Netflix’s Russian Doll: The World Starts Falling Apart

Photo: Netflix In the final episodes of Netflix’s Russian Doll, the world starts falling apart. Then Nadia and Alan die one more time, and Russian Doll’s final twist is revealed: When we reach the season finale, the Nadia and Alan we’ve been following from the beginning are no longer in the same universe. They’ve been split into two separate timelines, each of them newly charged with a sense of purpose and a desire to live.

In the seventh episode, titled “The Way Out,” the time loops are rapidly erasing the world around Nadia and Alan, turning their personal limbo into an apocalyptic crisis. As she’s dying for the final time — before the final time, that is — Nadia’s young self appears before her and whispers, “She’s still inside you.” It’s a line that encompasses Nadia’s belief that all of their loops somehow exist at the same time, and also Ruth’s question about whether, somewhere inside Nadia, there’s still a young girl who desperately wants to live.

It feels like an ending, like Alan and Nadia have fixed everything at last. This is why it’s so excruciating when, in the final episode, Nadia and Alan’s timelines split. Alan manages to jolt her by first asking the deli guy to call Nadia and tell her that she owes Alan $152,780.86 — it’s a callback to episode five, when Nadia tells Alan about her family’s history in the Holocaust, about the large stash of gold bullion they purchased because they couldn’t trust banks, and about how her mother sold off all but one of the coins intended for Nadia’s college fund.

These stories are woven throughout Russian Doll’s season finale, and the show gives us our own version of Ariadne’s string to help navigate the maze. Meanwhile, at Nadia’s birthday party, a partygoer wraps a red scarf around the Alan who remembers everything, clearly distinguishing him from the suicidal Alan in the other timeline. Then, in the very last moments of the finale, the two timelines run in parallel.

Nadia is wearing a white blouse and Alan has a red scarf around his neck; they are the characters we’ve followed this whole time, and in the end, they make it through together. See the other two Nadias? Photo: Netflix The multiple Nadias in the parade imply that more than one alternate timeline exists.

All the Deaths in ‘Russian Doll’

Who Did Lyonne Refer To As Genderless?

But when the pair went back one last time, they realized they were separated by the magical realism at the center of the show. The finale played out in two parallel timelines so both Nadia and Alan could confront their personal traumas in one, while saving each other in another. The versions left standing were the all-knowing Nadia and Alan, the ones who had gone through all of the time loops of Russian Doll and had emerged stronger and fulfilled.

“A reference that Natasha brought up early on and one we kept alive during the writers room was All That Jazz — a montage of your life kind of thing,” Headland tells THR. A vertical chart listed the loops (denoted as Loop A, B, C, etc. and a horizontal chart kept track of the time of day and what time frame the loop was happening. “It’s different lives happening over and over again so, like the levels of a video game, these things have to be recreated and very thoughtfully changed based on what happened in the previous loop,” says Headland, rattling off an example like how Loop CC denotes a specific outfit for Barnett.

We’re not back in the same moment with exactly all the same things are happening. If there was one thing that I would add to peoples’ experience of Russian Doll, it would be that it’s a little bit more of a haunting.” Lyonne, who has referred to Nadia as genderless, also wanted to open the conversation around what it means to have a female protagonist or a female-driven show.

We’re asking a lot of interesting questions like, what is gender? Lyonne, Poehler and Headland pitched Russian Doll as a three-season series to Netflix and now, speaking to THR, both Lyonne and Headland say they hope to do more. And maybe it’s all one idea.

Are there others out there, beyond Nadia and Alan, and could they haunt those people next? “What I love leaving an audience with, and something I think we really did do here, is a feeling both of unease and a sense of narrative fulfillment,” says Headland. “There’s this lingering feeling of: ‘I’m not quite sure about how I feel about what I just saw.

That’s what I always hope for.

What Is Nadia’S Birthday?

For the first half of the season, our story focuses on Nadia, who is re-living her 36th birthday over and over, always ending in her inevitable death. Every time she dies, she wakes up, back at her own birthday party, where she repeats the whole thing over again. We learn more about her personal relationships than we do about what exactly is going on in her lonely loop.

As they reluctantly join forces to figure out what is going on, they find a few more parallels between their lives. Nadia went home with Mike the night she died, and Mike is the same man who Beatrice was cheating on Alan with. More importantly, Alan and Nadia crossed paths on the night of their original deaths.

As she’s dying for, presumably, the final time, the young Nadia tells her, “She’s still inside you.” It’s a comment that hints at the infinite simultaneous timelines and that the young child she once was is still living simultaneously inside old Nadia (in like an emotional baggage sense). Meanwhile, Alan must understand the circumstances that led to Beatrice cheating on him and forgive her.

Once Alan and Nadia both solve their own moral riddles, they wake up to their lives as they were the first night they died. Instead, our healed Nadia finds Alan drunk and suicidal on the night of his first death with no memory of their loops together. And Alan finds bitter, lost Nadia getting ready to go home with Mike and get hit by a car.

But, he hasn’t jumped yet, and Alan asks: “You promise if I don’t jump, I’ll be happy?” “Absolutely not,” Nadia responds, “but I can promise you that you will not be alone.” He’s saved, but Original Nadia isn’t as easy to convince.

At the end of this will they wake up again in their bathrooms? And they definitely have ideas for other seasons, should the show be picked up by Netflix again. Though viewers are left with a satisfying conclusion, there could still be more Russian Doll stories to tell—whether they’re about Nadia, or part of a larger anthology.

Which Season Of Russian Doll Did Lyonne Direct?

Loading THE LOOP Have you watched Russian Doll? YES NO Russian Doll: Season 1 Photos 12 IMAGES THE LABYRINTH Loading THE PARADE The 20 Biggest New Shows Coming to TV in 2019 21 IMAGES SEASON 2? Keep in mind, Russian Doll isn’t a show about hard answers.

This is a storytelling device that’s, fortunately, sublimely effective either way. When it’s done for sci-fi – like with Edge of Tomorrow, Source Code, or even the way Happy Death Day switched genres for its sequel – there’s usually a tech-y and/or alien-y culprit for the time reboot. The overarching point is that two people experiencing two very different crucibles had to jointly decide to overcome a modicum (in the grand scheme) of selfishness.

She then started to carry the weight of possibly creating even more turmoil for others, in other forgotten worlds, rather than it all just being an instance where the slate was wiped clean with each tumble down the stairs.Everything culminated in the season finale, Ariadne (named after the Greek princess who helped Theseus escape the Labyrinth), written and directed by Lyonne herself, where, after they both successfully took ownership of their respective issues, Nadia and Alan found themselves sent back to the original, untouched night of the party. that all explanations are right in a certain regard, Nadia’s multiverse theory was also dead on. Now though, new Nadia and new Alan couldn’t connect with each other. They were paired up with versions of the other who’d never looped.

As if the universe rewarded both of them by pairing the best friend versions of themselves back together.But it could have just been a symbolic scene meant to show us Alan and Nadia were no longer alone. However, we do see two other versions of Nadia passing her and Alan and walking the other way, implying that there may be other Nadias out there, perhaps on another loop?Not to end on a downer, but if everything is and isn’t, then the theories can get quite vast. In which case: Is this how people die?

In which case, Nadia and Alan would’ve been dead from the moment they died. Just a theory!While a second season of Russian Doll has yet to be confirmed, Lyonne and co-creator Leslye Headland have said that they originally pitched Netflix with three seasons of the show in mind.We definitely pitched it as this three-season idea and yet it’s so interesting to think about how that shapes and morphs in the time since making it, Lyonne told The Hollywood Reporter . And maybe it’s all one idea.Indeed, Nadia and Alan’s stories do seem to have been wrapped up pretty neatly by the end of Season 1, so an anthology approach with new characters in future seasons would seem to make sense – unless we’re going to follow one of those other two Nadias we spotted in the tunnel.

What Is The Name Of The Co-Creator And Showrunner Of Russian Doll?

Are you ready to get some help with getting to the bottom of it? Because every time you’re using you’re killing your emotional connection to life. You can’t nurture yourself, you can’t nurture relationships.

Leslye Headland, co-creator and showrunner, says she has had her own experiences with addiction and treatment. “I am familiar with both 12-step recovery as well as CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy] and EMDR therapy [eye-movement desensitisation and reprocessing]”. “Some people use them all up really quickly, and then they can continue to get high, but there will be consequences.

I wouldn’t want to feel prideful about it. Addiction stories such as The Lost Weekend (1945), Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and Requiem for a Dream (2000) have been showered with praise. The time-loop conceit allows the show to explore its themes without forcing viewers to confront the misery and degradation of serious addiction.

In this respect, the fact that it takes place on the night of Nadia’s 36th birthday party is significant. The main reason to be grateful for this show is that it pushes past addiction into what’s beyond. The idea that they are trapped inside some kind of computer game is mooted and theology is discussed, but like the 12-step programme itself, which refers to “God, as we understood Him”, Russian Doll doesn’t get too hung up on the divine.

Russian Doll’s finale allows viewers to vicariously experience that Technicolor beauty of recovery, without the tedium of addiction. More than that, by depicting the principles of treatment at one degree of allegorical remove, the show makes plain how much more widely applicable, for addicts and non-addicts alike, the 12 steps might be. “There are many layers.

But the addiction allegory works well. Russian Doll is available to stream now on Netflix

What Netflix Hit Makes For A Perfect Binge-Watching Experience?

Netflix Spoilers Ahead Netflix’s latest hit, Russian Doll, makes for a perfect binge-watching experience; the thirty-minute episodes are densely packed with plot, each expanding the central “time loop” concept into a labyrinth of entangled pathways, with the underlying mystery just vague enough to fuel multiple, wildly conflicting fan theories. But why were they trapped in purgatory in the first place? I’m not sure that there’s a singular, definitive explanation behind the phenomenon; Russian Doll is one of those stories with no “correct” interpretation.

But here are a few possibilities … Trapped in a Simulation The series most significant clue, arguably, might be the frequent references to video games, especially the game created by Nadia, which Alan believes to be much too difficult. The single scene of Nadia at her workplace appears to offer a major clue, with Nadia’s bug being blamed for their game crashing.

One piece of evidence for this theory rests in the mysterious “Horse,” the homeless man who Nadia believes she has a connection to. The character could be a kind of spirit guide, or an angel. This might be a reference to Charon, a character in Greek mythology.

She even jokingly states that “life is like a box of timelines.” The fact that she is haunted by glimpses of her childhood self indicates that Nadia is on to something; perhaps those loops that ended in her death did indeed continue without her, multiple fraying timelines sprawled out in different directions. And sometimes, they overlap.

Reality IS a Simulation The “multiple timelines” theory seems to be the closest to a definitive explanation, although it’s unclear why Alan’s suicide sparked the time loops in the first place, nor why each loop was missing elements (the mirrors, goldish, people, etc). In one loop, Maxine states that her missing mirror is intentional, a “commentary on narcissism,” and in her final loop, seems perfectly happy to party alone, after all of her companions go missing. The video game theory and timeline theory compliment one another, indicating that Russian Doll’s universe might not be a literal simulation, but certainly behaves like one, especially when “bugs” are encountered.

You’d have to be a New York insider to fully understand this theory, but Russian Doll creators Natasha Lyonne and Leslye Headland both tweeted at Zinoman, implying that this was indeed a concept that was on their mind during the creation of the show.

Who Is Still Alive When Horse First Appears In Russian Doll?

Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) is still alive when Horse (Brendan Sexton III) first appears in Russian Doll. Momentarily, he meets her gaze, as the beat stretches out a little too long to be entirely comfortable. But she lets it go, and moves on.

“I think I know this guy,” Nadia says, before calling out, “Do we know each other?” Based on Horse’s response (“Fuck off!”), the answer would be “no.” But the deeper Russian Doll gets into Nadia’s spacetime conundrum, the clearer it becomes that Horse still bears some significance to her story.

The first hint as to his possibly otherworldly nature is Nadia’s sense of déjà vu; the second is the first full encounter between them, in which he tells her he wants to cut her hair. Nadia’s hair — besides looking great — is also something of an emotional burden. “This is the old you,” he says, as he brandishes the severed locks.

He passes on the opportunity, opting to cut her hair instead, but they both die that night, freezing to death after sleeping outside. In combination with what she does next — following Horse to the shelter where he’s been sleeping in order to ensure that his shoes don’t get stolen — it’s the part of the series that mostly closely recalls the other great cyclical work of our time, Groundhog Day. She even brings him new shoes in another cycle, and bestows upon him her Kruggerand — her literal inheritance — telling him that it’s become “too heavy.”

That isn’t to say, however, that he’s a solely benevolent force. His appearance in the enlightened Nadia’s (but unenlightened Alan’s) timeline at the end of the series suggests that he’s capable of malevolence, too. “We got one,” he tells his compatriots, as he lures an impaired Alan back to his hideout, though Nadia prevents anything worse than shaking Alan down from happening.

He lives in the woods in Tompkins Square Park, and he is all of our unconscious or subconscious selves.” Pan — the Greek god of the wild, of shepherds, of chaos — makes sense as a point of comparison given Horse’s inherently chaotic nature. He says he helped to found the Dark Web, which, regardless of whether or not it’s true, paints a certain picture.

Photo: Netflix In the final episodes of Netflix’s Russian Doll, the world starts falling apart. Then Nadia and Alan die one more time, and Russian Doll’s final twist is revealed: When we reach the season finale, the Nadia and Alan we’ve been following from the beginning are no longer in the same universe. They’ve been split into two separate timelines, each of them newly charged with a sense of purpose and a desire to live.

In the seventh episode, titled “The Way Out,” the time loops are rapidly erasing the world around Nadia and Alan, turning their personal limbo into an apocalyptic crisis. As she’s dying for the final time — before the final time, that is — Nadia’s young self appears before her and whispers, “She’s still inside you.” It’s a line that encompasses Nadia’s belief that all of their loops somehow exist at the same time, and also Ruth’s question about whether, somewhere inside Nadia, there’s still a young girl who desperately wants to live.

It feels like an ending, like Alan and Nadia have fixed everything at last. This is why it’s so excruciating when, in the final episode, Nadia and Alan’s timelines split. Alan manages to jolt her by first asking the deli guy to call Nadia and tell her that she owes Alan $152,780.86 — it’s a callback to episode five, when Nadia tells Alan about her family’s history in the Holocaust, about the large stash of gold bullion they purchased because they couldn’t trust banks, and about how her mother sold off all but one of the coins intended for Nadia’s college fund.

These stories are woven throughout Russian Doll’s season finale, and the show gives us our own version of Ariadne’s string to help navigate the maze. Meanwhile, at Nadia’s birthday party, a partygoer wraps a red scarf around the Alan who remembers everything, clearly distinguishing him from the suicidal Alan in the other timeline. Then, in the very last moments of the finale, the two timelines run in parallel.

Nadia is wearing a white blouse and Alan has a red scarf around his neck; they are the characters we’ve followed this whole time, and in the end, they make it through together. See the other two Nadias? Photo: Netflix The multiple Nadias in the parade imply that more than one alternate timeline exists.

All the Deaths in ‘Russian Doll’

Who Did Lyonne Refer To As Genderless?

But when the pair went back one last time, they realized they were separated by the magical realism at the center of the show. The finale played out in two parallel timelines so both Nadia and Alan could confront their personal traumas in one, while saving each other in another. The versions left standing were the all-knowing Nadia and Alan, the ones who had gone through all of the time loops of Russian Doll and had emerged stronger and fulfilled.

“A reference that Natasha brought up early on and one we kept alive during the writers room was All That Jazz — a montage of your life kind of thing,” Headland tells THR. A vertical chart listed the loops (denoted as Loop A, B, C, etc. and a horizontal chart kept track of the time of day and what time frame the loop was happening. “It’s different lives happening over and over again so, like the levels of a video game, these things have to be recreated and very thoughtfully changed based on what happened in the previous loop,” says Headland, rattling off an example like how Loop CC denotes a specific outfit for Barnett.

We’re not back in the same moment with exactly all the same things are happening. If there was one thing that I would add to peoples’ experience of Russian Doll, it would be that it’s a little bit more of a haunting.” Lyonne, who has referred to Nadia as genderless, also wanted to open the conversation around what it means to have a female protagonist or a female-driven show.

We’re asking a lot of interesting questions like, what is gender? Lyonne, Poehler and Headland pitched Russian Doll as a three-season series to Netflix and now, speaking to THR, both Lyonne and Headland say they hope to do more. And maybe it’s all one idea.

Are there others out there, beyond Nadia and Alan, and could they haunt those people next? “What I love leaving an audience with, and something I think we really did do here, is a feeling both of unease and a sense of narrative fulfillment,” says Headland. “There’s this lingering feeling of: ‘I’m not quite sure about how I feel about what I just saw.

That’s what I always hope for.

What Is Nadia’S Birthday?

For the first half of the season, our story focuses on Nadia, who is re-living her 36th birthday over and over, always ending in her inevitable death. Every time she dies, she wakes up, back at her own birthday party, where she repeats the whole thing over again. We learn more about her personal relationships than we do about what exactly is going on in her lonely loop.

As they reluctantly join forces to figure out what is going on, they find a few more parallels between their lives. Nadia went home with Mike the night she died, and Mike is the same man who Beatrice was cheating on Alan with. More importantly, Alan and Nadia crossed paths on the night of their original deaths.

As she’s dying for, presumably, the final time, the young Nadia tells her, “She’s still inside you.” It’s a comment that hints at the infinite simultaneous timelines and that the young child she once was is still living simultaneously inside old Nadia (in like an emotional baggage sense). Meanwhile, Alan must understand the circumstances that led to Beatrice cheating on him and forgive her.

Once Alan and Nadia both solve their own moral riddles, they wake up to their lives as they were the first night they died. Instead, our healed Nadia finds Alan drunk and suicidal on the night of his first death with no memory of their loops together. And Alan finds bitter, lost Nadia getting ready to go home with Mike and get hit by a car.

But, he hasn’t jumped yet, and Alan asks: “You promise if I don’t jump, I’ll be happy?” “Absolutely not,” Nadia responds, “but I can promise you that you will not be alone.” He’s saved, but Original Nadia isn’t as easy to convince.

At the end of this will they wake up again in their bathrooms? And they definitely have ideas for other seasons, should the show be picked up by Netflix again. Though viewers are left with a satisfying conclusion, there could still be more Russian Doll stories to tell—whether they’re about Nadia, or part of a larger anthology.

Which Season Of Russian Doll Did Lyonne Direct?

Loading THE LOOP Have you watched Russian Doll? YES NO Russian Doll: Season 1 Photos 12 IMAGES THE LABYRINTH Loading THE PARADE The 20 Biggest New Shows Coming to TV in 2019 21 IMAGES SEASON 2? Keep in mind, Russian Doll isn’t a show about hard answers.

This is a storytelling device that’s, fortunately, sublimely effective either way. When it’s done for sci-fi – like with Edge of Tomorrow, Source Code, or even the way Happy Death Day switched genres for its sequel – there’s usually a tech-y and/or alien-y culprit for the time reboot. The overarching point is that two people experiencing two very different crucibles had to jointly decide to overcome a modicum (in the grand scheme) of selfishness.

She then started to carry the weight of possibly creating even more turmoil for others, in other forgotten worlds, rather than it all just being an instance where the slate was wiped clean with each tumble down the stairs.Everything culminated in the season finale, Ariadne (named after the Greek princess who helped Theseus escape the Labyrinth), written and directed by Lyonne herself, where, after they both successfully took ownership of their respective issues, Nadia and Alan found themselves sent back to the original, untouched night of the party. that all explanations are right in a certain regard, Nadia’s multiverse theory was also dead on. Now though, new Nadia and new Alan couldn’t connect with each other. They were paired up with versions of the other who’d never looped.

As if the universe rewarded both of them by pairing the best friend versions of themselves back together.But it could have just been a symbolic scene meant to show us Alan and Nadia were no longer alone. However, we do see two other versions of Nadia passing her and Alan and walking the other way, implying that there may be other Nadias out there, perhaps on another loop?Not to end on a downer, but if everything is and isn’t, then the theories can get quite vast. In which case: Is this how people die?

In which case, Nadia and Alan would’ve been dead from the moment they died. Just a theory!While a second season of Russian Doll has yet to be confirmed, Lyonne and co-creator Leslye Headland have said that they originally pitched Netflix with three seasons of the show in mind.We definitely pitched it as this three-season idea and yet it’s so interesting to think about how that shapes and morphs in the time since making it, Lyonne told The Hollywood Reporter . And maybe it’s all one idea.Indeed, Nadia and Alan’s stories do seem to have been wrapped up pretty neatly by the end of Season 1, so an anthology approach with new characters in future seasons would seem to make sense – unless we’re going to follow one of those other two Nadias we spotted in the tunnel.

What Is The Name Of The Co-Creator And Showrunner Of Russian Doll?

Are you ready to get some help with getting to the bottom of it? Because every time you’re using you’re killing your emotional connection to life. You can’t nurture yourself, you can’t nurture relationships.

Leslye Headland, co-creator and showrunner, says she has had her own experiences with addiction and treatment. “I am familiar with both 12-step recovery as well as CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy] and EMDR therapy [eye-movement desensitisation and reprocessing]”. “Some people use them all up really quickly, and then they can continue to get high, but there will be consequences.

I wouldn’t want to feel prideful about it. Addiction stories such as The Lost Weekend (1945), Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and Requiem for a Dream (2000) have been showered with praise. The time-loop conceit allows the show to explore its themes without forcing viewers to confront the misery and degradation of serious addiction.

In this respect, the fact that it takes place on the night of Nadia’s 36th birthday party is significant. The main reason to be grateful for this show is that it pushes past addiction into what’s beyond. The idea that they are trapped inside some kind of computer game is mooted and theology is discussed, but like the 12-step programme itself, which refers to “God, as we understood Him”, Russian Doll doesn’t get too hung up on the divine.

Russian Doll’s finale allows viewers to vicariously experience that Technicolor beauty of recovery, without the tedium of addiction. More than that, by depicting the principles of treatment at one degree of allegorical remove, the show makes plain how much more widely applicable, for addicts and non-addicts alike, the 12 steps might be. “There are many layers.

But the addiction allegory works well. Russian Doll is available to stream now on Netflix

What Netflix Hit Makes For A Perfect Binge-Watching Experience?

Netflix Spoilers Ahead Netflix’s latest hit, Russian Doll, makes for a perfect binge-watching experience; the thirty-minute episodes are densely packed with plot, each expanding the central “time loop” concept into a labyrinth of entangled pathways, with the underlying mystery just vague enough to fuel multiple, wildly conflicting fan theories. But why were they trapped in purgatory in the first place? I’m not sure that there’s a singular, definitive explanation behind the phenomenon; Russian Doll is one of those stories with no “correct” interpretation.

But here are a few possibilities … Trapped in a Simulation The series most significant clue, arguably, might be the frequent references to video games, especially the game created by Nadia, which Alan believes to be much too difficult. The single scene of Nadia at her workplace appears to offer a major clue, with Nadia’s bug being blamed for their game crashing.

One piece of evidence for this theory rests in the mysterious “Horse,” the homeless man who Nadia believes she has a connection to. The character could be a kind of spirit guide, or an angel. This might be a reference to Charon, a character in Greek mythology.

She even jokingly states that “life is like a box of timelines.” The fact that she is haunted by glimpses of her childhood self indicates that Nadia is on to something; perhaps those loops that ended in her death did indeed continue without her, multiple fraying timelines sprawled out in different directions. And sometimes, they overlap.

Reality IS a Simulation The “multiple timelines” theory seems to be the closest to a definitive explanation, although it’s unclear why Alan’s suicide sparked the time loops in the first place, nor why each loop was missing elements (the mirrors, goldish, people, etc). In one loop, Maxine states that her missing mirror is intentional, a “commentary on narcissism,” and in her final loop, seems perfectly happy to party alone, after all of her companions go missing. The video game theory and timeline theory compliment one another, indicating that Russian Doll’s universe might not be a literal simulation, but certainly behaves like one, especially when “bugs” are encountered.

You’d have to be a New York insider to fully understand this theory, but Russian Doll creators Natasha Lyonne and Leslye Headland both tweeted at Zinoman, implying that this was indeed a concept that was on their mind during the creation of the show.

Who Is Still Alive When Horse First Appears In Russian Doll?

Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) is still alive when Horse (Brendan Sexton III) first appears in Russian Doll. Momentarily, he meets her gaze, as the beat stretches out a little too long to be entirely comfortable. But she lets it go, and moves on.

“I think I know this guy,” Nadia says, before calling out, “Do we know each other?” Based on Horse’s response (“Fuck off!”), the answer would be “no.” But the deeper Russian Doll gets into Nadia’s spacetime conundrum, the clearer it becomes that Horse still bears some significance to her story.

The first hint as to his possibly otherworldly nature is Nadia’s sense of déjà vu; the second is the first full encounter between them, in which he tells her he wants to cut her hair. Nadia’s hair — besides looking great — is also something of an emotional burden. “This is the old you,” he says, as he brandishes the severed locks.

He passes on the opportunity, opting to cut her hair instead, but they both die that night, freezing to death after sleeping outside. In combination with what she does next — following Horse to the shelter where he’s been sleeping in order to ensure that his shoes don’t get stolen — it’s the part of the series that mostly closely recalls the other great cyclical work of our time, Groundhog Day. She even brings him new shoes in another cycle, and bestows upon him her Kruggerand — her literal inheritance — telling him that it’s become “too heavy.”

That isn’t to say, however, that he’s a solely benevolent force. His appearance in the enlightened Nadia’s (but unenlightened Alan’s) timeline at the end of the series suggests that he’s capable of malevolence, too. “We got one,” he tells his compatriots, as he lures an impaired Alan back to his hideout, though Nadia prevents anything worse than shaking Alan down from happening.

He lives in the woods in Tompkins Square Park, and he is all of our unconscious or subconscious selves.” Pan — the Greek god of the wild, of shepherds, of chaos — makes sense as a point of comparison given Horse’s inherently chaotic nature. He says he helped to found the Dark Web, which, regardless of whether or not it’s true, paints a certain picture.

Photo: Netflix In the final episodes of Netflix’s Russian Doll, the world starts falling apart. Then Nadia and Alan die one more time, and Russian Doll’s final twist is revealed: When we reach the season finale, the Nadia and Alan we’ve been following from the beginning are no longer in the same universe. They’ve been split into two separate timelines, each of them newly charged with a sense of purpose and a desire to live.

In the seventh episode, titled “The Way Out,” the time loops are rapidly erasing the world around Nadia and Alan, turning their personal limbo into an apocalyptic crisis. As she’s dying for the final time — before the final time, that is — Nadia’s young self appears before her and whispers, “She’s still inside you.” It’s a line that encompasses Nadia’s belief that all of their loops somehow exist at the same time, and also Ruth’s question about whether, somewhere inside Nadia, there’s still a young girl who desperately wants to live.

It feels like an ending, like Alan and Nadia have fixed everything at last. This is why it’s so excruciating when, in the final episode, Nadia and Alan’s timelines split. Alan manages to jolt her by first asking the deli guy to call Nadia and tell her that she owes Alan $152,780.86 — it’s a callback to episode five, when Nadia tells Alan about her family’s history in the Holocaust, about the large stash of gold bullion they purchased because they couldn’t trust banks, and about how her mother sold off all but one of the coins intended for Nadia’s college fund.

These stories are woven throughout Russian Doll’s season finale, and the show gives us our own version of Ariadne’s string to help navigate the maze. Meanwhile, at Nadia’s birthday party, a partygoer wraps a red scarf around the Alan who remembers everything, clearly distinguishing him from the suicidal Alan in the other timeline. Then, in the very last moments of the finale, the two timelines run in parallel.

Nadia is wearing a white blouse and Alan has a red scarf around his neck; they are the characters we’ve followed this whole time, and in the end, they make it through together. See the other two Nadias? Photo: Netflix The multiple Nadias in the parade imply that more than one alternate timeline exists.

All the Deaths in ‘Russian Doll’

Who Did Lyonne Refer To As Genderless?

But when the pair went back one last time, they realized they were separated by the magical realism at the center of the show. The finale played out in two parallel timelines so both Nadia and Alan could confront their personal traumas in one, while saving each other in another. The versions left standing were the all-knowing Nadia and Alan, the ones who had gone through all of the time loops of Russian Doll and had emerged stronger and fulfilled.

“A reference that Natasha brought up early on and one we kept alive during the writers room was All That Jazz — a montage of your life kind of thing,” Headland tells THR. A vertical chart listed the loops (denoted as Loop A, B, C, etc. and a horizontal chart kept track of the time of day and what time frame the loop was happening. “It’s different lives happening over and over again so, like the levels of a video game, these things have to be recreated and very thoughtfully changed based on what happened in the previous loop,” says Headland, rattling off an example like how Loop CC denotes a specific outfit for Barnett.

We’re not back in the same moment with exactly all the same things are happening. If there was one thing that I would add to peoples’ experience of Russian Doll, it would be that it’s a little bit more of a haunting.” Lyonne, who has referred to Nadia as genderless, also wanted to open the conversation around what it means to have a female protagonist or a female-driven show.

We’re asking a lot of interesting questions like, what is gender? Lyonne, Poehler and Headland pitched Russian Doll as a three-season series to Netflix and now, speaking to THR, both Lyonne and Headland say they hope to do more. And maybe it’s all one idea.

Are there others out there, beyond Nadia and Alan, and could they haunt those people next? “What I love leaving an audience with, and something I think we really did do here, is a feeling both of unease and a sense of narrative fulfillment,” says Headland. “There’s this lingering feeling of: ‘I’m not quite sure about how I feel about what I just saw.

That’s what I always hope for.

What Is Nadia’S Birthday?

For the first half of the season, our story focuses on Nadia, who is re-living her 36th birthday over and over, always ending in her inevitable death. Every time she dies, she wakes up, back at her own birthday party, where she repeats the whole thing over again. We learn more about her personal relationships than we do about what exactly is going on in her lonely loop.

As they reluctantly join forces to figure out what is going on, they find a few more parallels between their lives. Nadia went home with Mike the night she died, and Mike is the same man who Beatrice was cheating on Alan with. More importantly, Alan and Nadia crossed paths on the night of their original deaths.

As she’s dying for, presumably, the final time, the young Nadia tells her, “She’s still inside you.” It’s a comment that hints at the infinite simultaneous timelines and that the young child she once was is still living simultaneously inside old Nadia (in like an emotional baggage sense). Meanwhile, Alan must understand the circumstances that led to Beatrice cheating on him and forgive her.

Once Alan and Nadia both solve their own moral riddles, they wake up to their lives as they were the first night they died. Instead, our healed Nadia finds Alan drunk and suicidal on the night of his first death with no memory of their loops together. And Alan finds bitter, lost Nadia getting ready to go home with Mike and get hit by a car.

But, he hasn’t jumped yet, and Alan asks: “You promise if I don’t jump, I’ll be happy?” “Absolutely not,” Nadia responds, “but I can promise you that you will not be alone.” He’s saved, but Original Nadia isn’t as easy to convince.

At the end of this will they wake up again in their bathrooms? And they definitely have ideas for other seasons, should the show be picked up by Netflix again. Though viewers are left with a satisfying conclusion, there could still be more Russian Doll stories to tell—whether they’re about Nadia, or part of a larger anthology.

Which Season Of Russian Doll Did Lyonne Direct?

Loading THE LOOP Have you watched Russian Doll? YES NO Russian Doll: Season 1 Photos 12 IMAGES THE LABYRINTH Loading THE PARADE The 20 Biggest New Shows Coming to TV in 2019 21 IMAGES SEASON 2? Keep in mind, Russian Doll isn’t a show about hard answers.

This is a storytelling device that’s, fortunately, sublimely effective either way. When it’s done for sci-fi – like with Edge of Tomorrow, Source Code, or even the way Happy Death Day switched genres for its sequel – there’s usually a tech-y and/or alien-y culprit for the time reboot. The overarching point is that two people experiencing two very different crucibles had to jointly decide to overcome a modicum (in the grand scheme) of selfishness.

She then started to carry the weight of possibly creating even more turmoil for others, in other forgotten worlds, rather than it all just being an instance where the slate was wiped clean with each tumble down the stairs.Everything culminated in the season finale, Ariadne (named after the Greek princess who helped Theseus escape the Labyrinth), written and directed by Lyonne herself, where, after they both successfully took ownership of their respective issues, Nadia and Alan found themselves sent back to the original, untouched night of the party. that all explanations are right in a certain regard, Nadia’s multiverse theory was also dead on. Now though, new Nadia and new Alan couldn’t connect with each other. They were paired up with versions of the other who’d never looped.

As if the universe rewarded both of them by pairing the best friend versions of themselves back together.But it could have just been a symbolic scene meant to show us Alan and Nadia were no longer alone. However, we do see two other versions of Nadia passing her and Alan and walking the other way, implying that there may be other Nadias out there, perhaps on another loop?Not to end on a downer, but if everything is and isn’t, then the theories can get quite vast. In which case: Is this how people die?

In which case, Nadia and Alan would’ve been dead from the moment they died. Just a theory!While a second season of Russian Doll has yet to be confirmed, Lyonne and co-creator Leslye Headland have said that they originally pitched Netflix with three seasons of the show in mind.We definitely pitched it as this three-season idea and yet it’s so interesting to think about how that shapes and morphs in the time since making it, Lyonne told The Hollywood Reporter . And maybe it’s all one idea.Indeed, Nadia and Alan’s stories do seem to have been wrapped up pretty neatly by the end of Season 1, so an anthology approach with new characters in future seasons would seem to make sense – unless we’re going to follow one of those other two Nadias we spotted in the tunnel.

What Is The Name Of The Co-Creator And Showrunner Of Russian Doll?

Are you ready to get some help with getting to the bottom of it? Because every time you’re using you’re killing your emotional connection to life. You can’t nurture yourself, you can’t nurture relationships.

Leslye Headland, co-creator and showrunner, says she has had her own experiences with addiction and treatment. “I am familiar with both 12-step recovery as well as CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy] and EMDR therapy [eye-movement desensitisation and reprocessing]”. “Some people use them all up really quickly, and then they can continue to get high, but there will be consequences.

I wouldn’t want to feel prideful about it. Addiction stories such as The Lost Weekend (1945), Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and Requiem for a Dream (2000) have been showered with praise. The time-loop conceit allows the show to explore its themes without forcing viewers to confront the misery and degradation of serious addiction.

In this respect, the fact that it takes place on the night of Nadia’s 36th birthday party is significant. The main reason to be grateful for this show is that it pushes past addiction into what’s beyond. The idea that they are trapped inside some kind of computer game is mooted and theology is discussed, but like the 12-step programme itself, which refers to “God, as we understood Him”, Russian Doll doesn’t get too hung up on the divine.

Russian Doll’s finale allows viewers to vicariously experience that Technicolor beauty of recovery, without the tedium of addiction. More than that, by depicting the principles of treatment at one degree of allegorical remove, the show makes plain how much more widely applicable, for addicts and non-addicts alike, the 12 steps might be. “There are many layers.

But the addiction allegory works well. Russian Doll is available to stream now on Netflix

What Netflix Hit Makes For A Perfect Binge-Watching Experience?

Netflix Spoilers Ahead Netflix’s latest hit, Russian Doll, makes for a perfect binge-watching experience; the thirty-minute episodes are densely packed with plot, each expanding the central “time loop” concept into a labyrinth of entangled pathways, with the underlying mystery just vague enough to fuel multiple, wildly conflicting fan theories. But why were they trapped in purgatory in the first place? I’m not sure that there’s a singular, definitive explanation behind the phenomenon; Russian Doll is one of those stories with no “correct” interpretation.

But here are a few possibilities … Trapped in a Simulation The series most significant clue, arguably, might be the frequent references to video games, especially the game created by Nadia, which Alan believes to be much too difficult. The single scene of Nadia at her workplace appears to offer a major clue, with Nadia’s bug being blamed for their game crashing.

One piece of evidence for this theory rests in the mysterious “Horse,” the homeless man who Nadia believes she has a connection to. The character could be a kind of spirit guide, or an angel. This might be a reference to Charon, a character in Greek mythology.

She even jokingly states that “life is like a box of timelines.” The fact that she is haunted by glimpses of her childhood self indicates that Nadia is on to something; perhaps those loops that ended in her death did indeed continue without her, multiple fraying timelines sprawled out in different directions. And sometimes, they overlap.

Reality IS a Simulation The “multiple timelines” theory seems to be the closest to a definitive explanation, although it’s unclear why Alan’s suicide sparked the time loops in the first place, nor why each loop was missing elements (the mirrors, goldish, people, etc). In one loop, Maxine states that her missing mirror is intentional, a “commentary on narcissism,” and in her final loop, seems perfectly happy to party alone, after all of her companions go missing. The video game theory and timeline theory compliment one another, indicating that Russian Doll’s universe might not be a literal simulation, but certainly behaves like one, especially when “bugs” are encountered.

You’d have to be a New York insider to fully understand this theory, but Russian Doll creators Natasha Lyonne and Leslye Headland both tweeted at Zinoman, implying that this was indeed a concept that was on their mind during the creation of the show.

Who Is Still Alive When Horse First Appears In Russian Doll?

Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) is still alive when Horse (Brendan Sexton III) first appears in Russian Doll. Momentarily, he meets her gaze, as the beat stretches out a little too long to be entirely comfortable. But she lets it go, and moves on.

“I think I know this guy,” Nadia says, before calling out, “Do we know each other?” Based on Horse’s response (“Fuck off!”), the answer would be “no.” But the deeper Russian Doll gets into Nadia’s spacetime conundrum, the clearer it becomes that Horse still bears some significance to her story.

The first hint as to his possibly otherworldly nature is Nadia’s sense of déjà vu; the second is the first full encounter between them, in which he tells her he wants to cut her hair. Nadia’s hair — besides looking great — is also something of an emotional burden. “This is the old you,” he says, as he brandishes the severed locks.

He passes on the opportunity, opting to cut her hair instead, but they both die that night, freezing to death after sleeping outside. In combination with what she does next — following Horse to the shelter where he’s been sleeping in order to ensure that his shoes don’t get stolen — it’s the part of the series that mostly closely recalls the other great cyclical work of our time, Groundhog Day. She even brings him new shoes in another cycle, and bestows upon him her Kruggerand — her literal inheritance — telling him that it’s become “too heavy.”

That isn’t to say, however, that he’s a solely benevolent force. His appearance in the enlightened Nadia’s (but unenlightened Alan’s) timeline at the end of the series suggests that he’s capable of malevolence, too. “We got one,” he tells his compatriots, as he lures an impaired Alan back to his hideout, though Nadia prevents anything worse than shaking Alan down from happening.

He lives in the woods in Tompkins Square Park, and he is all of our unconscious or subconscious selves.” Pan — the Greek god of the wild, of shepherds, of chaos — makes sense as a point of comparison given Horse’s inherently chaotic nature. He says he helped to found the Dark Web, which, regardless of whether or not it’s true, paints a certain picture.

Photo: Netflix In the final episodes of Netflix’s Russian Doll, the world starts falling apart. Then Nadia and Alan die one more time, and Russian Doll’s final twist is revealed: When we reach the season finale, the Nadia and Alan we’ve been following from the beginning are no longer in the same universe. They’ve been split into two separate timelines, each of them newly charged with a sense of purpose and a desire to live.

In the seventh episode, titled “The Way Out,” the time loops are rapidly erasing the world around Nadia and Alan, turning their personal limbo into an apocalyptic crisis. As she’s dying for the final time — before the final time, that is — Nadia’s young self appears before her and whispers, “She’s still inside you.” It’s a line that encompasses Nadia’s belief that all of their loops somehow exist at the same time, and also Ruth’s question about whether, somewhere inside Nadia, there’s still a young girl who desperately wants to live.

It feels like an ending, like Alan and Nadia have fixed everything at last. This is why it’s so excruciating when, in the final episode, Nadia and Alan’s timelines split. Alan manages to jolt her by first asking the deli guy to call Nadia and tell her that she owes Alan $152,780.86 — it’s a callback to episode five, when Nadia tells Alan about her family’s history in the Holocaust, about the large stash of gold bullion they purchased because they couldn’t trust banks, and about how her mother sold off all but one of the coins intended for Nadia’s college fund.

These stories are woven throughout Russian Doll’s season finale, and the show gives us our own version of Ariadne’s string to help navigate the maze. Meanwhile, at Nadia’s birthday party, a partygoer wraps a red scarf around the Alan who remembers everything, clearly distinguishing him from the suicidal Alan in the other timeline. Then, in the very last moments of the finale, the two timelines run in parallel.

Nadia is wearing a white blouse and Alan has a red scarf around his neck; they are the characters we’ve followed this whole time, and in the end, they make it through together. See the other two Nadias? Photo: Netflix The multiple Nadias in the parade imply that more than one alternate timeline exists.

All the Deaths in ‘Russian Doll’

Who Did Lyonne Refer To As Genderless?

But when the pair went back one last time, they realized they were separated by the magical realism at the center of the show. The finale played out in two parallel timelines so both Nadia and Alan could confront their personal traumas in one, while saving each other in another. The versions left standing were the all-knowing Nadia and Alan, the ones who had gone through all of the time loops of Russian Doll and had emerged stronger and fulfilled.

“A reference that Natasha brought up early on and one we kept alive during the writers room was All That Jazz — a montage of your life kind of thing,” Headland tells THR. A vertical chart listed the loops (denoted as Loop A, B, C, etc. and a horizontal chart kept track of the time of day and what time frame the loop was happening. “It’s different lives happening over and over again so, like the levels of a video game, these things have to be recreated and very thoughtfully changed based on what happened in the previous loop,” says Headland, rattling off an example like how Loop CC denotes a specific outfit for Barnett.

We’re not back in the same moment with exactly all the same things are happening. If there was one thing that I would add to peoples’ experience of Russian Doll, it would be that it’s a little bit more of a haunting.” Lyonne, who has referred to Nadia as genderless, also wanted to open the conversation around what it means to have a female protagonist or a female-driven show.

We’re asking a lot of interesting questions like, what is gender? Lyonne, Poehler and Headland pitched Russian Doll as a three-season series to Netflix and now, speaking to THR, both Lyonne and Headland say they hope to do more. And maybe it’s all one idea.

Are there others out there, beyond Nadia and Alan, and could they haunt those people next? “What I love leaving an audience with, and something I think we really did do here, is a feeling both of unease and a sense of narrative fulfillment,” says Headland. “There’s this lingering feeling of: ‘I’m not quite sure about how I feel about what I just saw.

That’s what I always hope for.

What Is Nadia’S Birthday?

For the first half of the season, our story focuses on Nadia, who is re-living her 36th birthday over and over, always ending in her inevitable death. Every time she dies, she wakes up, back at her own birthday party, where she repeats the whole thing over again. We learn more about her personal relationships than we do about what exactly is going on in her lonely loop.

As they reluctantly join forces to figure out what is going on, they find a few more parallels between their lives. Nadia went home with Mike the night she died, and Mike is the same man who Beatrice was cheating on Alan with. More importantly, Alan and Nadia crossed paths on the night of their original deaths.

As she’s dying for, presumably, the final time, the young Nadia tells her, “She’s still inside you.” It’s a comment that hints at the infinite simultaneous timelines and that the young child she once was is still living simultaneously inside old Nadia (in like an emotional baggage sense). Meanwhile, Alan must understand the circumstances that led to Beatrice cheating on him and forgive her.

Once Alan and Nadia both solve their own moral riddles, they wake up to their lives as they were the first night they died. Instead, our healed Nadia finds Alan drunk and suicidal on the night of his first death with no memory of their loops together. And Alan finds bitter, lost Nadia getting ready to go home with Mike and get hit by a car.

But, he hasn’t jumped yet, and Alan asks: “You promise if I don’t jump, I’ll be happy?” “Absolutely not,” Nadia responds, “but I can promise you that you will not be alone.” He’s saved, but Original Nadia isn’t as easy to convince.

At the end of this will they wake up again in their bathrooms? And they definitely have ideas for other seasons, should the show be picked up by Netflix again. Though viewers are left with a satisfying conclusion, there could still be more Russian Doll stories to tell—whether they’re about Nadia, or part of a larger anthology.

Which Season Of Russian Doll Did Lyonne Direct?

Loading THE LOOP Have you watched Russian Doll? YES NO Russian Doll: Season 1 Photos 12 IMAGES THE LABYRINTH Loading THE PARADE The 20 Biggest New Shows Coming to TV in 2019 21 IMAGES SEASON 2? Keep in mind, Russian Doll isn’t a show about hard answers.

This is a storytelling device that’s, fortunately, sublimely effective either way. When it’s done for sci-fi – like with Edge of Tomorrow, Source Code, or even the way Happy Death Day switched genres for its sequel – there’s usually a tech-y and/or alien-y culprit for the time reboot. The overarching point is that two people experiencing two very different crucibles had to jointly decide to overcome a modicum (in the grand scheme) of selfishness.

She then started to carry the weight of possibly creating even more turmoil for others, in other forgotten worlds, rather than it all just being an instance where the slate was wiped clean with each tumble down the stairs.Everything culminated in the season finale, Ariadne (named after the Greek princess who helped Theseus escape the Labyrinth), written and directed by Lyonne herself, where, after they both successfully took ownership of their respective issues, Nadia and Alan found themselves sent back to the original, untouched night of the party. that all explanations are right in a certain regard, Nadia’s multiverse theory was also dead on. Now though, new Nadia and new Alan couldn’t connect with each other. They were paired up with versions of the other who’d never looped.

As if the universe rewarded both of them by pairing the best friend versions of themselves back together.But it could have just been a symbolic scene meant to show us Alan and Nadia were no longer alone. However, we do see two other versions of Nadia passing her and Alan and walking the other way, implying that there may be other Nadias out there, perhaps on another loop?Not to end on a downer, but if everything is and isn’t, then the theories can get quite vast. In which case: Is this how people die?

In which case, Nadia and Alan would’ve been dead from the moment they died. Just a theory!While a second season of Russian Doll has yet to be confirmed, Lyonne and co-creator Leslye Headland have said that they originally pitched Netflix with three seasons of the show in mind.We definitely pitched it as this three-season idea and yet it’s so interesting to think about how that shapes and morphs in the time since making it, Lyonne told The Hollywood Reporter . And maybe it’s all one idea.Indeed, Nadia and Alan’s stories do seem to have been wrapped up pretty neatly by the end of Season 1, so an anthology approach with new characters in future seasons would seem to make sense – unless we’re going to follow one of those other two Nadias we spotted in the tunnel.

What Is The Name Of The Co-Creator And Showrunner Of Russian Doll?

Are you ready to get some help with getting to the bottom of it? Because every time you’re using you’re killing your emotional connection to life. You can’t nurture yourself, you can’t nurture relationships.

Leslye Headland, co-creator and showrunner, says she has had her own experiences with addiction and treatment. “I am familiar with both 12-step recovery as well as CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy] and EMDR therapy [eye-movement desensitisation and reprocessing]”. “Some people use them all up really quickly, and then they can continue to get high, but there will be consequences.

I wouldn’t want to feel prideful about it. Addiction stories such as The Lost Weekend (1945), Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and Requiem for a Dream (2000) have been showered with praise. The time-loop conceit allows the show to explore its themes without forcing viewers to confront the misery and degradation of serious addiction.

In this respect, the fact that it takes place on the night of Nadia’s 36th birthday party is significant. The main reason to be grateful for this show is that it pushes past addiction into what’s beyond. The idea that they are trapped inside some kind of computer game is mooted and theology is discussed, but like the 12-step programme itself, which refers to “God, as we understood Him”, Russian Doll doesn’t get too hung up on the divine.

Russian Doll’s finale allows viewers to vicariously experience that Technicolor beauty of recovery, without the tedium of addiction. More than that, by depicting the principles of treatment at one degree of allegorical remove, the show makes plain how much more widely applicable, for addicts and non-addicts alike, the 12 steps might be. “There are many layers.

But the addiction allegory works well. Russian Doll is available to stream now on Netflix

What Netflix Hit Makes For A Perfect Binge-Watching Experience?

Netflix Spoilers Ahead Netflix’s latest hit, Russian Doll, makes for a perfect binge-watching experience; the thirty-minute episodes are densely packed with plot, each expanding the central “time loop” concept into a labyrinth of entangled pathways, with the underlying mystery just vague enough to fuel multiple, wildly conflicting fan theories. But why were they trapped in purgatory in the first place? I’m not sure that there’s a singular, definitive explanation behind the phenomenon; Russian Doll is one of those stories with no “correct” interpretation.

But here are a few possibilities … Trapped in a Simulation The series most significant clue, arguably, might be the frequent references to video games, especially the game created by Nadia, which Alan believes to be much too difficult. The single scene of Nadia at her workplace appears to offer a major clue, with Nadia’s bug being blamed for their game crashing.

One piece of evidence for this theory rests in the mysterious “Horse,” the homeless man who Nadia believes she has a connection to. The character could be a kind of spirit guide, or an angel. This might be a reference to Charon, a character in Greek mythology.

She even jokingly states that “life is like a box of timelines.” The fact that she is haunted by glimpses of her childhood self indicates that Nadia is on to something; perhaps those loops that ended in her death did indeed continue without her, multiple fraying timelines sprawled out in different directions. And sometimes, they overlap.

Reality IS a Simulation The “multiple timelines” theory seems to be the closest to a definitive explanation, although it’s unclear why Alan’s suicide sparked the time loops in the first place, nor why each loop was missing elements (the mirrors, goldish, people, etc). In one loop, Maxine states that her missing mirror is intentional, a “commentary on narcissism,” and in her final loop, seems perfectly happy to party alone, after all of her companions go missing. The video game theory and timeline theory compliment one another, indicating that Russian Doll’s universe might not be a literal simulation, but certainly behaves like one, especially when “bugs” are encountered.

You’d have to be a New York insider to fully understand this theory, but Russian Doll creators Natasha Lyonne and Leslye Headland both tweeted at Zinoman, implying that this was indeed a concept that was on their mind during the creation of the show.

Who Is Still Alive When Horse First Appears In Russian Doll?

Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) is still alive when Horse (Brendan Sexton III) first appears in Russian Doll. Momentarily, he meets her gaze, as the beat stretches out a little too long to be entirely comfortable. But she lets it go, and moves on.

“I think I know this guy,” Nadia says, before calling out, “Do we know each other?” Based on Horse’s response (“Fuck off!”), the answer would be “no.” But the deeper Russian Doll gets into Nadia’s spacetime conundrum, the clearer it becomes that Horse still bears some significance to her story.

The first hint as to his possibly otherworldly nature is Nadia’s sense of déjà vu; the second is the first full encounter between them, in which he tells her he wants to cut her hair. Nadia’s hair — besides looking great — is also something of an emotional burden. “This is the old you,” he says, as he brandishes the severed locks.

He passes on the opportunity, opting to cut her hair instead, but they both die that night, freezing to death after sleeping outside. In combination with what she does next — following Horse to the shelter where he’s been sleeping in order to ensure that his shoes don’t get stolen — it’s the part of the series that mostly closely recalls the other great cyclical work of our time, Groundhog Day. She even brings him new shoes in another cycle, and bestows upon him her Kruggerand — her literal inheritance — telling him that it’s become “too heavy.”

That isn’t to say, however, that he’s a solely benevolent force. His appearance in the enlightened Nadia’s (but unenlightened Alan’s) timeline at the end of the series suggests that he’s capable of malevolence, too. “We got one,” he tells his compatriots, as he lures an impaired Alan back to his hideout, though Nadia prevents anything worse than shaking Alan down from happening.

He lives in the woods in Tompkins Square Park, and he is all of our unconscious or subconscious selves.” Pan — the Greek god of the wild, of shepherds, of chaos — makes sense as a point of comparison given Horse’s inherently chaotic nature. He says he helped to found the Dark Web, which, regardless of whether or not it’s true, paints a certain picture.