(no subject)

[skygiants]

I watched all of Russian Doll! I liked it!

Q: Russian Doll is that Groundhog Day sort of thing on Netflix, right?
A: That is indeed the general trope, yeah! Except with a lot more death and psychological deconstruction. You probably got all that from the trailer.

Q: OK, so why did you like it?
A: Can I answer that by comparing it to other things I like?
Q: .... sure? Will that be helpful?
A: Okay, so Russian Doll sits somewhere in the middle of a spectrum of shows about surreal snowglobe worlds full of extremely real-feeling people bouncing off each other's pain points until they form enough of a connection to push through the things that have been keeping them stagnant, with The Good Place on one end and Utena on the other.
Q: What do the points on that spectrum represent?
A: Sitcom and surrealist anime. Next question.
Q: ... that's not a spectrum though? Russian Doll is very emphatically not animated?
A: Yeah and also Russian Doll is actually probably the third point of a genre triangle representing 'the cable version with lots of cursing and casual sex', this is a bad analogy, anyway I said next question.

Q: Did you also say at some point that Russian Doll has the same energy as a Frances Hardinge book?
A: I definitely did! It totally does!
Q: ... how?? Frances Hardinge writes children's books???
A: List partially sourced from nextian: heavy parental stuff, terrible/amazing female protagonists, unclassifiable friendships between opposite-gender people who aren't very good at the whole concept, creepy fruit, girls consuming/disgorging horrifying objects...
Q: Not all Frances Hardinge books are like this though? Really just The Lie Tree is like this. What you're really saying is this show is just kind of like The Lie Tree.
A: Not so! Also Skinful of Shadows, A Face Like Glass, kind of Fly By Night? And the creepy objects are Cuckoo Song and -
Q: Wait, I thought this was a post about Russian Doll? Are you just trying to get me to read a bunch of Frances Hardinge now?
A: Yes, obviously! Always!

Q: MOVING ON. Speaking of heavy parental stuff and psychologically complex people, can you talk about Russian Doll's handling of mental illness?
A: I super am not qualified to talk about that but I very much hope somebody else does!

Q: Okay, but does any of this actually explain why you like Russian Doll?
A: I guess I just really like stories that treat human connection as the miracle it kind of is?
Q: Also you just like things that are weird enough to get stuck in your brain and irritate it like a grain of sand in an oyster shell while still feeling deeply grounded in relatably petty human concerns.
A: This also is true.
Q: And you like the soundtrack.
A: I REALLY LOVE THE SOUNDTRACK.

Comments

[sovay]

A: I REALLY LOVE THE SOUNDTRACK.

What makes the soundtrack so good, if that's an answerable question?

[skygiants]

Really it's as much the sound editing as the soundtrack -- the individual songs aren't just well-chosen (there's a full rundown here but it's quite spoilery) but used really diegetically well, and there's a moment where two characters' personal soundtracks converge on each other that's just an EXTREMELY well-done piece of television artistry.

(Icon used here because the soundtrack does in fact feature Mae West!)

[sovay]

and there's a moment where two characters' personal soundtracks converge on each other that's just an EXTREMELY well-done piece of television artistry.

Okay, that's cool. I'm not sure I've ever heard that done outside of opera or musical theater.

(Icon used here because the soundtrack does in fact feature Mae West!)

(I approve!)

[skygiants]

Yeah, I think it's more common in musical theater when the music is being composed specifically in order to allow that to happen, but one would not think it could be done particularly well with Harry Nilsson and Beethoven! AND YET.

[maplemood]

I LOVED Russian Doll! It's just this perfectly contained, fabulously emotional gem of a story, and I don't know...sort of Twilight Zone-y, but TV-MA-rated Twilight Zone with a heart? And you're absolutely right--the soundtrack is gold, and Nadia is the perfect blend of terrible and amazing.

[skygiants]

I LOVE HER SO MUCH. In all her terrible, terrible choices or occasional lack thereof.

(Perfectly contained is a great way to describe it also; I've seen discussion of two more seasons and I don't ... FULLY understand how ...... )

[maplemood]

I mean, I would not say no to more of Nadia! But yeah, I'm not sure where the story would go from this point. It seemed like an airtight ending to me.

[aquamirage]

it looks like it also has the same exact vibe as a live-action people watching/subnormality but you haven't read subnormality i'm the only person in the world who has and that's why that fic still only has one kudos

[skygiants]

THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME I MEANT TO READ SUBNORMALITY

[aquamirage]

I'll give you a Winston Rowntree primer in exchange for the Arthur primer. low/high culture

[sandrylene]

I haven't ready any in years, but I love it so much... I clearly need to go back and catch up, so I *also* appreciate having seen this comment!

[aquamirage]

Ethel and PHG!!! Where did you leave off? I don't know how often it's going to update anymore (the last update was in 2017) now that People Watching exists and takes up so much of Rowntree's time, but that's a good way to get a fix of a very similar thing.

[sandrylene]

As it turns out, I'd left off in the early 200s, so I don't have that much to catch up on, but I read maybe a dozen earlier in the week after the prior comments... Oh man, it gives me this feeling of well-being that was really, really appreciated, with how this month has been.

I haven't looked at any of People Watching, though, so glad I'll have that to look forward to! :)

[sasha_feather]

Gotta get up! Gotta get up!

I enjoyed this post.

[skygiants]

That song will never be leaving my head and honestly ... I've accepted that and I'm OK with it.

[rachelmanija]

I thought the way it handled mental illness was very good/realistic. Especially the understated way it dealt with generational trauma with Nadia's grandparents, her mother, and herself. I also really liked how mental illness was both real and sometimes dealt with via magical realism. "Every day a little death."

[skygiants]

I also really liked the way they wove in Nadia's family history; it doesn't surprise me that it's based in part on Lyonne's own family experiences. (Mike the asshole professor is even talking about dual threads of generational trauma left by a.) slavery and b.) the Holocaust when we see him with his student!)

[alias_sqbr]

This is a great post and a great advertisement for the show (which I have seen and very much enjoyed)

[skygiants]

I'm glad you liked it! :D HERE ALL WEEK for more 'I liked all these things and therefore they must be sort of the same, LET ME EXPLAIN HOW' >.>

data point re: your recruiter post

[brainwane]

so Russian Doll sits somewhere in the middle of a spectrum of shows about surreal snowglobe worlds full of extremely real-feeling people bouncing off each other's pain points until they form enough of a connection to push through the things that have been keeping them stagnant, with The Good Place on one end and Utena on the other.

I guess I just really like stories that treat human connection as the miracle it kind of is?

I have never seen Utena but I love The Good Place for the very reason you discuss -- sometimes your karass seems to start off as your crab bucket. (See also how Arrested Development and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin take the other side of this, kinda.) And -- to me -- the heart of speculative fiction is the struggle, ultimately triumphant, to connect with the Other. So you have now sold me on wanting to see Russian Doll and I believe your recruiter post has been successful! Now I just need to see whether I'll be seeing this with the spouse or without. Are there perchance any shipping containers, or genuinely surprising genre switches/trope subversions, or Steve Buscemi, or competence porn?

Re: data point re: your recruiter post

[skygiants]

Yeah, the karass and the crab bucket is a very good way to put it -- it's that thing where you get present people with 'CONNECT OR PERISH' and in fact people very often pick 'PERISH' and I love stories that show how difficult and wonderful it is to pick 'CONNECT' instead!

As far as your question list: no shipping containers that I can think of; the tropes start out familiar but the last couple episodes especially kept me very much on the edge of my seat as to how they were going to play out; no Steve Buscemi but some of Nadia's cohort have kind of the same energy; all of Nadia's plans are kind of amazingly terrible and not particularly competent at all but she's very determined!

[umadoshi]

I saw Russian Doll over the weekend and it was SO GOOD. *^^*

[skygiants]

RIGHT?? They just truly stuck the landing, in a way I've seen VERY few shows ever manage.

[asakiyume]

We're watching it one episode at a time, and by episode three (which we just finished), I can say I really like it! I was put off at first by what I think of as a New York cool-folks vibe--which I know should be a feature not a bug, but--but in the episode we just finished, she gets to know Horse-the-Homeless-Guy and protects his shoes, and that got me wholeheartedly on-board. That, and I loved her interactions with Rivka at the rabbi's office. And at the end of this episode she meets someone else who keeps dying, which I think is a great twist.

Not only great, it transforms the story from Groundhog "this is all about 'fixing' you by giving you chances to grow up" Day to something **different**, and I'm interested to see how that flavor of different is going to develop.

[skygiants]

Yeah, Nadia's partly especially has some of that We're All The Most Interesting People In The World And Don't We Know It -- and I truly love Nadia and Maxine and Lizzy, but the more the world broadens as Nadia ventures further out into it, so you see it is bigger than that party and those people, the more the show benefits. I love how much everybody she meets feels like a real person, with their own specific story going before and after Nadia intersects with them.

...and I won't say more until I know how far you've gotten by now! >.>

[asakiyume]

We advance very slowly because we watch one episode every other day ;-) So the other day, we got the episode from Alan's point of view (ep 4), and Nadia sleuthing him out a little.

I liked this episode, especially Nadia's interactions with the woman in the jewelry store, though I had a hard time believing that Alan had hitherto been content to just repeat the same events over and over, especially since in his case they'd been personally devastating. Maybe twice? Maybe even three times? But he was at **ten** when he met Nadia. I can see the metaphor here--people **do** repeat the same mistakes over and over and over... but within the storyverse, the *exact* same thing? It's consenting to be Sisyphus when you don't have to be.

... But don't let my griping lead you to believe I'm not enjoying myself. I am! It's a good show. I like arguing with things.

[skygiants]

I love Nadia's hilarious failed attempt at social engineering in the jewelry store so much -- an undeniably terrible plan but let it never be said that she didn't commit!

One thing I find interesting about episode 4 is how ambiguous it is about exactly how much Alan has been repeating exactly, and how much he's been shifting stuff around. Has he been searching for the right way to have those conversations, or just shuffling through them?

[asakiyume]

The way he was impatiently cutting off the girlfriend in the early scenes ("yes yes, now you're going to say this, and I'll say that")--I was like, but dude. She doesn't have your advantage here. And if you don't like it, why not try something ENTIRELY DIFFERENT?

[asakiyume]

(We should see episode 5 tonight--we would have seen it last night, but we watched a movie instead)

[asakiyume]

We finished it! I really loved it! rachelmanija has a spoiler post for discussion of the show, and I said a couple of things over there, but yeah--really great. I loved the interconnections and the way small details from early episodes take on much bigger significance later on.

[skygiants]

Yeah, it makes such good effect of the repetitive structure and the russian-doll metaphor -- everything circling in and in and in on what's important. And the last episode is just so gorgeous!

[china_shop]

I enjoyed it so much! I was particularly delighted there was a "the one with the bees" iteration. :-D

Thanks for reccing it!

[skygiants]

I'm so glad you enjoyed it! I absolutely died at the bees, definitely the most Good Place-esque sequence of the show.

[aamcnamara]

I have just finished watching Russian Doll, a fact for which I give you partial credit, because I read this post and went "wait, Frances Hardinge?" Also what sold me on it: Amal mentioning on twitter that it included a queer fuckpile (I was extra delighted to find that it's described as that in-show); someone telling me it featured Emily of New Moon.

Now I actually know what you were talking about and...yes, okay. It did remind me strongly in a couple of places of The Good Place, I have not seen Utena so I can't compare to that.

I really liked the ending where they have to save each other; I wasn't expecting it to go that way! It worked out the themes just so nicely. (I guessed halfway through that they had both killed themselves originally and only remembered from the first repeat onward. I was...half right.)

Also the ending really made me want to go back to Minnesota for the May Day Parade! Which is not a relevant statement about very many shows, haha.

[skygiants]

YOU SEE WHERE I'M COMING FROM THOUGH. Sometimes you make your own reality! Sometimes you get trapped there until you learn that trusting other humans is possible and then you can both bite and claw your way out! That's Hardinge energy all the way down.

I LOVE the way they both have to reach out to each other -- I love how they each have to do the work of it alone, but they know they're not alone, how you can't force someone else to be saved but you can maybe convince them there's something worth saving themselves for. "In another universe, you're doing the same for me." (I threw out 'we must love one another or die' in a fairly facile way in a conversation with nextian about this show elsewhere, and she immediately pulled up September 1, 1939 and was like, oh, yeah, actually, all of that, and I went and reread it and was like OH, YEAH, ALL OF THAT, I GUESS.)

Also, I kind of feel like you should see Utena. I mean it'd be 18 very strange hours of your life. But ... worthwhile strange .... I mean here's my rec post for Utena, none of which will probably be news to you: it's kind of like Russian Doll, but if it was an anime about the crushing weight of the patriarchy!

[aamcnamara]

OH, YEAH, ALL OF THAT, IN FACT. (Apparently today is an Auden day, given I just finished Letters from Iceland this morning? I'm cool with that.)

"it's kind of like Russian Doll, but if it was an anime about the crushing weight of the patriarchy" is a solid rec, tbh.

And yes, I was super not expecting the turn into surrealism with the child-self appearing and the other girl turning into her and the blood and the mirror shard and... but yep okay wow that was some Hardinge energy too.

[skygiants]

(I saw that! I'm enjoying this Auden renaissance all over, I had a brief Auden period in college and then sort of forgot about him for a while except when I read February House.)

oh wait Laine, I was under the impression you had already osmosed the basic Utena pitch from other sources but maybe that's not correct? I can ... give you more actual facts about Utena ....

WAS IT NOT JUST. There's just something about the magic-logic of the psyche that Hardinge and Russian Doll are both
really top tier at.