Russian Doll - series 2 [split topic]

[Dr Rock]

But the first season showed they could change things with time travel. The fella didn't top himself.

[Ascent]

I keep thinking about the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief model whilst watching the second season and felt like it flowed through them as it progressed. It might just be me reading too much into it of course (personal circumstances).

[Ant Farm Keyboard]

The whole theme for the season is pretty much stated with the Coney Island thing in episode two, and it's not even that original.

Spoiler alert

For instance, there's an Alain Resnais film called My American Uncle, based on the works of neurobiologist Henri Laborit, which mixes three different stories with comments by Laborit about escapism as a motor for surviving, the idea that people rely on believing into some long lost American uncle, who could magically fix our problems, put us into a different situation, which gives us at least some hope (the working title for the film was "God Can't Do Anything for Us").

[close]

Anyway, the lack of development for this season is extremely embarrassing. The main ideas are basically contained in the first half of the first episode and in the last two, which have at least enigmatic visuals and tighter execution. The rest of the season ranges between useless and irritating. The potentially better story line involving Freddie Mercury Alan and Berlin gets sidelined, which also removes the Nadia-Alan dynamic which was at the heart of the first season, and every snarky line shouted by Nadia (between two grunts) sounds like it's reused from Lyonne's original pitch for the season in the writers room. I wondered at some point if it was a way for the character to cope with tragedy, but fuck no, it's just a way to stretch the story to season length, by inserting The Natasha Lyonne Show in it.

Spoiler alert

All the Budapest segments (past and present) are for instance a catastrophe. Nadia and her friend show up unannounced in front of some Hungarian guy who doesn't know them, and he's supposed to provide on the spot documentation for every question by Nadia about his terrible grandfather? The 1944 sequences are even worse, as covering the Final Solution is already an extremely tricky thing, and the answer appears to be ranting about Spielberg, Schindler's List and the first episode of Columbo. Really?

Also notice how much it's obvious, given the many clues, right from the beginning of the season, that Ruth is dying. Nadia is totally indifferent about it, even if she learns gradually (and us with her) how much Ruth cared about her, and made sacrifices for her, during her entire life, without Nadia really considering it, until we reach the moment where she's in shock about her imminent death, when she can't find the "current time" version of Ruth at the hospital. But the show has done such a poor job so far about developing the themes of denial and grief about this major relationship that it rings hollow, and it immediately switches back to various Nadias at the morgue.

[close]

First season took a very specific situation but managed somehow to expand it into something relatable and universal about recovery. Second season is, as one critic pointed out, about a self-obsessed protagonist, and her personal journey. Up to the moment where it's supposed to morph into something universal, which doesn't work, given how flimsy the groundwork was laid out. All of this to come to the conclusion... that if you walked a mile in the shoes of your parents, you'd end up making somehow the same choices as them, and that you've now gained some acceptance?

[selectivememory]

Good review.

This was a mess. Intermittently enjoyable, but by the last couple of episodes I was really struggling to give a shit.

[steveh]

I found it kind of intellectually interesting with individual sections I liked but as a cohesive whole it didn't come together.

This interview with Natasha Lyonne goes into how it evolved, which made me wonder if there were too many people pushing to get ideas into the series but a lack of a strong lead to guide the story through the episodes.

[Mister Six]

I found it kind of intellectually interesting with individual sections I liked but as a cohesive whole it didn't come together.

Yeah, that's how I felt, more or less. For me the big stumbling block was Nadia and Alan spontaneously becoming massive fucking idiots throughout the whole thing. Nadia in particular felt like a cartoon rather than a person, with the constant gags and refusal to take anything seriously. In the first season, that made sense - she trapped in an insane situation outside of her control in which nothing seemed to have any consequences, and so amusing herself with jibes and jokes and fucking around seemed like a decent coping mechanism.

This time around, though, she's actually taking charge of what's going on and is directing the time-fuckery to achieve her own personal mission, so constantly jeopardising that by talking like a lunatic, referring to her host bodies in the third person, and fucking around in front of actual Nazis while in her Jewish grandmother's body just seem ridiculously boneheaded. She's trying to change the past, so she believes that anything can happen; why would she risk getting her grandmother killed, or getting her mother re-sectioned by constantly referring to "herself" as her mother?

And then she tries to kidnap herself... how does she think that will work? Even if the universe hadn't gone screwy at that point, what was she going to do? Raise baby her, then put herself back once she was 17 or something, and hope that the rest of the timeline somehow didn't change, even though vanishing for years as a kid and then reappearing would obviously cause all kinds of ructions in her personal past. Her being confused by the collapsing timeline in the hospital then totally fine with the fucked up birthday party was another moment of out-of-character stupidity.

The same problem crops up in Alan's part of the story - why try to get his grandmother to flee with that guy, or try to follow him out there? Doesn't he realise that doing that would probably mean he'd cease to exist? I figured that maybe he was clueless about the grandfather paradox, but then in the last episode he mentions exactly that idea when Nadia kidnaps her younger self. So what the fuck was he playing at before? His side of things also felt very half-hearted, like he's only in it because he has to be in it, which is a shame, because he had the much more interesting situation, and I like him as an actor. And his little subplot about his mum trying to get him married off didn't go anywhere, did it?

Very frustrating all round. I'll give that interview with Lyonne a read later because I'm intrigued to see how it changed, but AFAIK this time travel thing was always part of the three-season plan, so it's odd to see it go so far off the rails (ho ho ho). I wonder if it's a problem with the concept as much as the execution; Nadia and Alan were suited to a death loop story because their particular traits (emotional detachment and obsessive control-freakery) would - and did - become unbearable in such a claustrophobic scenario, where they can't distract themselves from their problems. They don't work so well in stories where they're free come and go as they please, especially when they're basically off by themselves, because the only pushback they'll receive (until the inevitable penultimate episode reality breakdown) is an abstract one that takes a while to actually manifest.

Plus the repetition in Nadia trying to do something to fix the future, then it not working out. It was pretty clear what was going on from the start, and it was only the character's very forced stupidity that made her keep going when obviously time was always going to be fixed.

Anyway, it wasn't all bad - it looked gorgeous much of the time, and I especially liked the weird abstract stuff in the water tower place (which might have been influenced by the idea of clipping through a wall in a video game into an unfinished area?). I really hope they don't try to explain that at all if they get another season. Russian Doll is at its best when it's hinting at the universe operating in a way that we can't ever really understand.