Review: _Russian Doll_

I just finished Season 2 of Russian Doll, on Netflix; it's worth talking about a bit.

Our protagonist is Nadia; Season 1 starts in the bathroom at her 36th birthday party. All her friends are there, as well as other folks -- it's a big uncontrolled party in a decidedly artsy bohemian part of NYC, so not a small close-knit group. She wanders out -- and gets killed.

She finds herself back in the bathroom, a bit freaked out. She leaves the party -- and gets killed.

Yes, it's a dark Groundhog Day scenario, but it leans weird and darkly funny, rather than horrific. It takes her a few tries to even get out of the building alive, but that's just the beginning of the loop, and the struggle to get to tomorrow.

Along the way, she meets Alan, who is almost her complete opposite. She is free-wheeling to an almost pathological degree -- she says what she thinks, and doesn't much care what people think of her -- whereas he is careful and controlled to the point of rather prissy. He is suffering from the same time loop, so the two of them bond over trying to get out of it.

(I should note: this story is not a romance. Nadia and Alan largely wind up friends supporting each other in a crisis, but are, to say the least, really not each others' type.)

The story does come to a resolution, and they do eventually see tomorrow. You can stop there -- Season one is a complete novel unto itself. But it's worth continuing on to Season two, which is when things get weird.

---

We pick up four years later -- Nadia's 40th birthday is coming up, and she has been visiting with her friend and quasi-aunt Ruthie, who is getting on in years and not entirely healthy. Nadia wanders down to the subway at Astor Place and steps onto subway car 6622, but instead of winding up crosstown, she finds herself in 1982, in the body of her mentally ill and extremely pregnant mother.

Season 2 is all trains and all time travel, all the time. It is not a story of being trapped in the past -- after all, Nadia can just find car 6622 again in order to return to 2022. But she decides that this is her opportunity to learn more about her family history -- mother Nora, grandmother Vera, and of course Ruthie -- and maybe figure out where the lost family fortune went, and how to get it back.

(Along the way, she tells Alan about it, leading to him being in East Berlin in 1968 in the body of his grandmother. There's an interesting story there as well, and the plots do meld by the end of the season, but this is mainly Nadia's story.)

Suffice it to say, the season looks like a treasure hunt, but is really a meditation on family, history, and mortality. It gets steadily stranger, until, towards the end, Nadia has kind of broken space-time, which is a bit of a problem and needs to be fixed.

This is about as far from hard science fiction as you can get -- do not go into this series expecting explanations. The story is moderately consistent, and follows some internal logic of its own, but the tone is more mystical than scientific, especially towards the end of Season 2, which gets downright 2001-esque. (But ends better than that did, IMO.)

It's solidly good stuff, and Nadia is a marvelous character: self-absorbed to a sometimes distressing degree, but generally good and sympathetic. She is neither the "must be careful to be inconspicuous" time-traveler trope, nor the "naif who doesn't understand what's happening" one -- she's smart and well-read, but generally doesn't give a fuck and isn't interested in conforming to 1982 expectations (or history in general).

So: recommended if and only if you can go with the flow and accept the story on its own strange terms. It's wryly funny, thought-provoking, and raises a lot of feels by the end, but far closer to mystical fantasy than any sort of science fiction.