Russian Doll

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.

If you recall, the character previously teamed up with Alan (Charlie Barnett) to try and escape her fate. But at the end of the first season, they entered ...

Russian Doll season 2 had a lot a potential, but based on the first two episodes, it’s not living up to expectations. The biggest problem with Russian Doll season 2? It all begins when Nadia time-travels back to the ’80s when her mom was pregnant with her.

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.

Nadia really makes a mess of her time-travel journey in season 2 of Russian Doll, can she fix it before it's too late?

She then says a heartfelt goodbye to the younger Ruth before exiting the train in her time. *Double wink*. Try as she might, she can't avoid the truth of Ruth's situation forever and is immediately confronted with it when she returns to 2022. The realisation that Ruth died alone hits Nadia hard and sends her spiralling. The show closes back at Maxine's house in the midst of Ruth's wake. After traumatically giving birth to herself on the subway platform, Nadia has the most bonkers idea of all. Nadia gets it into her head that she must do everything she can to retrieve the lost fortune. This heartbreaking revelation brings Nadia to the events of the finale. These wrongs are centred on the loss of her family's fortune in the form of South African gold Krugerrands. Time travel apparently has a sick sense of humour, because it is at this moment that her pregnant mother (aka Nadia) goes into labour. Having made peace with this truth, Nadia takes her time-travelling train home. Nadia is quickly swept up on another crazy cosmic ride when boarding a subway train takes her into the past. Nora (Chloë Sevigny) had previously stolen the Krugerrands from her own mother, Vera Peschauer, and squandered them.

Well, three years, but a whole pandemic happened since the show premiered in February 2019. In season 1, game developer Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) somehow winds up ...

Russian Doll season 2 is adding a few new faces. The full-length Russian Doll season 2 trailer previews the new time trip in store for Nadia and Alan. It looks like they're going back to ... 1982! Check out the five best new movies to stream this week on HBO Max, Netflix and more and Netflix’s new No. 1 show Anatomy of a Scandal. Russian Doll (one of the best shows on Netflix) returns after what feels like a lifetime. Netflix is the OG of streaming services. They team up to figure out how they're connected and if they can help each other break free.

Russian Doll is back, taking Natasha Lyonne's Nadia on another trippy time trek through tremendously therapeutic territory.

This allows Season 2 to feel special in its own way and escape the shadow of the first season as best it can. It also means that the underlying thread shifts more often than in Season 1 as Nadia and Alan's priorities shift now and again due to family secrets, historically relevant twists, and their own changing perspectives. As far as the show's core gimmick, that of Manhattan in '82, the season finds the perfect vibe/balance between reality and cartoon. Co-creators Lyonne, Amy Poehler, and Leslye Headland (Sleeping With Other People) are all back, throwing everything they have at poor Nadia, who initially sees this time fluctuation as an opportunity to right past wrongs with her mom and grandmother (and ultimately herself) regarding the inheritance -- a valuable cache of Krugerrand -- that we learned back in Season 1 her mom carelessly spent. Alan's story starts as a curious exploration, of both his family and himself, but then it unexpectedly transforms into something more powerful and haunting for him. Fortunately, Season 2 only gently suffers from the most predictable flaw a sequel story can carry, which is that it's not as good as what came before.

A woman with red hair leans out of a subway car and looks down the platform. Natasha Lyonne in “Russian Doll” Season 2. (Netflix).

Having already lived through a major disruption of reality, Nadia is hard to rattle — “Inexplicable things happening is my entire modus operandi,” she says — and as if to match her determination, the new season throws abrupt changes of scene and even weirder dislocations of reality in her way. She’s a comedian too — every other line of dialogue is a wisecrack — a bit like Hamlet, punning his way through tragedy, collaborating with ghosts, with the difference that she tends to plunge ahead instead of dithering. (“I prefer the term ‘time prisoner,’” says Nadia.) The expanded canvas enlarges the field of investigation — as before, this is a sort of detective story — which grows geographically as well, to encompass Berlin and Budapest, Hungary. Although the Netflix spoiler police have a bug about reviewers mentioning just what years Nadia and Alan travel to, the official trailer gives you a glimpse of a “Sophie’s Choice” poster — not incidentally, a Holocaust film — a man with a mohawk and Nazis. (One perfectly pointless identified spoiler is what character Annie Murphy plays; that will be known soon enough, and the exciting part, anyway, is that Annie Murphy’s in it.) Season 2, which begins 10 days shy of Nadia’s 40th birthday — as the first season repeatedly began on the night of her (repeating) 36th — moves on by digging in, focusing on a few undeveloped points from Season 1 and fleshing out a backstory. But nothing succeeds a success like a stab at another success, and a second season is here, with Lyonne taking over as showrunner (previous showrunner Leslye Headland and Amy Poehler are her co-creators), and it does the job ably and elegantly. In that fairy tale of New York, described by Natasha Lyonne’s main character, Nadia, as “the one about the broken man and the lady with a death wish that got stuck in a loop,” Nadia and her spookily entangled metaphysical twin, Alan (Charlie Barnett), keep dying until life looks better.

Nadia finds the universe messing with her again, but this time she's choosing to engage. A recap of Netflix's Russian Doll, season two, episode one, ...

But Nadia is also struck with the desire to right some old wrongs; she urges her mother (herself?) to grab the bag with the coins (the one that was recovered by — you guessed it — Vera Vulvokov at the start of the episode): “Just get ’em back. Of course, the “outstanding prick” runs off with the bag, but Nora/Nadia might still have a shot at regaining the family fortune. While digging into Nadia’s new metaphysical quandary, the episode offers more of a glimpse at what her relationship with Alan is like now (though not before a pointed needle drop in the form of Danzig’s “Mother”). They don’t seem especially close, despite the fact that Nadia has a key to his place (for “emergencies”), which I find a little surprising, though I’m not entirely sure why. • When Nadia sees Horse on the subway platform, he calls her “Nora,” which hints at what’s to come. And maybe Alan is aware of how stifling this new routine is because, after another middling date, he also gets on the six train — more than a little trepidatious but still eager to see what comes of it. For now, there is a fork in the road, as Alan seems to have settled into a new routine (“a date a week,” thanks to his mom’s relentless matchmaking), while Nadia remains much more open to chaos (she gets right back on the train to the past after their talk). At one point, her journey to a subway station is accompanied by Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” a likely nod to Nadia’s resurrection (or is it a rebirth?). Since Nadia and Alan prevented each other’s deaths in the season-one finale, are they in the original timeline prior to their “first” deaths, or are they in some brand-spankin’-new one now? She’s cut back on the cigarettes (because she recognizes her lungs are like “two shriveled-up Nick Caves”) and is looking after Ruth, who’s a little worse for wear here after a “little fender bender.” Nadia shows Ruth the same compassion her godmother has always offered her, but she also admits to Maxine that she’s struggling with her role as caretaker. In interviews, Lyonne has said that season two is inspired by Back to the Future. Marty McFly’s time-traveling exploits, incestuous though they may be, pale in comparison with making out with the seedy cokehead who stole your family’s money while in the body of your mom, who is pregnant with you. But she may still find it difficult to fulfill her obligations — Nadia’s tendency to just drop dead last season was a real head-scratcher, but her predicament is a bit more difficult to parse here, as it involves time travel and a more conventional mode of travel. At this time in her life, Lenora’s entangled with an “outstanding prick” by the name of Chezzare Carrera. Ruth tells Nadia that he played some role in Lenora (or Nora, as she’s also known) losing the family money, a.k.a., the 150 Krugerrands that her grandmother — a Holocaust survivor — bought to ensure the future of her family. (And as season finales go, “Ariadne” is one of the smartest and most life affirming.) But season two takes a closer look at what they’ve done with that second chance.

The next seven days also feature the finale of one of the season's breakout shows, CBS' Ghosts, the second season debut of The Flight Attendant on HBO Max and ...

Horror comedy The Baby follows Barry at 10:30 p.m. Sunday on HBO. On Monday, HBO debuts limited series We Own This City (9 p.m.), from The Wire’s David Simon and George Pelecanos, and season two of Gentleman Jack (10 p.m.). The comedy ends its first season at 9 p.m. Thursday as Sam (Rose McIver) and Jay (Utkarsh Ambudkar) ready the house for their first official bed and breakfast guests — a situation complicated by having an ancient Norse curse placed on them. Nothing in this season is quite as compulsively entertaining as the first season’s recurring fatalities,” writes THR critic Daniel Fienberg. “But coming as close as this season does to recapturing, without shamelessly reproducing, the satisfying difficulty of the first season is achievement enough.” Season two premieres Wednesday on Netflix. True crime docuseries Captive Audience (Thursday, Hulu) tracks the abduction of Steven Stayner and the fallout for his family. Season two, which comes three years and two months later, still plays with time — but more in the time travel sense as Nadia slips in and out of the past. Or, as THR critic Daniel Fienberg notes, maybe it won’t matter that much: “I’m not sure that various potential assassinations and discoveries matter all that much to me,” he writes. Returning: It’s been a long time since Barry last ran on HBO, which means viewers may not have full recall of the varied characters who move through the hitman/aspiring actor’s (recent THR cover subject Bill Hader) life. Season two of The Flight Attendant (Thursday, HBO Max) features Sharon Stone in a recurring role and Kaley Cuoco playing multiple versions of her title character. Two critical favorites that have had looong hiatuses return to screens this week as Netflix’s Russian Doll (which has been away for more than three years) and HBO’s Barry (just under three years) begin new seasons. It would be next to impossible to watch everything, but let THR point the way to worthy options for the coming week. Magic Johnson retraces his basketball career and life in They Call Me Magic (Friday, Apple TV+). Unscripted favorite Selling Sunset opens a new season Friday on Netflix. A Very British Scandal (Friday, Prime Video) — not to be confused with Netflix’s Anatomy of a Scandal — stars Claire Foy and Paul Bettany and dramatizes a well-known divorce case from the 1960s. Below is The Hollywood Reporter‘s rundown of premieres, returns and specials from April 20-26.

When Russian Doll premiered at the start of 2019, it instantly became one of the best shows of that year. In the 11 months that followed, few could overtake ...

Ironically, given Russian Doll’s credo that what came before is intrinsically linked to the now, the two seasons work perfectly fine as they are. But being stuck in a time loop is nothing compared to the cycle of generational trauma. The Groundhog Day-esque time loop didn’t just serve as a hook in a sea of streaming options, it propelled Russian Doll’s rhythm.

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 is accustomed to dismantling reality in its season finales, but there are lessons to be learned when things are put right.

As Alan’s wise grandmother says, “We can’t spend our lives so scared of making the wrong move that we never live at all.” The two Russian Doll protagonists learn not to pursue what Nadia calls their “Coney Island,” the thing that would make everything better if only it had happened or didn’t happen — an “if only.” One could speculate that even without her meddling in the past, the family fortune would only have been lost sooner, and the resulting life for Nadia, from her mentally ill mother to the caring Ruthie, would have been exactly the same. “The closer you are to the center of the Earth, the closer you are to the truth.” Therefore when Alan and Nadia find themselves between two colliding trains, they are sent down, down, down to learn their final lesson in a water-logged tunnel that leads to the one fact that they must accept. But it’s not that simple, and as usual, the transient sage Horse speaks the central truth as he leads Nadia and Alan to their awakening. Implying that there’s an explanation to be gleaned goes against every lesson Nadia and Alan learn in the course of the seven episodes. This is akin to the grandfather paradox, in which the time traveler goes back and kills their own progenitor, undoing their own existence but also negating their ability to travel back in the first place.

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' 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.

"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.

'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.