, streaming on Netflix
THE latest hit on Netflix turns out to be a magic trick in eight parts. As Russian Doll begins, everything looks fairly ordinary for a TV drama – a party, a woman floundering in her mid-30s, death – then, with a single twist, it becomes extraordinary.
This dark comedy stars as Nadia, a foul-mouthed New Yorker who we soon learn is stuck in a time loop, repeatedly living through the night of her 36th birthday. She dies, only to be resurrected in the bathroom at her party, but in a new branch of the multiverse. This plays on the “many worlds” concept in physics, the idea the cosmos is constantly splitting into alternate universes.
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Some of Nadia’s deaths are played for laughs, some are so graphic they are upsetting and some leave her so alone and frantic that it is heartbreaking. But Russian Doll isn’t painful to watch. Each episode is 30 minutes, a welcome change from the trend for prestige television shows to have much longer instalments. Best of all, Lyonne infuses Nadia with almost inexplicable charm.
The character is a fabulous dirtbag with the personality of a pit bull. Her unkempt hair has a bottle top stuck in it for most of one episode. Waking up, her first move is to light a cigarette. She did ketamine at a christening. Seemingly self-centred, in real life she would be horrible to know. But Lyonne’s sardonic humour makes Nadia likeable.
When the show starts, Nadia has isolated herself from friends, her sad-sack ex and even her mother figure, a therapist named Ruth, who took care of her during and after the breakdowns and death of Nadia’s actual mother.
Which takes us to the heart of the series and, be warned, some unavoidable spoilers. To get out of her self-centered time loop, Nadia has to convince someone that she is reliving the same night, and come to terms with intimacy and abandonment issues. The first part is hard to do without getting sent to a psychiatric hospital – a fate she avoids only by dying once more in the ambulance ride there.
Initially, Nadia thinks it may all be a drug-induced turn or some mystical retribution for having a party in what was once a Jewish school. Then, she meets Alan, a perfectionist and her opposite in all ways but one: he too keeps dying and reliving the same day.
Alan sees their experience as a video game, but their trip through the multiverse isn’t as clear cut as that. Nadia tells her drug dealer that every time she dies it hurts. She has been hit by a cab, fallen down the stairs, drowned, been blown up, plummeted down an elevator shaft – and more.
Around her 14th death, Nadia finally realises that her friends and her beloved Ruth grieve for her when she dies. This motivates her to look for a way out, and so she notices that after each death, things around her die off. Fresh flowers wilt, and fruit in bowls looks rotten. Nadia tells Alan.
“There is a nod to Einstein that reminds us of his key tenet: there is no such thing as absolute time”
She cuts open an orange, and though the outside is mouldy, inside it is still edible – just as their inner lives continue as one linear experience while their bodies keep dying. “Time is relative to your experience. We’ve been experiencing time differently in these loops, but this tells us that somewhere, linear time as we used to understand it still exists,” she says. This nod to Einstein’s theory of relativity may be a bit simplistic, but it does remind us of his key tenet: there is no such thing as absolute time. Our experience of time is dependent on our point of view.
In the final moments of the series, we see two timelines side by side – two branches of the multiverse in which Nadia and Alan change their behaviour and save the other from their first death. The split-screen effect is almost gut-wrenching, as you don’t know whether these two people who have come to care about each other will ever reunite in the same timeline.
It isn’t a great magic trick if you just saw the woman in half – you have to put her back together again. Fortunately, Russian Doll delivers on that.
