'Russian Doll' Season 2: That Ending Explained, All Your Questions Answered
Does time collapse? Does Nadia get her family's gold back? Here's what happens at the end of season 2 of the Netflix show. Get ready for spoilers.
- She has a master's degree in journalism from Syracuse University.
Nadia finds the past is just a train ride away.
Netflix comedy-drama series Russian Doll is back for another tangle with the fabric of time.
While the first season found Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) and Alan (Charlie Barnett) stuck in Groundhog Day-style time loops where they died, only to respawn like in a video game, this season, streaming now, delves into a different sort of time travel. Nadia and Alan both discover that getting on a particular subway train transports them into the past and into the bodies of their family members. Alan becomes his own grandmother in 1962 East Berlin, helping a friend tunnel to West Berlin. Nadia's travels are tied up in her family's lost Krugerrand gold coins, which her mother, Nora, stole from her grandmother in 1982.
Here's what happens at the end of season 2 of Russian Doll. But be warned: Spoilers ahead.
So, Nadia stole her infant self and brought her back to 2022. That's bad, right?
Back in 1982, while inside her mother Nora's body, Nadia's just given birth to herself. Knowing what a rough childhood she had, she decides that baby Nadia deserves a better mother -- herself.
After getting off the train with her baby self in 2022, time starts to get pretty wacky. Nadia experiences a strange episode after rushing to the hospital to see her godmother, Ruth, who has a pulmonary embolism and might not make it. At the hospital, time jumps around and she sees multiple versions of Ruth and her friends Maxine and Lizzy.
Nadia and Alan eventually find each other at Maxine's, where they're sort of back at Nadia's 36th birthday from the first season. As Alan tries to persuade Nadia she can't let time collapse on itself, time continues to fall apart around them. For one, Nadia sees multiple Ruths on the stairs walking up to Maxine's apartment. Maxine puts a cooked chicken in the oven and it comes out raw– standard time chaos.
Does Nadia take her infant self back to 1982?
Finally convinced the baby has to go back to Nora in 1982, Alan and Nadia try to make their way back to the train with baby Nadia. There are more signs of the collapse of time. When they get to the station, the train doesn't show up, and they go down the tracks, eventually finding a train car, but not the right train. When they get on, they find Maxine and Lizzy on the way to the wake of Nadia's godmother. It's April 30, and a month has passed somehow.
Once back out of the train, they continue to wander the tracks, and Alan talks about his experience in 1962 Berlin, how he wasn't sure if he was supposed to have stopped his grandmother's friend Lenny from tunneling to West Berlin. All of a sudden, trains come speeding toward the pair on the tracks from both sides. Instead of being hit by them, Alan and Nadia start falling (through time? space? both?), and each one ends up in some type of flooded hall with columns and arches. It's unclear if it's merely underneath the subway tracks for somewhere otherworldly. If you've read Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, the scene feels somewhat familiar -- the novel deals with inter-dimensional travel and features a flooded hall.
Alan's journey takes him to East Berlin in 1962.
What happens to Alan?
Alan finds an industrial-looking door and walks through it. He finds an older version of his grandmother, Agnes, who is now an MTA worker. It turns out Agnes was the MTA worker who helped Nadia/Nora when she fell asleep on the subway, which seems to underline that Nadia and Alan are connected, even if it's not clear how. He asks her what happened to Lenny. She doesn't know, but she says that helping Lenny get out was the way it was supposed to have been. Still, Alan is frustrated because he wants answers. She tells him they can't spend their lives so scared of making the wrong move that they never live at all. He tells her he'd tried to killed himself (referencing the events of the first season) and wasn't sure how to live with that. He also asks her where they are.
She says it's called the void, an empty pocket of space left over from a job that was never completed. She directs him back to the surface.
What happens to Nadia?
Meanwhile, back in the flooded hall, Nadia (holding her infant self) finds the leather bag with her family's lost gold coins. She fumbles with it and the baby and it sinks. She finds a similar door to the one Alan found, and goes through it. She finds a subway car with her mother sitting by herself. Her mother asks, if Nadia could choose her mother all over again, would she choose her (Nora). Nadia also sees Ruth on the car -- the present-day version, sitting next to her younger self. Likewise, she sees her grandmother in double, and a younger version of herself. Nadia hands the baby back to her mother.
The lights in the car go out, and when they come back, the car is full, and she sees her grandmother, mother (with baby) and Ruth making their way through the car. She says goodbye to Ruth. Nadia gets off the train. When she checks her watch, it's April 30, a month after her birthday. One Redditor speculated that Nadia missing both Ruth's death and funeral was a punishment of sorts for disrupting the timeline by abducting her infant self.
Finally, Nadia goes to Maxine's where they're holding the wake for Ruth. Alan's there. Nadia heads back to the bathroom (the spot from the first season where she kept regenerating).
What's the deal with Horse?
One minor recurring character is a homeless man named Horse. In season 1, Nadia thought he had something to do with the time loop, but that turned out to be a dead end. Fan theories have sprung up that perhaps Horse is involved, because of how he tends to turn up at odd moments. Elite Daily speculates that he's also a time traveler. One Redditor put forth an idea back when the first season aired that Horse was there to help Nadia and Alan navigate their loops. Another Redditor pointed out that before Nadia goes back to 1982 for the first time, she sees Horse on the subway platform and he calls her "Nora."
What actually closes the time loops?
Both Nadia and Alan are once again seemingly being taught some kind of lesson about grief and letting go of the past. Early on, Nora's ex-boyfriend Chez explains to Nadia the concept of what he calls a Coney Island, or a pivotal moment that people get stuck on, thinking that if it had played out differently, maybe life would have turned out better. In Nadia's family history, the Coney Island is tied to the fate of the Krugerrands. Nadia spends most of the season figuring out how to get them back, thinking she can save her mother and even change the course of her own life. Perhaps what finally closes the loop for her -- or at least sets her back toward fixing time -- is when she's presented with the bag of coins one last time and lets them go. And crucially on the train, accepts her mother for who she was.
For Charlie, perhaps it's the conversation with his grandmother, learning that there are just things in life you have to accept in order to keep moving forward.
Are Nadia and Alan dead?
Maybe? Who's to say? Some Redditors don't seem convinced there's a concrete answer to this question. Since both their adventures into time chaos started with their deaths, perhaps what we're watching is some kind of purgatorial journey, where they work through their trauma, grief and the like on the way to something else.
