Russian Doll season 2 is the Natasha Lyonne show, for better or worse

polygon.com:

Mirrors are tricky objects: we see ourselves and we don’t see ourselves. We see a reflection, a reversal. Sometimes mirrors are a tool for adjusting makeup or an errant hair; other times they’re an enemy, showing us something we don’t want to see. In Russian Doll season 1, Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne) wakes up in the bathroom, standing at the sink, on her 36th birthday, looking at herself in the mirror. It is often easy to latch onto the central hook of Russian Doll’s first season: that Nadia is doomed — or maybe blessed — to die and wake up at her 36th birthday party over and over again. Over the course of the season, Nadia links up with a man named Alan (Charlie Barnett) who is also doomed — or maybe blessed — to meet the same fate. He, too, emerges from death standing in front of his bathroom mirror.

Together, they wend their way through New York City’s Lower East Side to solve the mystery of what is happening to them. Are they caught in a wormhole? A glitch in the Matrix? Is this a moral quandary? A mystic curse? A Jewish Groundhog Day? Why are these two people, Nadia and Alan, united in this cosmic hiccup? Nadia, helmed by Lyonne’s signature wryness and smoker’s rasp, courts death with every inhale. She’ll bravely ingest anything and anyone, never missing a chance to live a little harder. Alan, on the other hand, is faithful to routine, sucking all the potential for joy and surprise out of his life. He is in good shape, careful, and polite. She indulges; he refrains. And yet they die and die and die.

The second season of Russian Doll is less of an exploration of death, less a lesson in living and reliving, and more of a journey through a hall of mirrors. This works to the show’s advantage: we don’t need to see