In our house, a ‘Coney Island’ is the thing that would’ve made everything better,” explains Chez (Sharlto Copley) to Nadia (Natasha Lyonne), who, having met a younger version of this droning old man during her time travels, realizes that her mother’s ex-lover has no clue what became of her family’s stolen Krugerrands. The concept of events in time being rewritten undergirds the second season of Russian Doll, as Nadia and Alan (Charlie Barnett) chase enticing what-if time travel scenarios that promise to fix or at least shed light on their lives. The missing coins, Nadia figures, are the one thing that would have made everything better: a happier mother, college tuition, and so on.
Russian Doll benefits from its non-commitment to ever explaining its temporal funny business, favoring instead the use of time travel as a conduit for character catharsis. The show’s second season, though more convoluted, continues to straddle the line between realist tragicomedy and run-of-the-mill sci-fi as Nadia, upon her 40th birthday, is sent back to the East Village in the year of her birth in comically pedestrian fashion: via the New York City subway system. After parading around as a “time prisoner” before returning to the present, Nadia, having grown accustomed to all manner of space-time discrepancies, becomes eager to go back further in time to track down the whereabouts of the stolen Krugerrands.
The new season is cognizant of how it deploys its time travel conceit, hedging the bet that viewers will care more about the scenarios that Nadia finds herself in over how she got there. It’s a smart bet given that, for all her hardened exterior, the sharp-witted Nadia has a lot of trauma tied to her mother and her fear of schizophrenia to sort through. And even as the pacing lulls in the season’s middle stretch, Nadia’s interactions with the past causes her identity to blur, adding more eccentricity and emotional depth to the character.
By contrast, the high-strung Alan, whose screen time in Russian Doll’s second season feels somewhat limited, is initially content to simply travel back in time to experience events as they were. As the yin to Nadia’s yang, Alan suggests to Nadia that perhaps there’s no endgame to their travels, that perhaps they’ve simply leveled up. Fittingly for Alan, stasis and acceptance was also his position about being caught in a time loop, intimating that both he and Nadia have somewhat reverted to their previous states of mind since we last saw them.
Fittingly, the new season conjures a sense of déjà vu, what with Nadia and Alan experiencing variations of the situations they faced last season. Apparently, resolving a time loop and escaping death isn’t quite the catharsis that the first season’s finale suggested. Gradually, though, Alan’s story opens up throughout the new episodes as his trips back in time lead to questions about why living freely and searching for fulfillment seems to be so hard for him.
Whereas the first season of Russian Doll served as a sounding board for themes encompassing childhood trauma and suicide, season two, by way of its new time-travel ruleset, homes in on broader, more traditional themes like immigration and the intergenerational history. That’s not to say the series has lost its mocking wit in addressing its themes, as in scene where Nadia and Maxine (Greta Lee) drop acid at a party and Nadia, a Jewish New Yorker, is forced to listen to the vapid host (Balázs Czukor) justify being in possession of Nazi paraphernalia.
Despite some divergences in story structure, both seasons of Russian Doll are consistent in terms of visual aesthetic. Callbacks are used to remind us of the first season (which debuted in 2019) and subvert viewer expectations, such as Nadia’s repeated encounters with the ever-mysterious Horse (Brendan Sexton III). The season’s plotting isn’t as tight as the first, opting instead for a more expansive historical backdrop that allows ample time for the story to really dig into its characters’ backgrounds. But by increasingly leaning into its sci-fi elements, Russian Doll continues to strike at an emotional core through flights of delirious weirdness.
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