Originally published in print in September 2022.
Admittedly, when I first heard that there would be a second season of Russian Doll, I was disappointed. Before watching, I thought that everything had been resolved within the first season and was not expecting the second season to be anywhere near as good as the first. No piece of dialogue has ever hit me harder than “You’re the most selfish person I’ve ever met. Thank you for changing my life. Lives are hard to change.” However, I was pleasantly surprised.
In the first season of the show, we learn that Nadia is grieving her deceased mother. In flashbacks, her mother is shown to be quite abusive towards Nadia, causing her an immense amount of trauma. Although the first season ends with Alan and Nadia ‘saving’ each other, this is not the end of Nadia’s healing. Her relationship with her mother is explored again in the second season in a unique way. The season begins with Nadia’s surrogate mother, Ruth, in ill-health. Nadia appears to be in denial about the severity of this. If the audience has learned anything from season one’s resurrection time loop, it is that Nadia doesn’t see death as permanent. Her mother’s death did not constitute an end to anything, only opened up a fresh wound to the past.
Nadia is given the opportunity to visit the world through both her mother and grandmother’s eyes. Nadia’s mother, Nora, is a troubled schizophrenic with impulsive tendencies, which complicates Nadia’s attempts to change her actions in 1982 by returning the family inheritance that she stole. There is a theory that Nadia caused Nora’s breakdown by travelling to the past and hijacking her body, but I disagree with this. The message of the second season, in my view, is that family history cannot be changed. Attempting to create a better life for Nora was also Nadia’s attempt to prevent the trauma she went through as a child. Nadia’s hallucinations in her mother’s body were not supposed to show how she was tampering with space and time, but to show Nadia experiencing the way her mother viewed the world.
On my first watch of the second season, I misunderstood the ending completely: what was the point, I thought? Nadia accomplished nothing by the end of the season and allowed the woman she loved the most to die alone. On rewatching, I realised how important the phrase ‘Coney Island’ (Russian Doll’s term for an “if only”) had been to the season. If only Nadia had recovered her inheritance and repaired Nora’s relationship with her mother, she may have had an easier childhood. If only Nadia had fought harder for her mother to retain custody of her, Nora may not have committed suicide. If only Nadia had never travelled in time, Ruth may have not died alone. All of these are, of course, meaningless speculations. The second season serves not only as a way for Nadia to understand her mother and grandmother, but also as a way to realise that there is nothing she could have done to change what happened to her family.
The season reaches its climax when Nadia ends up giving birth to herself while in Nora’s body. She takes herself, as an infant, back to the 21st century, which breaks time itself. Realising that there is nothing she can do to save her mother, she does the only thing that she can to save her own childhood – start afresh with her infant self in the 21st century. By now, Nadia has also accepted that Ruth, the only “witness” to everything that she has gone through, is going to die.
The most devastating and tear-jerking moment in Russian Doll occurs on the train as Nadia contemplates handing her infant self back over to Nora. Nora asks, “If you could choose your mother all over, would you choose me again?”. Nadia responds that she had never chosen her in the first place, absolving herself of the guilt that she had felt over the past two seasons. Although Nadia can never fix or change what had happened to Vera or Nora, she has now accepted that they are an integral part of her. Ruth was the most significant part of her chosen family and, although she has now lost that as well, she knows that Ruth loved her and that she loved Ruth.
The second season is the perfect conclusion to Nadia’s story, as she learns to accept that her family’s unfinished business and trauma will always be a part of her. However, she also understands that that should not stop her from living her life with her new chosen family; Alan, Maxine and Lizzy. Ruth was the last connection she had to her family and her trauma, but she comes to understand that Ruth will always be part of her, alongside Nora and Vera.
