In the show’s second outing, our central characters are also forced to deal with the pasts of their ancestors, taking them to exotic new locations and time periods, like Budapest in the 1940s and Berlin in the 1960s. Once again, Nadia and Alan are confronted with blips in the space-time continuum, but now, they aren’t exploring their presents and immediate pasts within the confines of New York.
But this is nothing compared to the show’s second season, which ups the ante.
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The concept was first posed at the tail-end of season one, when Nadia and Alan finally figured out how to break their time-loop, only to each find themselves dealing with a “different” version of their partner in the present.
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In Russian Doll, growth is a metaphysical concern, and nowhere does this series show that more than in its presentation of a multiverse. Instead, she’d do so only after chasing a younger version of herself through the bustling streets of her New York hometown. If Nadia needed to confront the guilt she still harbored for the unfortunate suicide of her mentally ill mother, she wouldn’t do so through a visually-rote therapy session, like so many other shows.
Russian Doll was emotionally complex, but it also was also a heady mind-trip that refused to explore its overarching themes in any traditional manner. They were inverted reflections of one another, eventually learning how their yin-yang relationship might just be the key to unlocking the secrets of their rather unfortunate predicament. With Alan’s individual neuroses standing in stark contrast to Nadia’s, the pair became an ideal odd couple. The addition of Alan Zaveri ( Chicago Fire’s Charlie Barnett), a similarly emotionally-stunted 30-something who finds that he and Nadia are stuck in the same time-loop, only enhanced the show’s mission. What started in rather familiar territory - a Groundhog Day update, reinvented for the millennial set - eventually morphed into something far more profound, using Nadia’s endless spiral of death as a lens through which the show could explore loftier concepts like inherited trauma, mental illness, and collective responsibility. A mind-bending comedy that makes ample use of star Natasha Lyonne’s wide-ranging talents, the Netflix series was deceptively immersive. In the first season of Russian Doll, our protagonist, the snarky chain-smoking video game programmer Nadia Vulvokov, finds herself trapped in a vicious time-loop, forcing her to relive the night of her 36th birthday party over and over again.