No coincidence that Russian Doll is just in time for Groundhog Day, the Natasha Lyonne, Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland-created series plays into all of our deepest fears about getting stuck in a rut a.k.a. never being able to die. Commencing on the night of Nadia Vulvokov’s (Lyonne)–yes, the last name is both suggestive and Russian–thirty-sixth birthday party, her usual chip-on-shoulder manner is somewhat augmented as this is the age that marks her outliving her own mother, Lenora (Chloë Sevigny).
That one of her greatest fears in life is being deemed crazy as a result of Lenora’s mental illness (involving, among other fixations, shattering all mirrors to disprove existence and buying an excessive amount of watermelons from every bodega in the neighborhood) is especially salient when she finds herself “reborn” into the same night after being hit by a car. Always restarting at the very moment that “Gotta Get Up” by Harry Nilsson is playing, she is interrupted by a knock at the vaginal door in a repurposed yeshiva in the East Village where her friends, Maxine (Greta Lee) and Ruth (Rebecca Henderson), are throwing her a party. Convinced, at first, that whatever is causing this “hallucinogenic reaction” must be related to the “Israeli joint” laced with coke that Maxine gave her, Nadia is sent on a sleuthing mission to unearth the one element of that evening that set off this nightmarish time loop. Because, let’s be honest, all time loops are nightmarish–you should know, you’re probably already living one as a result of your routine. But like any routine, there are select nuances. So it is that in each nightly rebirth into the same party, Nadia is met with new destinies that directly affect those she interacts with, from a professor/sex addict named Mike (Jeremy Lowell Bobb) to the daughter of her ex, John (Yul Vazquez), who she refused to meet during all their time together.
Everything is connected and nothing makes sense, Nadia resignedly learns in her position as an existential Nancy Drew, investigating into the nature of this void she’s found herself seemingly forever trapped in. At the very least, fortune sees fit to throw her a bone at the end of the third episode, “A Warm Body,” after she encounters a man named Alan (Charlie Barnett) who is equally as calm about plummeting to their death in a faulty elevator. When she asks why, he returns, “I die all the time.” Thus, a cosmic link is established and the duo becomes their own set of existential detectives à la Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman in I Heart Huckabees.
So it is that we’re now given insight into Alan’s daily death, which also takes place on his birthday, as he meticulously prepares and listens to affirmations about deserving love and being in control while packing a suitcase with an engagement ring in it. It is after this process, when he goes over to his girlfriend Beatrice’s (Dascha Polanco, for that Orange is the New Black connection Lyonne can’t escape), that we see just how “down pat” his death day routine is, for, unlike Nadia, he enjoys the familiar sameness of it all. Knowing all the lines and motions to go through. It’s finally something he can control. Later, one of Beatrice’s criticisms for what led her to breaking up with him after nine years is that he always wants everything to stay the same.
Nadia, on the other hand, is not so complacent, her software programmer brain determined to ascertain what the “bug” in this existence is. Dying in myriad ways over fifteen times, Nadia endures being frozen to death, falling down the same stairs at the yeshiva, going up into flames in a gas leak, stumbling down one of those sidewalk hatches and falling into the East River. It all amounts to the fact that there’s just as many ways to die as there is to live. And, for the most part, none of them are ideal options.
Neither is facing the traumatic demons of one’s past, though, of course, this is ultimately what Nadia must do with regard to her mother when she starts to see her 1993 self haunting the streets of the East Village and giving her a literal heart attack. For wouldn’t you have one too if you saw your child self–or just a creepy child in general–standing before you inexplicably? As clues about the passage of time, like rotting fruit still fresh on the inside, become more apparent to Nadia, she explains to Alan that while time has altered and stagnated for them, it has gone on for the others in their lives in all these alternate realities (hence her repurposing the Forrest Gump quote to one of Alan’s neighbor’s, “Life is like a box of timelines, you never know which one you’re gonna get”). She also states that both time and morality are relative. True though that may be, it doesn’t change the fact that because the two didn’t respectively help one another in a way that might have prevented both of their initial deaths, the time loop was set in motion (the lesson, one supposes, being, don’t be a selfish prick and love thy fucking neighbor–even if, as Nadia puts it, “Other people are garbage”).
With each episode growing increasingly macabre (again, it pertains mostly to Nadia’s child self), Lyonne–through that combination of Shirley Temple-esque locks and hard-boiledness–manages to imbue the narrative with just the right tinge of the comedic to make the absurdity work. Then again, Kafka would probably call this storyline mere business as usual.
As it is the month of Groundhog Day, it’s also no shock that the sequel to Happy Death Day–another narrative that finds its protagonist forced to relive her death every day until she can figure out who or what is killing her–should be released around the same time. Russian Doll, however, asserts itself right at the top of the “time loop genre,” maybe even above the original concept it pays tacit homage to.
