Russian Doll – Schrödinger’s Ruth

By: Kelly Kearney

The baby is coming! That’s right! Nadia is about to go through a really weird first day on earth – and as a mother! After figuring out she couldn’t change the past and was chain to her present and future for eternity, in this episode Nadia gives it one more shot attempting to step in and help infant Nadia avoid the pain that adult Nadia has lived through. Things get even more hectic when Ruth has another health scare, and it sends Nadia careening off the timeline cliff just hoping for a few more moments with the godmother who always loved her like a daughter. Death, like fate, isn’t something we can run from even if we can hop on a train to other eras in other countries; home, and the problems we left behind are always there.

Subway Baby

The last time we saw Lenora (Chloë Sevigny) she was escaping out of a mental hospital window and in the opening moments of the episode she is about to give birth to Nadia on the Astor place subway platform. The year is 1982 and Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) is occupying her mother’s conscience just in time to give birth to herself. Everyone is there for her—Ruthie (Annie Murphy), Delia (Athina Papadimitriu) and even her grandmother Vera (Irén Bordán) and all of them are offering her words of encouragement has she pushes herself into the concrete jungle world. The entire 6 train is cheering Nadia/Lenora on, even her Guardian Angel pal Derek (Ephraim Sykes) and one random stranger offering to swaddle the newborn in the concert T-shirt he took right off his back. Everyone is pushing for a front row seat to the birth, and Nadia is not so quietly freaking out.

When Nora/Nadia wakes up in the hospital, Chez (Sharlto Copley) is there, drunk and offering his support but mostly he’s there to rope Nora into another grift to make a quick buck. Her “Subway Baby” is the talk of New York City and he just knows there’s money to be had in that publicity stunt. When Ruth and Vera show up, they unceremoniously kick the thieving disaster out of Nora’s room with Vera smacking him the whole way. We’ve gotten the impression that Vera and Ruthie do not get along but when it comes to protecting Nora and Nadia from the likes of Chez, they agree on something. The two women find solidarity in hating the toxic men Nora seems to attach herself to and it kicks off a private conversation about the mentally ill new mother and if she could care for New York’s most famous baby. They both agree she’s just not cut out to be a mother, at least not with her mental health struggles, and they wonder if a longer stint in the hospital could help. But then who will take care of Nadia? Well considering adult Nadia is listening in on this entire conversation she starts to feel bad for Nora and even worse for that little version of herself. In a panic, she picks up the baby and escapes out of the hospital towards the subway hoping to rescue herself from a life of disappointment. She knows she can’t change the past but she’s going to give it one last try because this baby is so innocent, and she has no idea what’s coming for her.

No, Not Ruth!

As she sits on the 6-train heading back to 2022 Nadia’s phone rings and it’s Maxine (Greta Lee) with bad news that Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley) is back in Lenox Hill Hospital with an embolism in her lung. Nadia wasn’t there to help her and now she is a panic to get to her godmother. She rushes to the hospital where Lizzy (Rebecca Henderson) and Maxine are waiting, and both seem surprised at what they assume is a crack baby Nadia stole. Why else would someone give her a defenseless infant? They take over the mommy duties while Nadia heads into the emergency room to see Ruth. Apparently, she’s not dying because when Nadia walked through the door she jumped backwards in time to the week before her 40th birthday–when Ruth was hospitalized for a fender bender. Somehow Nadia, who can still see baby Nadia in Lizzy’s arms is somehow both in the past and in the present simultaneously! How can this be? Is time collapsing into itself? Have all the trips back and forward in time created a tear in the continuum and now all of the timelines are bleeding into each other or is this about her removing baby Nadia from the past? The present is fracturing and dividing on some sort of cellular level as we see two Nadias in the present and numerous Ruths going through various before and after health scares. Nothing makes sense and Nadia begins to panic. In the last room she finds evidence that Ruth didn’t survive the blood clot in her lung at least in one timeline she didn’t, but in the next room over she is alive and well. Determined to get to the bottom of this, Nadia heads down to the morgue and after a concerning high five from a couple of EMT’s who assume she’s going down there for necrophiliac’s date, she finds the room full of body bags with a surprising revelation inside each one. When she pulls down the zipper, she sees each one contains the corpse of herself in various states of trauma. Are these the bodies of all the Nadias who died in season one? Has this time jump been just another circle of death she can’t escape?

Going Back To The Start

Meanwhile, in East Berlin the year is 1962 and Alan (Charlie Barnett) inside Agnes’ (Carolyn Michelle Smith) conscience gets stopped at the train station by an officer who demands to know where she’s heading. She’s bound for West Berlin, but she doesn’t have the correct paperwork to travel there so she is told to go home. Considering the state of Cold War in East Berlin, she’s lucky they’re letting her leave at all. So, Alan boards the train heading home but finds that he’s also dealing with duplicate timelines existing simultaneously. Everywhere he goes he sees himself at different points in his life and he too is really starting to freak out. Everything in the scene overlaps in one endless parade visual duplicity- multiple Oatmeal cats, Alan reliving some of his drunken moments of his youth, and his best friend’s dead father who is now apparently alive and well. It’s not long before Nadia comes crashing into Allen’s apartment which morphs into the two come together in that dreaded bathroom of Maxine’s! We are back to the season one the time loop and it has somehow converged with the death loop! Perhaps they never left that bathroom, and this time travel is more like purgatory like a waiting list for Hell. Considering all the “Hail Satan” references, nothing should shock us with this show.