Warning: Major spoilers for Russian Doll follow.
No offense to E.M. Forster, but “Only connect” is a scam. The phrase appeared in Forster’s 1910 novel Howards End, expressing its heroine Margaret Schlegel’s theory that by marrying fragmented parts of yourself, you can enrich your life. Since then, though, it’s fallen into more general use as an inspirational guideline for basic humanity. Only connect with someone else, it implies, and goodness will follow.
Now that we’re all aggressively connected, all the time, it’s obvious how hollow connection can be. Now, we only connect to each other as anonymous Twitter eggs; only connect over nothingy crap at Christmastime (no politics, please, pass the potatoes); only connect within our class, in our comfort zone, just as far as society’s strictures and assumptions will allow.
Natasha Lyonne, who has been writing Russian Doll for ten years, only subtly situates its redheaded grump, Nadia, in the Times We Live In. Nadia lives in an East Village peopled with Wall Street bros rather than postmodern artists, and leads a gig economy life as a video game coder. But the show—which finds Nadia stuck in a puzzling Groundhog Day–like loop of death, rebirth, and emotional excavation—feels explicitly designed for America’s 2019, an era so defined by alienation that it feels like a cliché to even mention it.
When we first meet Nadia, she’s at her 36th birthday party, thrown by an artist friend, Max (Greta Lee). She looks at her reflection in the bathroom mirror, steadies herself, and tumbles into a rollicking room packed with beautifully dressed people and conscientious conviviality. “Sweet birthday baby,” Max coos, but the birthday girl isn’t having it. “I’m staring down the barrel of my own mortality,” Nadia carps, and decides to bury her head in the time-honored sand, hooking up with the nondescript Mike (Jeremy Bobb) back at her place long before the party is over. Afterward, she realizes her cat is missing, heads out into the night, and is hit by a car.
Next thing we know, it’s the same bathroom, same Nadia, same party—or so it seems. Is she dead or pinned to her own psyche by a drug cocktail? It becomes imperative to figure out because soon, she’s dead again, having taken a fall down a flight of stairs. The answer is odder than seems possible, especially when she meets Alan (Charlie Barnett), a human bag of sadness who has also somehow found himself in a loop of endless deaths.
When I’m describing this show to someone who hasn’t seen it, I’m resolute in not uncovering plot twists or revealing how Nadia’s investigation progresses. I’ll just say, Russian Doll is like Groundhog Day, but with art hipsters, and it’s very, very good. Watching Lyonne bluster through endless mutating timelines is a pleasure that compounds as the mystery of her time loop explains itself. But the finale, thanks to Nadia’s self-exploration, lands a gut punch that deserves discussion.
As Nadia tries to find out why she keeps dying, she runs into elements of her past that warrant a second look. Nadia’s ex (Yul Vasquez)—who left his wife to be with Nadia—arrives at the party, and it becomes apparent that she broke up with him before meeting his daughter, guided by self-protectiveness and an avoidance of meaningful relationships. Then there’s Nadia’s mother (a brittle, charismatic Chloe Sevigny), a mentally ill woman whose difficult life and early death a young Nadia thought was her fault.
With each do-over, Nadia manages to revise her life, leading with love and consideration and forgiveness rather than her customary selfishness. But that’s only the first level of what she needs to learn. Gradually, she and Charlie realize that they’ve been paired for a reason; their mutual purgatory stems from the fact that they actually met on the night they both died. Theoretically, they could have saved each other.
This might sound like hippie woo-wooism—Only Connect-ness at its most scoldy and familiar. But the finale pushes it further. They’ve “connected,” sure; that doesn’t mean anything. Just because you find out the truth about life doesn’t mean you’re going to do anything with that information. And so the heartbreaking final episode sees Charlie and Nadia back in their original timelines. But this time, each wakes up to a version of that first night in which the other person doesn’t recognize them. The episode splits into two different versions; in one, Charlie tries to make sure a skeptical Nadia doesn’t die, and in the other, Nadia tries to prevent a bereft Charlie from killing himself.
It’s uncomfortable watching. Russian Doll insists that to make a difference in the life of another person, its protagonists might have to behave in ways that would be viewed as impolite, unchill, and invasive. Female viewers may wince watching Charlie follow Nadia and Mike home, urging her to believe that he’s trying to save her life. Unsurprisingly, she’s not receptive. A man following her home, ranting about her fatal future? No fucking thanks. So he racks his brain for ways to make her trust him, eventually landing on an obscure fact about her past and her obsession with her lost cat. Meanwhile, Nadia tracks a completely wasted Charlie through the East Village, eyes on him like a bodyguard.
I think of myself as a fairly caring person, but would I ever do that for a stranger? I doubt it. I’m guessing I’d find it sufficient to check in on someone, then move on, satisfied I’d done what a decent person should do.
Netflix
Which is not to say that Russian Doll wants you to become emotionally dependent on another person or weirdly stalk them in case of accidental death. It’s still a TV show. But what it does suggest that “Only connect” isn’t enough. You can’t watch it, go through the wringer with Lyonne (who told ELLE.com that the show is very personal), and sit back on your couch satisfied at the end, safe in the knowledge that you get it. We don’t mystically receive life-saving partners IRL. There are no do-overs. For Russian Doll, if we’re going to think in terms of any old-ass quote, it should probably be that Roosevelt thing: Anything worth doing is hard. Connecting is easy. It’s really only the start.
Russian Doll is streaming on Netflix now.
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