If the first season of “Russian Doll” was protagonist Nadia Vulvokov’s own personal “Groundhog Day,” the second season is “Back to the Future.”
More than three years after Harry Nilsson’s track “Gotta Get Up” was permanently seared into your brain as it played repeatedly during the first season, the Netflix dark comedy returns Wednesday for its second. This time, instead of outrunning death, Nadia is outrunning her own history.
“In season one, it’s about how do I stop dying. In season two, it’s a question of how do I stop living,” Natasha Lyonne, who stars as Nadia and has taken over as showrunner, told the Daily News.
“It’s a double-edged coin of mortality. Season two is on the nature of time in the present moment.”
Jumping back and forth between the '80s and the present — using the Astor Place subway station which has mysteriously turned into a time portal — Nadia chases her own tail.
Sometimes she’s trying to figure out her own history, sometimes she’s trying to change it. But in the present, she’s hiding from her future, as her substitute mother Ruthie’s (Elizabeth Ashley) phlegmy cough gets worse by the day.
“When you’re up against 40, for many of us, the parent or the parent figure, the responsibility flips and we begin to become the caretaker. A lot of us aren’t prepared for that from an intimacy standpoint,” Lyonne told The News.
“Change will come whether we get on the bus willingly or we’re dragged kicking and screaming. She’s going to have to show up and face these things in her present life whether she thinks she’s ready or not. That’s just the process of growing up in many ways.”
In a way, the 41-year-old New York native said, Nadia is perfectly suited for the unraveling of her reality. As a video game developer she is used to manipulating unknown worlds to her liking. She sees a clear win: her family’s last krugerrand (a South African gold coin), which she wears around her neck on a chain. That’s her inheritance. That’s what she’s earned for putting up with her mother (Chloe Sevigny) for all those years. That’s what will change her life.
But video games aren’t that simple, and reality is even more complicated. Nadia cannot simply jump timelines and fix the past.
Much as with last season, her friend Alan (Charlie Barnett) is also facing his past, once again on a parallel but distinct path to Nadia’s journey. He approaches his as a learning experience more than a mission, but the two remain different sides of the same coin.
That’s what “Russian Doll” is ultimately about: what happens when life happens.
And at the heart of it, it’s about the passage of time.
“I love getting older. I know that as a woman I’m not supposed to love it, but I firmly disagree. I think it’s great over here on the other side,” Lyonne told The News.
“In many ways, I’m always thinking about the little young weirdo girl and I want her to feel less alone, but I also want her to know that we do get to the other side. Even when we have these intense personal histories, we’re allowed to become freestanding people who have a measure of radical acceptance for our own experiences and are not in a state of constantly self-judging and self-criticizing.”
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