The first few episodes of the Netflix Original show, Russian Doll, definitely caught my attention. The excitement of the partying scenes, the thrill of life, the unexpected outcomes of minor decisions and carelessness. Within the first few minutes of watching this show, I got the idea that Nadia was not a very put together or type-A person. In fact, I was surprised to find out that she was successful in her life and worked as a leading software developer for a huge video game company.
As the show gets deeper, there are many themes and symbols that begin to take hold. The ideas of parallelism and mirroring are very apparent throughout the entire season of the show. To begin, the other main character of the show, Allan, parallels Nadia in a lot of ways. Not only is he stuck in this looping narrative with Nadia, but when they find each other, a lot falls into place. One thing that particularly stuck out to me was the fact that Nadia is a video game developer who had never played her game, and Allan was a gamer that played Nadia’s game a lot. This gave me the idea from early on, that they would learn a lot from each other. I thought that the relations of their characters was interesting and introspective due to the way they find each other and figure out how to be better people.
The main characters also have relationships with people around them in foiling ways. Since Allan is an overly careful, maybe even OCD type-A personality, it makes it hard for others to maintain relationships with him, since he always feels the need to be in control. On the other hand, Nadia is maybe too careless and seems to find herself unable to commit to true relationships for fear of following in her mother’s footsteps. They both do have very close friendships who seem to be supportive of them in their times of need, but for the most part, they are both running away from something, which reflects heavily in their romantic relations. I think these are both aspects that a lot of individuals can relate to, which makes the show easier to connect to. Personally, I feel as though I share similar characteristics and issues in maintaining relationships, so I mindlessly kept watching till someone told me how to fix my own issues. Of course that didn’t happen and I didn’t fully expect that, but seeing people overcome what seems like fate is especially empowering.
The main idea of bettering themselves falls together once they realize that they have terrible coping mechanisms. I thought the show was very visually pleasing and enjoyed it for the most part, but the first few episodes were very repetitive and a little bit boring for my tastes. I would recommend this show to any netflix fanatic, or anyone really. Russian Doll is, simply put, and unraveling of self, promoting the expansion of moralistic intentions.
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