In season one of Russian Doll we’re introduced to Nadia Vulvokov, a software engineer at a video
game company. Nadia is brash and has a massive chip on her shoulder. For Nadia’s 36th birthday,
her best friend Maxine throws a massive party at her newly renovated apartment. Nadia smokes
an Israeli joint laced with cocaine, then meets a man named Mike whom she ditches the party for and
the two head off for Nadia’s apartment. Along the way, they stop at a deli to pick up some
essentials and Nadia takes note of the deli clerk’s friend as he drunkenly makes a mess.
At Nadia’s apartment, she and Mike have sex,
and afterwords Nadia goes off in search of her missing cat, Oatmeal.
The night takes an abrupt turn when Nadia is then struck by a car, killing her instantly.
Nadia then wakes back up in the bathroom of Maxine’s apartment, once again reliving her
birthday party. This time, a confused Nadia misses Mike and is instead confronted by her
ex-boyfriend, John. John had left his wife to be with Nadia, who subsequently dumped him.
John still wants nothing more than to be with Nadia and introduce her to his daughter,
but Nadia’s self-destructive tendencies push him away. When John helps Nadia look for Oatmeal,
he saves her from being struck by a car, but after successfully finding Oatmeal,
the cat disappears from Nadia’s arms and she falls from a bridge, killing her once again.
Nadia wakes back up in the bathroom, once again reliving her birthday party.
She was now determined to uncover the meaning behind being trapped in this time loop. First
she investigates the Israeli joint she smoked, which had secretly been laced with ketamine,
but that was a dead end. Then she suspects that Maxine’s apartment might somehow be cursed,
but that lead also goes nowhere. Nadia dies constantly, often by falling down the stairs
of Maxine’s apartment building. Every reset is an opportunity to not only learn more about her
current predicament, but also about the lives of her friends and their true feelings for her.
Nadia begins to recognize her own faults and becomes less selfish,
even befriending a homeless man named Horse and allowing him to cut her hair.
Eventually, Nadia’s journey of self-discovery leads to her crossing paths with a man named Alan,
who also happened to be stuck in a time loop. Alan was a bit obsessive-compulsive,
so being stuck in a time loop was oddly comforting for Alan’s neuroses. Unfortunately,
Alan’s loop began on the night he was going to propose to his girlfriend, Beatrice, but was
instead broken up with. Alan eventually discovers that Beatrice had been cheating on him with
a man named Mike. The same Mike that Nadia had slept with on her first night in the time loop.
Nadia and Alan befriend each other as they try to figure out how to break free from
their time loops. They discover that they are somehow intrinsically connected, as their loops
started on the same night, and that when one of them dies, the loop restarts for both of them.
Nadia even realizes that she had seen Alan before, as he was the deli clerk’s drunken friend she had
seen on her first night. Alan confesses that he had been depressed when Beatrice first broke up
with him and had then committed suicide. When Alan discovers that Nadia had slept with Mike,
he and Nadia sleep together so Alan can prove himself as the better lover.
The more times Nadia and Alan die, the more the world around them starts to change. Items
begin to disappear after each reset, then mirrors disappear, and then, scariest of all,
people begin to disappear. Afraid that all of their loved ones would soon cease to exist,
Nadia and Alan decide to confront their past traumas before their time runs out. Alan
confronts Beatrice, forgiving her for cheating on him and apologizing for his own shortcomings as a
partner. Meanwhile, Nadia talks with her mother’s friend Ruth and gets closure for the resentment
she had long held toward her mother and the guilt she had over blaming herself for her mother’s
struggles with mental health and eventual suicide. Both at peace, Nadia and Alan die once again.
Upon waking up in Maxine’s bathroom, Nadia is thrilled to discover that everything was back
to normal, and everything that had disappeared had been restored. She rushes to find Alan to
celebrate their victory, only to discover that Alan was somehow back to his past self,
drunk and depressed after Beatrice breaks up with him. And in another, separate timeline,
the fully-realized Alan discovers past-Nadia once again on her self-destructive path to sleep with
Mike. Knowing their paths would lead them to death, Nadia makes it her mission to prevent
Past-Alan’s suicide, while in the other timeline Alan tries to protect Past-Nadia from herself.
After successfully saving each other in their separate timelines,
both Nadia and Alan feel at peace. They had both conquered what was holding them back in
life and were finally free to move forward. As season one comes to a close, the two divergent
timelines find Nadia and Past-Alan AND Alan and Past-Nadia coming across Horse leading a
celebratory parade. As both sets of Nadias and Alans enter the parade, the timelines
merge. The new and improved Nadia and Alan are reunited and emerge from the crowd, side by side.