Russian Doll – Coney Island Baby

By: Kelly Kearney

In episode two of Season 2 Nadia puts on her detective hat to get to the bottom of her grandmother Vera’s missing Kruggerand. If she can find that gold, she may be able to untie the fates that bind her to a very disappointing future relationship with her mother and the creeping loss she’s feeling over Ruthie’s declining health. As a walking dictionary on the history of film, one would think Nadia heard what happens to someone who starts meddling in timelines, but she is on a mission, and nothing, not film trivia or even Alan, will get in her way.

The Kruggerand Inheritance

Nadia (Natasha Lyonne), who is still inhabiting her mother, Lenora’s (Chloë Sevigny) conscience, wakes up in her bed to the sounds of her grandmother, Vera (Irén Bordán), ranting about the stolen gold coins she smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Hungary. That fortune was to secure her family’s future in America. Now it’s gone and it’s all thanks to Lenora and her “outstanding prick” of a boyfriend, Chez (Sharlto Copley), who stole it, squandered it, and is currently talking gibberish the woman doesn’t understand. Those coins, Nadia says, are her birthright, and she isn’t going to let her mother’s current loser take that from her. She promises Vera, she will get them back, but Vera has heard that from her daughter, Nora, before and she isn’t buying it. All Vera can see is Nora’s mistakes, and she is beyond sick of paying a price for them. So much so, she threatens to stop footing the bill for Nora’s dismal life and Nadia just knows this feud was the start of her mother’s decline.

If she has any hope of finding the missing coins, she needs to track down whatever she can about Chez and where he is today. First, she asks Guardian Angel Derrek (Ephraim Sykes) for help because the red berets who patrol the streets of New York probably know about this scoundrel, Chez, and might have the intel she needs to find him. Derrek was so nice to her on her first day in ’82, so he can be trusted to help, right? Of course, but it is going to take a few weeks because research takes time in this era. It’s time she doesn’t have to wait and starts rambling about time travel and something called the World Wide Web to a man trapped in pre-internet world. Derrek starts to think she is crazy and why wouldn’t he? She is talking about a future he doesn’t know exists. In her flurry of verbal non sequiturs she does manage tell him, and the viewers, the story about the Kruggerand and how her grandparents were Holocaust survivors too afraid to store their life’s savings in banks, so hid the money until they could make it to America. Nazis were well-known for stealing people’s valuables and Vera wasn’t about to let those monsters take her family’s security. The 149 Kruggerand (minus the coin Nadia wears around her neck) would be worth around $250,000 today. It’s a considerable birthright that Nadia isn’t leaving the past without. Only, this past can’t be tracked down in a telephone book; she needs the power of Google. She hops back on the 6 train to return to 2022 to surf the web for clues.

Research will have to wait though, because the second she exits the 6 train her phone blows up with messages about Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley). Her Godmother has been discharged from the hospital, and Nadia wasn’t there to pick her up. If there is one thing about Nadia that holds true, it’s her care for that woman and sending her home alone fills her with guilt. Thankfully, Maxine (Greta Lee) and her partner Lizzy (Rebecca Henderson) were there to pick up her slack and when Nadia arrives at Ruthie’s, they tell her the woman is ok, but the doctor’s did say they found a concerning lump on her neck. That news isn’t something Nadia is ready to listen to, so she fills the triggering airspace with excuses as to why she missed this important moment. She tells Maxine everything she went through—the entire Back to the Future/Freaky Friday day she had, and her friends wonder if she is being sarcastic. Maxine assumes she is because that is Nadia’s natural state of being. Everything else she said seems absolutely crazy- which, funny enough, is also a natural state of being.

Digging Up the Present to Fix the Past and Change the Future

After digging up an address for the now elderly Chezare Carrera, Nadia pays him a visit hoping he knows where that stolen gold was hidden. Well, he definitely didn’t sink into a nice house, because today, he is living in a sad little apartment with absolutely no glitzy golden coin glamour. Nadia really wants to know what he did with her inheritance and that is when he tells her they were Lenora’s “Coney Island” excuse– their “if only” money. If they only had that money things would have turned out better for them, kind of like what Nadia is assumes this gold will do for her. As he is explaining he has no idea where the Kruggerand is, Nadia spies a photograph dating back to a 1982 squash tournament he played in. The plot thickens… and it sends Nadia back to the year question where she finds Chez in the men’s dressing room of an athletic club. He looks a little roughed up and his face full of scratches and sporting a shiner probably wasn’t the result of a brutal squash game, In fact, he says she gave him the injuries—not that she remembers why, how, and when. She does ask him about the coins and shockingly, he claims Nora (Nadia) was given her share the night before after she beat him up. Now, she really doesn’t remember last night and must be wondering why future-Chez never mentioned this during his “Coney Island” speech. He must be telling the truth though because Nadia, with the help of young Ruthie (Annie Murphy), heads out on an adventure to trace her mother’s footsteps after the gold went missing. It seems the money was burning a hole in Nora’s pocket and who better than Ruthie to help her walk the path it led her down?

Two Time Zones

The convertible! Nadia’s mind goes straight to Nora’s beloved Alpha Romeo and assumes she pawned the Kruggerand for the cash to purchase it. While retrieving the car she runs into her grandmother’s Romani friend, Delia (Athina Papadimitriu), and grieving widow Ruthie, who just lost one in the long line of husbands she had. First, they head to the car dealership to return Nora’s latest purchase. Before turning it over they look in the trunk and find a number of sable coats. This leads the two to a pawn shop where they find the coins! Unfortunately, the pawn shop owners are only willing to give her two out of the three sleeves of coins in exchange. Shockingly, Ruthie hands them her wedding ring as a trade for the gold Nora sold them. With a “Hail Satan” as a very bizarre thank you from the pawn shop owners, they hand over Vera’s coins for the ring.

After a phone call to her mother where she leaves a strange voicemail about the found gold and fixing all her mother’s mistakes in hopes of saving her, Nadia jumps on the train heading back to Vera’s. On board, she catches a glimpse of Alan (Charlie Barnett) in a subway car whizzing by and she knows her partner in crime must be going through his own time loop. She pounds on the car window trying to get his attention, but he misses it seemingly too enamored with whatever is making him smile on the train. She doesn’t have time to dwell on what he is up to because when she returns to her seat the duffle bag of gold is gone! Nadia can’t take things with her from the past into the future—not cellphones, not the internet, and definitely not the family fortune.