Russian Doll

It is so inventive, and creative, and original, that it seems petty to quibble. As the story progresses, it gets smarter and weirder, and the surreal twists once again land in an unsentimental yet beautiful place. It dares to ask big questions about trauma, grief and fate.

This show is truly a gift, and if Season 2 is any indication, it can keep on reinventing itself for years and years to come.

With its second season, Russian Doll crafts a narrative that is far more confounding and less structured than the first, and while it might not always work, the result is a season that is far more layered, emotionally satisfying, and engrossing than the pristine nature of the first season.

Seven bewitching, off-kilter, and visually stunning episodes.

The swings are bigger this time around. The results might be less consistent in Season 2, but the finished product is even more stunning than its predecessor.

"Doll" is the rare show to come up with two seasons worth of good ideas.

Season 2 offers a more conventionally enjoyable (and more surreal) yarn, hopping decades, continents and bodies. It’s messier than its predecessor but less insular and claustrophobic, too.

This new season is less a Russian doll than a Fabergé egg. Gilded, ornate, almost ostentatiously clever and beguiling, but with that crucial surprise – a nugget of emotional clarity – that emerges as the egg is cracked.

While the show’s first season hits different now, its second (fortunately) does not try to repeat Russian Doll’s repetitions. Instead, in season two, our hero finds herself on a whole new journey of surreal/soft sci-fi self-discovery.

As it stands, what this second season lacks in narrative polish, it makes up for in strong performances and trippy visuals.

Nothing in this season is quite as compulsively entertaining as the first season’s recurring fatalities, and there were some subject threads I wish had been carried through more consistently. But coming as close as this season does to recapturing, without shamelessly reproducing, the satisfying difficulty of the first season is achievement enough.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that this go around the time and space continuum is quite as focused as the first, nor that its ending is quite as viscerally rewarding — but that, it seems, is more deliberate than not.

So, no, it is not the immaculate experience that the first season was. But in reaching further and trying more, Russian Doll Season Two ultimately justifies the series’ existence as more than just a one-shot.

Shouty acting notwithstanding, Lyonne is commanding as she tucks into a dense sci-fi story that unspools like a classic episode of The Twilight Zone, digging ever deeper and further back in time.

For the most part, while the experimental aspects of this season didn’t fully work, I do think the risks are worth taking.

The season’s plotting isn’t as tight as the first, opting instead for a more expansive historical backdrop that allows ample time for the story to really dig into its characters’ backgrounds. But by increasingly leaning into its sci-fi elements, Russian Doll continues to strike at an emotional core through flights of delirious weirdness.

While the growth that Nadia — and, to a less-showcased extent, Alan — undergoes this season is made to feel substantial by the time the final (perfect!) shot longs, it’s easy to argue there’s just not enough meat to the seven episodes that comprise it to convince skeptics the return was worth it.

Too many threads are left unexplored to make this new season of “Russian Doll” as wholly satisfying as its dazzling debut. However, its exploration of how fruitless “what if” thinking is and the importance of taking agency in your own life despite your generational baggage builds wonderfully on the themes explored in the first season.

Ms. Lyonne's presentation is a little Mae West, a little Rodney Dangerfield, with maybe a dash of Leo Gorcey in a Bowery Boys movie. But she's also as consistently funny as anyone on a series, mini- or otherwise. The program also deserves credit for making its convoluted, spoiler-lousy story as clear and accessible as it is. If "Russian Doll" were a place, it would be less like the grid plan of Manhattan and more like the incoherence of Boston. But Ms. Lyonne is certainly an entertaining tour guide.

The second season is missing some of the unbridled mania that made the first so much fun, but still delivers on giving us more time with Lyonne’s Nadia and her madcap world.

Russian Doll Season 2 is good, but it’s not quite as great as Russian Doll Season 1. This new season gets messy with its wild narrative swings and lazy with its logic.

“Russian Doll” had a similar inventiveness, excitement, and conviction in its first season, but Season 2 struggles to bring those foundational elements together. Lyonne is still a charismatic and singular screen presence.

While "Russian Doll" didn't fully explain the "Groundhog Day"-like aspects of what was happening in its first go-round, it finally reached a logical conclusion. By contrast, the altered nature of Nadia and Alan's predicament mostly just feels like, "Well, we got picked up for another season, so why not?"