“Given how firmly it closed its circular plot, and the relatively peculiar particulars of its narrative, it’s somewhat surprising to see a second season of 'Russian Doll,' the excellence of its 2019 first season notwithstanding,” writes LATimesTVLloyd.
Alan’s half of the story, which involves his Ghanaian grandmother and interesting suggestions gender-wise, can feel a little abbreviated, but its points are made, and he is there in the clutch. Nadia’s godmother, Ruth , whose years of smoking may be catching up with her, is very much in the mix, with Greta Lee’s Maxine, liberated from endlessly throwing Nadia’s birthday party, getting more things to do and places to go.
There are many smaller callbacks to the first season, as well — Oatmeal the cat, Alan’s fish, the deli, Horse the homeless guy, Nadia’s way of pronouncing “cockroach” as “cock-a-roach,” which recalls Zero Mostel’s reading the opening line of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” in “The Producers” — and really, you couldn’t better describe the series’ gestalt than as the mixture of those two works, a little Franz Kafka, a little Mel Brooks.
Having already lived through a major disruption of reality, Nadia is hard to rattle — “Inexplicable things happening is my entire modus operandi,” she says — and as if to match her determination, the new season throws abrupt changes of scene and even weirder dislocations of reality in her way.
Armored under a cascade of curls, swathed in a sort of military overcoat that flares dramatically in silhouette, Nadia is a fireplug superhero, if one less concerned with the fate of the world than of her own situation; her selfishness is explicitly noted, with her pursuit of remaking her past getting in the way of her paying attention to the present.
Ultimately, it’s helpful to regard the series, especially in the whipsaw transitions of its beautiful last movements, as musical or poetic. “Russian Doll” turns somersaults to get where it’s going, but its conclusions are emotionally unambiguous and universally useful and consonant with the previous season’s themes of attachment and surrender. The show is smart without ever being too smart for its own good.
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