Russian Doll 2 is full of dizzying time loops again

As series viewers, we are used to the manipulation of timelines, if only because watching series moves us into a kind of time machine. take Better Call Saulseason 6 (more on that later), which started this week on Netflix: the final season of a series that itself is prequel by Breaking Bad began. We had to get used to the fact that some characters were younger, after all, the story took place years before the events of Breaking Bad (2008-2013), but that they were played by actors who were inevitably a lot older by now. Not to mention the fact that the timelines of Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad threaten to intersect in this final season – after which we will all disappear into a wormhole.

The series Russian Doll (the second season of which is now on Netflix) was even about nothing more than a runaway timeline. In the first season, we see how Natasha Lyonne played Nadia Vulvokov ends up in a time loop at a New York birthday party. In it she comes to her end in many different ways, only to return to the same point in time and place again and again. The cosmos wanted to tell her something, but what? Russian Doll was one of the most original series of 2019, and was chosen as one of the titles of the year by the series panel of this newspaper.

But where to after that perfect season, in which we had moved in a nice circle with the characters at the end? And in which the character Nadia (based on the heady life of Natasha Lyonne herself) had learned that empathy might be the lifeline in life. Whoever reads interviews with Lyonne (or her short biography in her wikipedialemma), knows that she was far from finished with her own life story, in which much revolves around the difficult relationship with her mother, born in Paris to Hungarian-Jewish parents who, unlike the rest of the family, had survived the Holocaust.

Russian Doll, season 2, not only follows three years after the first season, a number of years have passed in Nadia’s life since she escaped that eternal birthday party. And the cosmos pulls the rug from under her feet again, this time just before her 40th birthday. This time, subway line 6 in New York serves as the vehicle for a time travel. Already in the first episode, Nadia finds herself in the year 1982, with the city filthy and disrupted at its most photogenic. This is by no means a classic Back to the Futuretime travel type: Nadia ends up in her mother’s body when she is pregnant with Nadia (talking about time loops). While her fellow time traveler Alan (Charlie Barnett) disembarks at Friedrichstrasse station in 1962 East Berlin, trapped in his grandmother’s body.

There are beautiful moments in it Russian Doll (not least the final scene where Shine on You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd is used with crushing effect), but a lot is discussed, prompted by the thought experiment that later generations still want to fight the fate that befell their families earlier. The question that may only be answered in a third season remains whether that fate can be reversed. Or that we should honor our family lineage by living the best life possible right now.