound like a real New Yorker.

Three years ago, Natasha Lyonne produced one of the best and strangest things on TV. On Wednesday she followed up with a second season that does everything ...

While Nadia's issues with her mother were discussed in the original, the wholesale plot built around her for the new season feels more artificial — a spiritual sequel connected more by theme than plot. Nadia alternatively struggles to sort out her mother's past, solve the mystery of time travel, accept surrogate mother Ruth's mortality, and come to terms with her own abysmal childhood — all while Alan has his own parallel adventure into the past. Four years out from the original, this time Nadia is caught in a cycle that routinely sends her back to 1982. "It is very scary to do a sort of sophomore album, which is, I guess, how I looked at it," she said. The first attempt, a pilot made for NBC called Old Soul, failed, prompting Lyonne to go even wilder on their next attempt — what would ultimately become Russian Doll — as she assumed it would disappear unnoticed anyways. That's because talking to Lyonne is pretty much like talking to Russian Doll's Nadia — the same raspy-voiced, acerbic character on the show she conceived, wrote, directed and starred in.

The consequences of Nadia's tinkering with her timeline are beginning to manifest. A recap of Netflix's 'Russian Doll,' season two, episode six, ...

Is her disorientation a result of her latest (and biggest) time “tweak,” or has she spent weeks traveling to the past? When Nadia leaves the hospital with baby Nadia in search of Alan, it’s because she can’t bear to think of what’s happened to Ruth, so it’s better to let her live in the quantum state hinted at by the episode’s title. We never learned how she and Nora met and became friends or how she spent any of the intervening years between Nadia’s birth and the present day. And this really has been much more of a solo outing for Nadia and series star and multi-hyphenate Natasha Lyonne. Sure, Alan was skeptical of “taking the 6 train into my mom,” but even once he was on board, Nadia pushed him away because he wasn’t as eager to mess with the past as she was. In season one, Nadia’s live-die-repeat cycle was heralded by the extended absence of Oatmeal. All the times she and Alan died and reset affected the world around them — fruit rotted from the outside only, fish and people began to disappear, etc. The increasingly singular focus is likely intentional: Last season, Alan described Nadia as the “most selfish person” he’d ever met, and Maxine said she embraced Nadia’s flaws because they made her feel “superior.” Nadia also spent a huge chunk of her adolescence and some of her adulthood on her own, so it would probably take more than four years to learn to let people help you. Nadia’s tinkering with her timeline (and Nora’s and Vera’s) really begins to manifest in “Schrödinger’s Ruth,” no doubt because of her traveling with her infant self to the present day. She might be telling herself that she can focus on her present-day relationships once she’s sorted through her own “issues,” that she’ll be better equipped for them or just “better.” Isn’t that what so many self-help books and reality-TV host catchphrases push on audiences? Also the first three minutes of this episode see Nadia giving birth to herself as her mother, Nora, while Alan’s grandmother Agnes and a gaggle of subway riders look on — so, you know, it’s probably best if we don’t rush through things. This will probably sound counterintuitive given the hectic opening and mindfuck closing of the penultimate episode of Russian Doll season two, but “Schrödinger’s Ruth” presents an opportunity to catch our breath, to step back and take in the big picture before the finale. But as season two unfolded, Ruth was gradually pushed to the periphery, waiting in the wings as Nadia insisted on going on this journey of self-discovery (mostly) on her own. “Schrödinger’s Ruth” shares the propulsive action of its predecessor, “ The Way Out,” as well as a poignant revelation about the Nadia-Ruth relationship.

The Netflix hit has already repeated itself, many times over. Should Natasha Lyonne and Co. have kept spinning in circles?

The shagginess can make Russian Doll feel like a less polished retread of its earlier self, revisiting familiar themes while losing track of other elements. As affecting as some of the flashbacks may be, Russian Doll was already a deft dissection of how Nadia still carries Vera’s and Nora’s emotional baggage. The coins represent the wealth Nora’s mother Vera (Irén Bordán) smuggled out of Budapest while fleeing the Holocaust, and Nadia sees in them a way to secure her own future and mend the ruptures in her scarred, fractious matrilineage. When one character introduces themselves as “the assistant editor of a zine about commodity fetishism and Debordian spectacle,” we’re so deep into pop philosophy the viewer doesn’t bat an eye. “Sweet birthday baby,” “what a concept,” and Lyonne’s pronunciation of “cock-a-roach” all became calling cards after Season 1, and each make an appearance in Season 2. It also followed those threads long past the point where they organically came together, a path Russian Doll also seems to be walking. Considering Nadia lives in the shell of a former yeshiva, Russian Doll was already a profoundly Jewish enterprise. In this context, it’s largely a reminder that Russian Doll isn’t the only latest award-winning hit to try and find out if lightning can strike twice. These are the questions that face existential explorer Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne) in the second season of Russian Doll. They’re also the questions that face the show itself, with new episodes streaming on Netflix after a three-year hiatus. Russian Doll’s first incarnation felt as sui generis as its cocreator and star, Lyonne; the plot used a time loop to weave together Harry Nilsson, roast chicken, unprocessed grief, and New York’s East Village. By the time Nadia and fellow traveler Alan (Charlie Barnett) brought their vicious cycle to an end, Russian Doll appeared to reach the end of its specific, finite story. This week, The Flight Attendant takes off for a second season on HBO Max. The series, another comedy about a messy, 30-something woman whose extreme circumstances force a look in the mirror, already paired well with Russian Doll even before their proximate premieres. Thrust back into the roots of her own trauma, Nadia fixates on tracking down the MacGuffin she’s convinced will fix her family: a stash of gold, South African Krugerrands her grandmother hoarded and her mother stole, then lost.

Russian Doll season 2 delves into the Volvokov family's past. Here is Nadia's familial history, presented in as linear a fashion as possible.

Ultimately, Nadia and Alan make it out of the Void and back to the “correct” 2022. Through it all, Nadia’s version of 2022 is the “correct” version and similar to our own. Before departing for the future, Nadia gives László a map to the treasure and asks him to mail it to her after the war. This timeless space is an “empty pocket of time left over from the job not completed.” To learn more about the void and the ending of Russian Doll, check out our ending explained feature. With Nadia at the wheel of her mind, Nora then returns that car and furs and gets a sizable percentage of the money back. By the end of the whole experience, both the viewers and Nadia have a rough narrative of the Volvokov family history in place. Nadia/Vera then sneaks into a sewer, chisels out a hole in the side of it and deposits the valuables there. While Nadia is in the past inhabiting Nora, Chez in turn steals the Krugerrands for himself. The end of episode 4 introduces the 1944 timeline, which Nadia is also able to navigate to and from before all of her time traveling interference collapses reality into a ball of mush. Nadia/Vera infiltrates the warehouse as an interested buyer and eventually finds her family’s treasures in the basement. Nadia darts back and forth from 2022 to 1982 in the first few episodes of season 2. Every attempt to make it through the night without dying brings her into death’s clutches and right back to the lavatorial starting point.

This time around, Vulvokov and Alan Zaveri (Charlie Barnett) are time-traveling via the New York City Subway system, which you can pretty much get from the ...

“There’s something about the nature of this show being expansive. I carry this all the way through the sound mix, where it’s a very endless succession of chiseling and refining. “Or for Alan — ‘I don’t have to explain anything about the nature of who I am,'” Lyonne, now the “Russian Doll” showrunner, paraphrased Barnett’s character’s attitude for this run of episodes. “I’ve always been curious about that, like, when you’re in a long-term relationship, like this crossroads thing, should I stay or…could I just like double-self and one of me stays while the other gets a pass? Along the way I went from somebody who was so hellbent on getting out of here to somebody who is so concerned with time shrinking and it being over. Alan and Nadia cracked the problem of how to stop dying.”