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Russian Doll (Netflix, Season 1)
It’s Nadia’s 36th birthday and her friends have thrown her a crazy party. It’s really a shame that she dies that night...and finds herself staring at the mirror again.
(This is very hard to discuss without spoilers, so there are spoilers.)
It’s really a shame that The Good Place exists, because it hits virtually all of the same character beats and it does them better. I mean, a kinda-terrible white woman it trapped in purgatory with an extremely-uptight black man and they must grow as people and save each other.
(Side note: There are several of my friends who should never watch this, if only because the main character is a short, red-haired Russian Jew who’s kind of a terrible person.)
They do some clever things with the Groundhog Day loop and foreshadow a bunch of the later twists well. I think the drug use, cursing and one boob scene are basically there because they can (“Look, we’re on Netflix!”) though I did appreciate the Ketamine twist. I also appreciated that Nadia is the one who’s really running the show; Alan is very passive until prodded, and she’s the one who’s running through the sci-fi scenarios and trying different tricks (and noticing the changes). She notices the fruit and the trick to the fruit; she also clearly has deeper issues (mostly with her mother) that I suspect the later seasons will tackle.
Nadia’s voice also starts off sounding like she’s been smoking for forty years (and as the series takes place on her 36th birthday, that’s a real trick), though I suspect Natasha Lyonne decided to back off on that as the filming went on.
Someone pointed out that the convenience store yuppies, the EMTs and the programmer coworkers are all played by the same actors. Given the symbolism buried elsewhere, I suspect that’s a clue about the nature of this loop and how “real” most of the people are. Until people and things start disappearing, the only changes from loop to loop seem to rely on Nadia and Alan’s actions. Well, except for the gas leak that doesn’t happen in the second-to-last loop, but I think I chalked that up to something that caused it to “disappear”.
It seems very likely, given how the universe has to twist itself to make Nadia and Alan die at the same time and that the deaths / hallucinations seem to be driving particular outcomes that there’s an intelligence behind this; not just a reality glitch. This plays like a purgatory story, not like pure sci-fi. It’s also unclear whether they “leave behind” dimensions that they die in (Nadia thinks they do), or if they overwrite/erase as they loop.
Overall: The competition with The Good Place hurts it, but it’s interesting in its own right. I’ll be curious to see how they continue this.
(This is very hard to discuss without spoilers, so there are spoilers.)
It’s really a shame that The Good Place exists, because it hits virtually all of the same character beats and it does them better. I mean, a kinda-terrible white woman it trapped in purgatory with an extremely-uptight black man and they must grow as people and save each other.
(Side note: There are several of my friends who should never watch this, if only because the main character is a short, red-haired Russian Jew who’s kind of a terrible person.)
They do some clever things with the Groundhog Day loop and foreshadow a bunch of the later twists well. I think the drug use, cursing and one boob scene are basically there because they can (“Look, we’re on Netflix!”) though I did appreciate the Ketamine twist. I also appreciated that Nadia is the one who’s really running the show; Alan is very passive until prodded, and she’s the one who’s running through the sci-fi scenarios and trying different tricks (and noticing the changes). She notices the fruit and the trick to the fruit; she also clearly has deeper issues (mostly with her mother) that I suspect the later seasons will tackle.
Nadia’s voice also starts off sounding like she’s been smoking for forty years (and as the series takes place on her 36th birthday, that’s a real trick), though I suspect Natasha Lyonne decided to back off on that as the filming went on.
Someone pointed out that the convenience store yuppies, the EMTs and the programmer coworkers are all played by the same actors. Given the symbolism buried elsewhere, I suspect that’s a clue about the nature of this loop and how “real” most of the people are. Until people and things start disappearing, the only changes from loop to loop seem to rely on Nadia and Alan’s actions. Well, except for the gas leak that doesn’t happen in the second-to-last loop, but I think I chalked that up to something that caused it to “disappear”.
It seems very likely, given how the universe has to twist itself to make Nadia and Alan die at the same time and that the deaths / hallucinations seem to be driving particular outcomes that there’s an intelligence behind this; not just a reality glitch. This plays like a purgatory story, not like pure sci-fi. It’s also unclear whether they “leave behind” dimensions that they die in (Nadia thinks they do), or if they overwrite/erase as they loop.
Overall: The competition with The Good Place hurts it, but it’s interesting in its own right. I’ll be curious to see how they continue this.