Russian Doll Season 2 Spoiler Alert!
Pictured: a photo of Natasha Lyonne playing Nadia in Netflix's Russian Doll.
In Season 2 of one of my favorite shows, Russian Doll on Netflix, main character Nadia time travels into her Jewish maternal family’s history via a New York City MTA train. We meet Nadia’s grandmother Vera in Nazi-occupied Budapest and later in her life in New York City, and her mother Nora in the 1980s on the verge of one of many breakdowns. Nadia has a complicated relationship with Nora, her mother, who is suggested in Season 1 to have schizophrenia. Through Nadia’s flashbacks, we see a traumatic childhood being raised by an unstable mother. In Season 2, we see Nora’s psychosis in the form of visual hallucinations. We also learn about the intergenerational trauma originating from her grandmother Vera surviving the Holocaust.
When Nadia gets the chance to travel back in time to the 80s and become her mother during her pregnancy with her, Nadia, she is caught literally giving birth to herself. Out from her own vagina comes her own baby self. Or, at least it seems to Nadia. Nadia steals the baby, herself, and time travels forward to 2022 New York City. The adult and child self are together, and now Nadia can parent herself the way she would have wanted to be parented. Her anger and grief at her mother can be resolved, as there would be no mother in the first place to ruin things. We see Nadia kissing baby Nadia’s head, holding her to her chest, leaving her in the watchful eyes of her best lesbian friends.
Shortly, Nadia realizes that changing the course of history is having dire consequences on 2022. Time is glitching and Nadia knows she must travel back in time and return her baby self to the rightful mother, her mother, Nora. Nadia walks out of a void and finds her mother on a subway car. Nadia sits opposite of Nora who asks her, “If you could choose your mother all over, would you choose me again?” Nadia begins to cry, sniffles, holding her baby self, and looks around the car at her child self in adolescence and her past maternal ancestors who are sitting at the other end of the car. She replies in her signature scratchy, New York accent, “Ma, Yeah I didn’t choose you the first time, but I guess that’s just how the story goes, huh mom?” Nora and Nadia smile at each other knowingly and Nadia returns her baby self to her mother.
In that moment, we see Nadia’s grief at never having the mother she had wanted. The truth is she got the mother she got, and in the end and we see something that feels like acceptance.