This Isn’t Déjà Vu

Too much everything everywhere all at once.

after three overly long years away, the trippy, time-traveling dark existential comedy of family trauma Russian Doll has returned to Netflix for a second season. In its first, the show’s star and co-creator, Natasha Lyonne, played Nadia, a woman trapped in a time loop at her 36th-birthday party. To her annoyance and increasing terror, Nadia keeps meeting an untimely death, then, over and over again, wakes to find herself right back at the beginning. She is stuck at the same party, stuck with the same sense of ennui and underexplored troubling childhood memories. Eventually, she connects with Alan (Charlie

Barnett), himself caught in a time loop; together they realize they have been linked by some unknown knot in the space-time continuum. And they can’t escape without finding the source of each other’s pain.

Russian Doll was that rare and precious kind of TV, a show that felt both born out of a dozen familiar cultural sources and unmistakably new. It was a sui generis creation, and many pieces were responsible for its distinction. The wrinklein-time mystery elements have existed elsewhere, but Russian Doll connected them to certain fading, grimy, but appealing aspects of ’70s New York nostalgia. It wasn’t just one woman lost in time; it was a season of TV about a woman sinking her hands deep into layers of hyperlocal, hyperpersonal history. The second season

revisits the same world and characters, but as of this writing, most of the premise had to be shrouded in mystery, per Netflix orders.

Nadia returns. So does Alan. Together they go on strange adventures through time once again, though how, and where, and when exactly they go, I can’t say. (The rest of the ensemble, including Greta Lee and Elizabeth Ashley, is back too.) Some of the season takes place in 1982; some was filmed in Budapest.

Season two operates on larger ambition and cannot entirely bear all the ideas and images it’s trying to hold. It is stuffed— overstuffed—with schemes and emotions, hopes and dreams. The first season’s magic was closely contained within a claustrophobic experience of Alan’s and Nadia’s lives; its ending gestured toward expansive, all-encompassing humanity. It was the kind of small story that seemed almost giddy in its secret enormity. Relatively straightforward central tenets operated inside all the madness.

Now it’s like a brainstorm in which someone said “No bad ideas in a brainstorm” and then brought every single one of the ideas all the way to the finish line. Some work. Some are even exquisite: poignant themes of grief and parenting and the human capacity for growth that, had they been given more space to develop, might have been momentous. But even they are buried by too many other things, and it leaves Nadia’s voyage through another world-bending existential crisis feeling like a self-aware 18th-century picaresque novel crammed inside the titular nest. So many moods! So many tones, so many events, so many twists and red herrings and gold coins and bad Nazis! Through it all (or most of it, at least), Nadia is there like a chain-smoking time-traversing hero of her own universe, cracking wise and wryly pointing out that the straight line of her life has done a bit of a loop de loop.

What a frustrating literalization of the show’s scope. Season two is bigger in terms of time, geography, riddles, and mechanisms. You name it, there’s more. But there’s a perverse backward effect to all that new roominess. Russian Doll wants to be more sprawling and leaves its emotional resonance smaller and emptier. Nadia’s frantic attempts to make her life right again start to feel myopic. Meanwhile, there’s not nearly enough Alan. The show is a lesser version of itself without him; so much of the first season’s grace came from their strength as an unexpected, appealing pair. With less Alan, there’s no one to balance Nadia’s zany self-commentary, so she’s left out there on her own, caught in her circling mind.

Russian Doll once conveyed the disorienting sensation of being lost in a hedge maze. Every time Nadia reached a new turn, the twist that might finally lead her back to linearity, she instead discovered a dead end (down staircases, off piers, via elevators, fire escapes, choking, freezing …). There was no escaping the maze, and being on the ground inside it was an Alice in Wonderland ride somewhere between utopia and dystopia, where the laws of physics had been dismantled, the rules of logic chucked out the window.

Yet the feeling of no way out—that totalizing experience of loss and bewilderment—existed in part because of the palpable presence of order and design. The labyrinth was a controlled vessel. Now it’s an overgrown jungle. Heady, exuberant excess has its appeal, but as a season of TV, it is desperately in need of pruning.