The Cruel Twist of <em>Russian Doll</em>

This article contains spoilers through the second season of Russian Doll.

In a much-discussed for late last year, the critic Parul Sehgal analyzed the recent ubiquity of the trauma plot; the reliance, in books and on television, on stories that define characters by their pain, their guilt, the weight of their suffering. Trauma narratives, Sehgal wrote, are limited by their need to portray what trauma does: “annihilate the self, freeze the imagination, force stasis and repetition.” None of this was true of a fascinating and mind-bending series about a woman stuck in a time loop, dying over and over on her 36th birthday. Yes, Nadia (played with raspy old-man panache by the show’s co-creator Natasha Lyonne) was entrenched in a recurring cycle, but each trip toward death was equally puzzling and revealing. The show’s revelation that she wasn’t alone in her time loop blew up the parameters seemed to be saying, can truly survive alone, or without attending to others.