Russian Doll: Season 2 premieres Wednesday, April 20 on Netflix.
Russian Doll is back after three years with an appropriately absurdist follow-up to its excellent first run, once again trapping Natasha Lyonne's Nadia in a madcap prison of metaphysical psychotherapy. These seven new episodes don't quite match the majesty of the first season, but this year's surreal odyssey -- ditching the "time loop" for Quantum Leaping -- is still a freakish, fantastical hoot.
Given that Russian Doll's marvelous lightning-in-a-bottle first season could easily stand on its own as a limited series, with a definitive ending (relatively speaking, in Russian Doll terms), it was a risky move to cook up more chaos. 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. That being said, Season 2 is as good as it ever could be, and that's more than enough to provide oodles of awesome temporal trickery and truly transcendental moments of warmth and heart.
Check out our review of Russian Doll: Season 1, from 2019...
Of course, with that warmth comes also with Lyonne's personal brand of wit and snark and this season, having already been through a never-ending night and countless deaths, Nadia is more than ready to just jump into a new type of fresh hell when her New York subway car transports her back to 1982 and into the pregnant body of her own mother, Lenora (Chloë Sevigny). It may be a few years later, and Nadia and Charlie Barnett's Alan may have spent every birthday since the time loop in lockdown mode, just to be safe, but once the universe starts up its fuckery, Nadia quickly dives right into the paradoxical puzzle to try and solve it. Except now, the learning curve has all but vanished and she treats everyone around her like an NPC from the get-go. It makes sense, saves time, and allows us to get into the pleasurable insanity.
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. As Nadia gets to know people from her mom's life -- scheming lover (District 9's Sharlto Copley), her grandmother (Irén Bordán), and a younger version of adoptive mother Ruth (Schitt's Creek's Annie Murphy) -- her mission blossoms into something more expansive and related to family healing.
The time-traveling subway isn't a prison the same way Season 1's time loop was. It's a tool, and a lot of fun is had with that. After Nadia discovers that she can return to 2022, she bounces back and forth in order to piece together clues (or to just use the internet) that'll lead her down the right path. And since the present is easily accessible, she's able to wrangle Season 1's Elizabeth Ashley, Greta Lee, Rebecca Henderson, and -- naturally -- Barnett into her whirlwind scheme to correct sins of the past. As Copley's character explains at one point, so perfectly, Nadia's looking to chase down her "Coney Island." That makes sense when he describes it, being the one thing from your past that you feel, if done differently, would have changed everything.
Once again, Nadia and Alan seem to be the only ones (at least in this story) capable of utilizing the time train, though Alan's experiments with it take him off on a different arc, which doesn't feel as gratifying as Nadia's journey. I'll stay clear of spoilers here except to say that the time traveling doesn't just stick to 1980s New York. It's a large portion of the show but it's not the only wild destination. 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. It's the lesser of the two time stories but it allows for a mesmerizing and memorable endgame featuring both of our headliners.
As far as the show's core gimmick, that of Manhattan in '82, the season finds the perfect vibe/balance between reality and cartoon. With some nice needle drops -- Bauhaus' "Bela Lugosi's Dead" opens the adventure, and acts as a recurring theme (Bauhaus fans will find a few other Easter eggs) -- along with costuming, set dressing, and an overall crime-y, grimy gloss, Nadia's main train destination is a blend of authenticity and cliché. This was a time, a decade, when murder and mayhem was at an all-time high for the city, and would be until the early '90s, so the specific look of those streets has been sort of set in cinematic stone and Russian Doll has a blast with that.
Because Nadia's not trying to figure out how to free herself from a batshit time loop or some other heightened, hilarious temporal trap, but instead using a cosmic loophole to her advantage, Season 2 is simmering in different spices. 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. This allows Season 2 to feel special in its own way and escape the shadow of the first season as best it can.
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