Liked: Russian Doll’s take on time travel

“Literally every movie about time travel says don’t change things!” Alan shrieks at Nadia. It doesn’t take long, however, before he himself starts trying to meddle in the past in the guise of his grandmother—a young woman from Ghana who falls in love with a fellow engineering student who’s plotting to escape from… East Berlin, because it’s 1962. Russian Doll season two knows it’s part of a long line of time-travel stories, much like season one was aware it wasn’t the first time-loop tale ever told. But even with that acknowledgement, it makes some of its own “rules;” paradoxes can happen (see: Nadia co-existing with Baby Nadia), but also, playing too fast and loose with time can eventually cause time itself to start to collapse.

It takes almost the whole season for Nadia to realize that Ruth is right (“nothing can absolve us but ourselves”), but in the meantime she tries to sci-fi a way to fix the problems—financially, emotionally—that have plagued her family for decades. That means we also get cool time-travel stuff like Nadia-as-Vera mailing an actual treasure map from 1944 Hungary to 1962 New York, but we also get Nadia (in 2022) tracking down the descendent of a Hungarian Nazi in Budapest, and realizing he’s come to terms with his own complicated family history in a less contorted way.

Also, in a production-design sense, the way Russian Doll delineates between time periods is subtle but also loaded with detail. The contrasts between 2022 and 1982 Manhattan are the most delightful (Nadia has to travel to the 21st century to internet-stalk anyone—but there’s also a scene where she visits the New York public library in 1982 to rifle through the card catalogues), but the depictions of 1944 Hungary and 1962 East Berlin are also effective (plus, scary soldiers in both!) .Additionally, the use of the NYC subway as a time-travel mechanism is inspired; it offers a way for the story to connect to those other time periods (ah, the power of public transit), and it plays into that disorienting feeling that just comes with riding a subway, hurtling along underground through the dark.