Netflix’s funny and frightening new mystery series, Russian Doll, has an ending that may leave some viewers mystified. Co-created by and starring Natasha Lyonne, Russian Doll follows a woman called Nadia who is suddenly killed on her 36th birthday, only to find herself back at her birthday party hours before her death. As she tries to figure out what’s going on, Nadia realizes two things: she is always doomed to die within 24 hours of the party, and she will always rewind to the same moment in her friend’s bathroom.
As Russian Doll progresses, Nadia arrives at a new revelation – that she is not alone. Alan (Charlie Barnett), an upright and anal retentive man who is her opposite in just about every way, is being forced to relive the worst night of his life. Unlike Nadia, however, he welcomes the opportunity to get as many possible chances at “fixing” the past as possible, desperately trying to find a way to prevent his girlfriend, Beatrice (Dascha Polanco), from breaking up with him.
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As Nadia and Alan meet and try to find the patterns in their endless time loops, and how they might be connected, it becomes clear that their time is not as infinite as it seems. With people, animals, and objects starting to vanish with each new loop, the race is on to figure out how to stop the cycle of deaths. Here’s our breakdown of Russian Doll‘s ending, and what it all means.
- This Page: What Happens At The End Of Russian Doll
- Page 2: Russian Doll’s Time Loop and Ending Explained
- Page 3: Emily of New Moon and The Real Meaning of Russian Doll
What Happens At The End Of Russian Doll
At the end of Russian Doll‘s penultimate episode, “The Way Out,” Nadia goes to meet her former boyfriend, John’s (Yul Vazquez) daughter, to give her a copy of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel Emily of New Moon. Lucy (Tatiana E. Rivera) thanks Nadia for the book, and all finally seems to be going well… until Nadia suddenly coughs up blood all over the table and Lucy’s face. A calm Lucy tells Nadia, “She’s still inside you,” and Nadia reaches into her own throat and pulls out a shard of broken glass. She recalls a memory of her mother (Chloë Sevigny) going through their apartment and breaking all the mirrors, and then looks up to find that Lucy has transformed into Nadia’s younger self (Brooke Timber). Young Nadia asks if older Nadia is ready to let her mother die, and Nadia nods in assent. Young Nadia tells her, “This is the day we get free.”
In Russian Doll‘s season finale, “Ariadne,” Nadia and Alan’s nights reset one last time. This time, everything has been restored: all the missing people and objects are back, the fish are back in their fish tanks, and the fruit is no longer rotten. However, when Nadia and Alan catch up to one another, they realize that something else has changed: they are no longer in the same timeline. Both of them, with the full knowledge of all the different time loops, has been restored to the original night and been given a second chance to save the other person. Nadia has a chance to save a drunken and depressed Alan from throwing himself off the roof, and Alan has a chance to stop Nadia from sleeping with Mike (Jeremy Bobb) – who, in his own words, is not a choice but “the hole where a choice should be” – and subsequently getting hit by a car.
The problem is that Alan and Nadia didn’t know each other before the time loops began, and both have a hard time convincing the other that they’re in danger. In Alan’s timeline, he catches up with Mike and Nadia at the deli and tries to persuade Nadia to leave Mike, but she simply mocks him and leaves. Alan follows the two of them down the street, telling Nadia that she is going to die, but she still refuses to take him seriously. When Nadia and Mike get to Nadia’s apartment, Alan takes a photo of the two of them kissing and sends it to Beatrice, whom Mike has been dating, and texts her with instructions to call Mike. She does so, but Mike rejects the call, and heads inside with Nadia.
Heading back to the deli, Alan tells their mutual friend Ferran (Ritesh Rajan) to call Nadia, and writes down a number. Ferran obliges, and Nadia gets the call as she is getting ready to sleep with Mike. Ferran passes on the message that Nadia owes Alan $152,780.86 – the exact amount of Nadia’s college fund that her mother frittered away. This finally convinces Nadia to leave Mike and go back to the deli. Alan tries to explain that he believes the two of them are meant to save each other’s lives, and continues to reveal things that he knows about her – like the fact that her mother died on her 36th birthday. They encounter Mike, who has received a slew of angry messages from Beatrice, and who tells Nadia that Alan is crazy and she should get away from him. She starts to cross the street to Mike when a car almost hits her, and Alan saves her life. Freaked out, Nadia continues across the street and rejoins Mike.
Nadia similarly finds Alan at the deli in her timeline, drunken and miserable, but as she tries to snap him out of it the same drunken idiots from the first episode interrupt and cause a scene. Ferran kicks everyone except for Alan out of the deli, and Nadia is forced to follow Alan and Ferran discreetly to a restaurant. While Ferran takes a phone call from his girlfriend, Alan leaves the restaurant and Nadia continues to follow him. She catches up to Alan as he is giving all of his possessions away to Horse (Brendan Sexton III) and the other homeless people, and helps Alan back to his apartment. Lying in bed with him, she tells him a fairy story about their respective stories and the time loops, and eventually they both fall asleep. When Nadia wakes up, Alan is gone.
At first it seems as though both of them have failed. In her timeline, Nadia runs up to the roof of Alan’s building, hearing ominous sirens as she does so. As she stands on the roof in despair, Alan walks up behind her, alive and well. He asks if she can promise that he’ll be happy if he doesn’t jump, and she tells him that she can only promise that he won’t be alone. For Alan, that is enough. Meanwhile, in Alan’s timeline, Nadia is walking away from Alan as Mike opines about how crazy he is. Then she hesitates, however, and abruptly walks back to Alan (looking both ways as she crosses the street this time).
The two timelines finally convene as both versions of Alan and Nadia find Horse and the other homeless people in a bizarre parade with the papier-mâché creations that they were shown making earlier. The two timelines merge and the versions of Alan and Nadia who lived through all the timelines are reunited.
Page 2: Russian Doll’s Time Loop and Ending Explained
Why Nadia and Alan Are Stuck In A Time Loop
The most important thing to understand about Russian Doll‘s time loop is that the show’s genre is not science fiction, but magical realism. The deaths and rewinds are not the result of alien interference or government experimentation, but rather are a vehicle for a character study of Nadia and Alan, and to a lesser extent the people in their lives. Therefore, the “rules” of the time loop don’t follow scientific or supernatural logic, but rather a narrative logic. The only way for them to break free is to not only choose to help one another in the deli, but also to understand why they didn’t help each other in the first place.
That being said, the time loop does have consistent rules. One of the main rules is that Nadia and Alan will always die at the exact same moment: if Nadia gets blown up in a gas explosion, Alan will get hit by a car; when Nadia sees her younger self and has a heart attack, Alan experiences a sudden, violent illness and dies as well; and, in the first time loop, Nadia was hit by a car at the exact same time that Alan jumped off the roof. They always rewind to the same time and place – standing in a bathroom in front of a mirror on the night of Nadia’s party. Although they can avoid death for a while by being careful, they will always die within 24 hours. Finally, with each new time loop their world gradually degrades, becoming emptier and stranger.
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After meeting one another and realizing that they’re sharing the same weird phenomenon, one of the first things that Nadia and Alan do is try to figure out why they, specifically, were chosen to be stuck in this purgatorial time loop. Nadia at first blames the drugs at the party, and openly admits that she needs the drugs to be at fault because the alternative – that it’s something wrong with her – is not something she wants to deal with. She then explores the possibility of the building where the party takes place being haunted and sends John to speak to a rabbi, who says that buildings aren’t haunted – but people are. Alan thinks it’s because they are bad people and they are being punished, but Nadia is unconvinced by this argument, since neither one of them is especially bad.
Eventually, Nadia and Alan figure out the link between the two of them, and why they keep revisiting the same night. On the night that they both died, they crossed paths at the deli and had a window of opportunity to help one another. However, Alan was lost in his own drunken misery, and Nadia was too self-centered to take a real interest in him.
The Two Timelines & Ending Explained
Russian Doll bucks expectations in its season finale by sending Alan and Nadia back, not to make better life choices for themselves, but to convince the other person to make better choices. Before either of them can even have the opportunity to do this, however, they first have to figure out and confront their own trauma. A common idea in therapy and self-care is that you have to help yourself before you can help others (the airline safety instruction, “put on your own oxygen mask before helping others,” is often used as a metaphor for this).
So, the process of ending the time loop has two stages, the first of which is Alan and Nadia letting go of their own trauma. For Alan, this means approaching Beatrice with forgiveness and openness, telling her that he loves her, and acknowledging his own fault in their relationship falling apart. For Nadia, this means letting go of her lingering guilt over her mother’s death and finally going to meet John’s daughter for breakfast. Immediately after she hands over the book, she starts to cough up the shard of mirror that represents the trauma her mother’s mental illness and death left behind in her. It’s only when both Alan and Nadia have helped themselves that they’re given the opportunity to help each other in separate timelines.
Alan and Nadia coming across the parade is a fittingly bizarre ending to such a bizarre show. Since we saw Horse and the other homeless people making the models and props earlier in the episode, it seems that they might be some kind of artist collective. Regardless of any logical explanation for it, however, the parade itself serves as a kind of surreal bookend to the story, with references to its motifs and characters. One of the creations is wearing a brown trenchcoat like the one that John had to wear when Nadia borrowed his main coat. Among the models is a skeleton, representing the specter of death. Finally, there are people wearing large cat masks, as a nod to Oatmeal.
Perhaps the most confusing element of this ending is the question of which versions of Nadia and Alan we see at the end. However, if you look closely, you can see that it’s definitely the versions who lived through all the deaths and time loops. Alan is wearing the scarf that was given to him at the party, while Nadia is still wearing her white blouse (the other version of her took the blouse off when she was about to have sex with Mike). Another detail that’s easily missed is that, right after the cut from the split screen to a single screen, you can see two other versions of Nadia walk past her, going in the opposite direction. This may represent the fact that she is finally parting ways with all those other possible timelines.
It seems that, having successfully saved one another’s lives, Alan and Nadia’s reward is to be reunited with the person who shared their crazy ordeal. They can now both move forward together, having faced down their respective inner demons – as well as each other’s.
Page 3: Emily of New Moon and The Real Meaning of Russian Doll
The Significance of Emily of New Moon
One of the few objects that doesn’t disappear by the final time loop is Nadia’s copy of Emily of New Moon, a children’s book by Anne of Green Gables author L. M. Montgomery. Like Anne, Emily is an orphan who is sent to live with strangers – though in Emily’s case, those strangers are her relatives. Emily of New Moon is also, like Anne of Green Gables, set on Prince Edward Island.
There are a lot of parallels between Emily of New Moon and Nadia’s own life story. Emily goes to live with her two aunts – Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Laura – who raise her together (she also has an aunt called Ruth). Aunt Elizabeth is cold and distant (not unlike Nadia’s mother), while Aunt Laura is much kinder, but has to save her displays of affection towards Emily for when Elizabeth is not looking – similar to Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley) in Russian Doll. Whereas Emily is a born writer and uses writing as an outlet for all her emotions, Nadia is a video game coder who puts herself into games and expresses herself through writing code (for example, a game about a female character who has to accomplish everything by herself).
Oatmeal is also a bit of an Easter egg from Emily of New Moon, since the cat exactly matches the description of Saucy Sal (pictured above), Emily’s pet cat. In one particularly heartbreaking moment in the book, Emily is forced to choose only one of her two pet cats – the skinny and wild Saucy Sal, or the fluffy and affectionate Mike – to take with her when she moves away. Though Emily is more fond of Mike, she chooses to take Sal with her instead, as she feels Sal needs her more.
The Real Meaning Of Russian Doll
To break down the themes and meaning of Russian Doll, the best place to start is with the title. Russian dolls, or matryoshka dolls, are a collection of wooden dolls that all nest inside the other, with the smallest doll often being a baby. In Russian culture these dolls are a symbol of femininity, and specifically the relationship between mothers and daughters. Therefore, the Russian doll is a representation of Nadia’s troubled relationship with her own mother, and her fears that she will end up living an identical life of mental illness and early death.
The Russian doll works on other levels. For starters, Nadia herself could be considered a “Russian doll,” since she’s of Russian descent and has beautiful curly hair like a doll, which is commented on by many characters. Perhaps the most interesting interpretation of the Russian doll motif, however, is as a way of understanding the time loops – which aren’t really time loops at all. Nadia and Alan aren’t journeying backwards; they’re on a journey inwards.
Russian Doll‘s narrative is about stripping back layers in order to reach the core of trauma. This is represented literally by things and people gradually disappearing with each new time loop, and it’s no coincidence that the things that disappear are things that have some symbolic or emotional weight. The first to go is Nadia’s cat, Oatmeal, who is missing when the series begins. At one point, Oatmeal literally vanishes from Nadia’s hands while she’s holding him. Alan’s pet fish also disappears, as do the fish in Maxine’s (Greta Lee) apartment. After a time loop where Alan throws his engagement ring in the mirror, the engagement ring is gone in the next reset. People begin to vanish from Nadia’s party, starting with her more casual acquaintances, until only Maxine is left.
Another motif in Russian Doll is that of a maze – which, as with the nesting dolls, is symbolically about a journey to the center of something. This is represented in episode titles like “The Way Out” and “Ariadne” (Ariadne being a character in Greek mythology who guided Theseus through the Minotaur’s labyrinth and back to safety). In Jungian psychology, the labyrinth is linked to the concept of a journey into the underworld – which is fitting for Russian Doll, a show about people dying over and over again.
As with its namesake, there are a lot of layers to Russian Doll, and a lot is left up to your own interpretation. Hopefully, however, this has been a useful breakdown of some of the major themes and messages of the story. Let us know in the comments what you thought of Russian Doll, and if there were any other interesting details that you picked up on.
