Review: Russian Doll, "Nowhen" | Season 2, Episode 1
Three years later, Netflix's timey-wimey series fittingly returns as though we never left
[While Netflix is only newly in crisis from a business perspective, they’ve been creating a crisis in how to write about binge-released shows for nearly a decade. Accordingly, I’ll be writing sporadic reviews of Russian Doll’s second season as I go, dropping in as I have things to say and then wrapping up my thoughts with the finale. Those reviews will be available exclusively to paid subscribers.]
It’s been a while since I’ve watched a “Previously on” montage quite as extensive as Russian Doll’s, although I suppose that’s for a good reason: it has, after all, been over three years since the first season debuted.
Ending as it did, Russian Doll did not require a second season to complete its story, but the approach that Natasha Lyonne—who both writes and directs the premiere—chose to pursue for a second season is very much dependent on an understanding of the first. Facing her 40th birthday, and with her godmother Ruth back in the hospital, Nadia is reflecting on her past when she steps onto a subway train and magically finds herself in 1982. And while the first season forced Nadia to constantly cycle through numerous deaths in her time loop before it gave her any signal what it could mean, one look in the mirror explains this one: she has traveled back in time into her mother’s body in the days before she was born.
“Nowhen” gets to have its timey-wimey cake, as it were, before Nadia sees her reflection for the first time: she’s confused to be stuck in 1982, but she’s more than willing to go with the flow, following the matchbook to the dive bar and taking the Black Beauty that Chez offers her. Nadia’s freewheeling energy is a huge part of the show’s distinctiveness, and Lyonne comfortably steps back into the “cock-a-roach” of it all in a way that’s fun and breezy, and which carries into the initial 1982 sequences.
But after she realizes what’s happening, and makes her way back to the present, we get a clearer sense of how she’s been living her life over the past few years. Earlier, on the phone with Maxine, she notes that life as Ruth’s caregiver has been itself something of a time loop: she’s okay, but then she’s not okay, and yet Nadia is all she has. And Ruth is also all that Nadia seems to have: we get no insight into whether she’s still working, or her love life, or really much of anything about what’s going on in her world. She was obviously changed by being stuck in a time loop and fighting to keep both her and Alan alive in that timeline, but it’s still defining her existence in a way that seems unhealthy.
This becomes clearer when she finally arrives at her destination when she got on the train to begin with. As with the first season, we come to Alan belatedly, although there’s more going on in his neck of the woods, as his mother is now sending him on weekly dates in order to find a wife. In a way, we find him exactly where he was before, unlucky in love and facing the idea of being alone. He insists, though, that he doesn’t believe that her time traveling means that they both have unfinished business: he thinks that this is simply what life is like, what they’ve been doing. But that also involved spending every one of her birthdays armed and ready to confront whatever the universe threw at them, a paranoid state of mind that reinforces that there is certainly something unfinished if neither have found peace or progress in their respective lives in the intervening years.
When Nadia meets up with Ruth, she receives the key piece of the puzzle, which is that Chez was around when her mother’s fate was truly decided: when she lost the family’s fortune in Krugerrands. The way she barrels back into the past is as clear an indication as any that she does indeed have a reason for being there, and the way Alan tentatively steps onto a train of his own—notably marked with “Don’t Block the Door” in German, implying he’s exploring space more than time—shows that he’s less certain he wants to know his own. They remain a study in contrasts, but this time having spent years living in the aftermath of their shared cosmic journey.
“Nowhen” doesn’t feel like the second season of a TV show, so much as it feels like the second chapter in a story. What I mean by this is that exposition is kept to a minimum: we get the phone call with Maxine, but there’s no real effort to lay out a clear groundwork of what Nadia’s daily life looks like, and we only get a few stray seconds of Alan’s date. It’s not that this new manifestation of the time-space continuum fucking with them is interrupting an entirely new status quo: it’s more or less just picking up where it left off, because they actually haven’t really, truly moved past the trauma that was driving it the first time. The universe, like the show, just took an extended hiatus, but it’s back to deliver another dose of whatever the hell it’s trying to do or say at a given moment.
This makes for a premiere that simultaneously says a lot and very little. We jump right into the new (if familiar) premise: I had known that the show was exploring time travel—and that Nadia does so in Quantum Leap style (in someone else’s body)—from conversations with other critics, but I was surprised to see all of that be laid out so quickly. And while the full details of Alan’s journey are left as bait to continue onto the second episode—which I’d have watched if I hadn’t been stopping to write this review—it still feels like we’re hitting the ground running. It’s this weird mix of comforting and disorienting, allowing the show to settle back into a familiar rhythm but through inherently disrupting our sense of time and space and sending us back into a new temporal spatial mystery.
It means that “Unwhen” isn’t quite a delightful romp, but it also isn’t a deflating disappointment. It’s just a re-entry vessel into this world, giving us space to settle in for another wild ride.
Stray observations
It’s funny how without taking notes, I don’t know if I would have even remembered that the episode actually started with a woman with red hair knocking out a wall in the sewers and removing something from it. In retrospect, it’s clearly some type of in medias res opening, but the premise means we have no idea where that is in the past, although it certainly presumes she might end up traveling back into other people’s bodies if we presume that was Nadia. (I also presume that she’s finding something she hid in an earlier timeline, since she can’t bring anything back with her on the train).
I have to say, as much as I love hearing Lyonne say “cock-a-roach,” it was a little too conspicuously deployed to appeal to this affection, and seemed to be just a bit too aware of the meta-reality of the show’s reception. A cheap pop, is what a wrestling fan would call it. (I still popped, though, so fair play, Lyonne).
Curious to see how the homeless man from the first season plays into this in some way, or whether that was just a cameo designed to signal her stepping back into a new spin on the timeloop.
No sign yet of a recurrent needle drop to match Harry Nilsson, but “Personal Jesus” was still a nice way to start sonically speaking.
So I knew she was in someone else’s body because Netflix banned critics from talking about it, which means that they naturally complained to other critics when they somehow had to write reviews without mentioning something so basic to the season’s premise. However, I hadn’t pieced together it was her mother during her pregnancy, so it was still an effective reveal, although Chloe Sevigny remaining a big piece of the opening credits should have tipped me off more than the comments when she ordered her bourbon.
Doesn't the woman in the opening scene remove the same duffle bag that Nadia/Nora and Chez later take from under the sofa? Whose house are they taking it from - Nadia's grandmother? She has a key, right?