This text incorporates spoilers by the second season of Russian Doll.
In a much-discussed essay for The New Yorker late final 12 months, the critic Parul Sehgal analyzed the current ubiquity of the trauma plot; the reliance, in books and on tv, on tales that outline characters by their ache, their guilt, the burden of their struggling. Trauma narratives, Sehgal wrote, are restricted by their have to painting what trauma does: “annihilate the self, freeze the creativeness, pressure stasis and repetition.” None of this was true of the primary season of Russian Doll, an interesting and mind-bending sequence a few girl caught in a time loop, dying time and again on her thirty sixth birthday. Sure, Nadia (performed with raspy old-man panache by the present’s co-creator Natasha Lyonne) was entrenched in a recurring cycle, however every journey towards demise was equally puzzling and revealing. The present’s revelation that she wasn’t alone in her time loop blew up the parameters of the story and led to a conclusion that was affirming, even celebratory. Nobody, Russian Doll gave the impression to be saying, can really survive alone, or with out attending to others.
Season 2, which debuted on Netflix this week, is in some way much more bold, even denser with layers (“I don’t suppose you need to peel that onion,” Nadia tells a person in a single scene who asks her who she is), allusions, and stomach flops proper into the temporal paradox. As a substitute of being trapped inside loops of time, Nadia finds herself vaulting again into the previous, by way of a mystical subway that sends her into the our bodies of her mom and grandmother. The present’s examination of inherited trauma—Nadia’s grandparents, like Lyonne’s, had been Holocaust survivors—by the Again to the Future–esque conceit of time journey appears ripe with potential. However because the season unfurls, it’s additionally uncooked, bruising, and existentially heavier than its predecessor. If the primary installment felt miraculously full, the seven new episodes really feel as a substitute like a slide down right into a darker area. They finish (ample spoilers from this level on) with Nadia realizing she’s left the one one who ever meaningfully cared for her to die alone. The ultimate scene—during which she pulls closely on a joint on the wake of her beloved “aunt” Ruth and smiles wanly into the mirror the place she stored discovering herself alive throughout Season 1—feels static, even merciless. Attempting to flee a legacy of guilt and ache, that are banded with medicine and alcohol into one trippy mille-feuille, Nadia solely hundreds herself up with extra of each.
The questions the brand new season appears to ask are: What do you do when a lot of your destiny appears to have been decided by forces you may’t management? How a lot historic trauma can one individual bear? Specializing in this immensely weighted topic is Lyonne’s prerogative, and it’s a daring alternative for an artist to make. (It’s honest to say that Nadia is a non-sober model of Lyonne, whose childhood was equally turbulent and unstable.) In Season 1, I assumed the Russian nesting dolls of the present’s title had been alluding to layers of time contained inside each other; Season 2 makes clear with its finale, “Matryoshka,” that the present title’s referent can be the layers of matriarchal heritage every individual incorporates. As a personality asks Nadia within the fifth episode, with out sensing any fraught subtext: “Do you need to wind up like your mom?”
These sorts of queries are fascinating for a TV comedy to contemplate. However additionally they flatten Nadia as a personality, making her overwhelmingly passive within the face of the universe’s meddling. The primary season launched the character of Horse (Brendan Sexton III), an eccentric homeless individual Nadia stored encountering round New York Metropolis’s Tompkins Sq. Park. Attempting throughout one in every of her loops to maintain him from freezing to demise, she encountered Alan (Charlie Barnett), who was her temperamental reverse in each approach however who seemed to be caught in the identical loop she was. Leslye Headland, the author who co-created Season 1 with Lyonne and Amy Poehler, has likened Horse to Pan, the Greek god of nature and wildness. However in Season 2, Horse is extra like a malevolent trickster god, or a portal to the underworld. When Nadia sees him on a subway platform within the first episode, he calls her “Nora,” her useless mom’s title. Minutes later, the prepare Nadia boards seems to have transported her each again in time to 1982, and into—she finds out shortly—her mom’s physique, pregnant with herself.
Because the episodes play out, Russian Doll juxtaposes this body-swap plotline with an investigation of deep familial wounds. Nadia isn’t trapped inside her mom’s physique, precisely; she will trip the 6 prepare again to her 2022 self anytime she desires. However the longer she stays in it, the extra she appears compelled to make choices that aren’t absolutely her personal. The forceful thrill of Nadia’s detective work—she struts round Manhattan in shades and a heavy coat like a steampunk Columbo—is lessened by how shortly and instinctively she makes unhealthy and erratic decisions. “I simply want you to be proper right here with me. Proper right here, proper now. Are you able to do this?” Ruth (performed within the 1982 scenes by Schitt’s Creek’s Annie Murphy) asks Nadia-as-Nora in a single scene, a recurring plea. Nadia can’t. Destiny’s (or Horse’s) arbitrary interference has pressured her to focus nearly monomaniacally on fulfilling a mission that by no means is smart: fixing one in every of her mom’s worst errors to attempt to appropriate the course of her personal childhood.
Ruth’s ongoing request for Nadia to attempt to decelerate and join with the folks she loves as a substitute of spiraling by area and time looks like recommendation the present ought to have adopted, too. There’s simply a lot taking place. The structural self-discipline of the primary season is gone, changed with classic-film references and oddball non sequiturs. (“Polio!” Nadia randomly shouts whereas strolling to satisfy Ruth at Lenox Hill Hospital. “Legs are the bicycles on the trip of life,” she declares in one other episode.) In a single scene, Nadia makes the standard journey to her ancestral residence of Budapest on an airplane; in one other, she arrives in the identical metropolis in 1944 by way of otherworldly subway automotive.
The characters, too, really feel much less exactly drawn, largely as a result of the intricacies of the time-travel plot take up a lot area. Alan, whose story line and anxious tendencies put Nadia’s chaotic character into good stability within the first season, is basically sidelined to an odd subplot that locations him in his grandmother’s physique in Nineteen Sixties East Berlin. (The profound reduction he seems to really feel dwelling in a feminine physique isn’t given the area right here that it appears to deserve.) Nadia begins to expertise, in her mom’s physique, what Nora’s schizophrenia will need to have felt like, however that’s the one type of connection the pair have. Nora (Chloë Sevigny) remains to be a cipher, a personality outlined by her mental-health points as a substitute of her needs, her goals, even her character. Nadia’s grandmother Vera, whose physique Nadia occupies in 1944 Budapest, shortly after Vera’s possessions had been looted by the Nazis, is even much less of a discernible presence in her personal proper.
All through the brand new season, Russian Doll posits that Nadia is the bruised container for the ache her feminine forebears felt. Her grandmother’s hypervigilance and obsession with survival locations a burden on Nora that the latter can’t carry. Nora, in flip, smokes, drinks, and makes use of medicine whereas pregnant, all stressors that appear to sentence Nadia to a lifetime of her personal addictions. (“Tabula rasa,” Nadia says about her personal new child self, not seeming to know that in keeping with research of transgenerational trauma, a few of the harm has already been achieved.) All through Nadia’s travels, Ruth, in each her 1982 and 2022 timelines, retains telling her issues she wants to listen to however received’t attend to: that, ultimately, nothing can absolve us however ourselves. That inherited trauma is simply too sophisticated to attempt to patch with a Quantum Leap jaunt by historical past. That the one strategy to bear what Nadia can’t change is to simply accept that she will’t change it.
Nadia heeds none of this and appears to cede management of her personal story, dropping Ruth within the course of. It’s a devastating strategy to depart a present that, at its outset, underlined how reference to different folks might convey hope, pleasure, and redemption. Lyonne has stated that Russian Doll has all the time been designed to have a three-season arc, which is hopefully why Season 2’s remaining moments really feel so shatteringly incomplete. To finish right here, with Nadia excessive, grieving, and staring, hollow-eyed, right into a mirror that after signified her cussed survival, can be a callous conclusion to a personality who has embodied resilience within the face of unattainable challenges. Now all Nadia can do is give up.
