Approximately 200 years ago (OK, actually three years ago), the first season of Russian Doll saw lifelong New Yorker Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) fall into a time loop on the night of her 36th birthday. Every time she’d come back to that night — in her friends’ cosmically cool bathroom, soundtracked by Harry Nilsson’s “Gotta Get Up” — she’d attempt to figure out what, exactly, was happening to her. It was a very lonely experience until she met Alan (Charlie Barnett), a complete stranger who was also traversing the same time loop (though he’d wake up in his own sterile bathroom with no fun music. Sad!). The duo paired up to figure out how they were linked — and how to escape — and by the end of the season, they’d managed to crack the mystery. But if, like us, you’re getting ready to watch Season 2 and can’t remember exactly how they did it, we have all those answers here.

Let’s start with the basics: We meet Nadia at her birthday party.

Software developer Nadia is turning 36, and she’s at her friends’ East Village apartment for a casual Sunday night birthday party. (By casual, we mean the kind of party that involves cocaine-laced joints and group sex.) Here, we learn all of the most important things about Nadia’s life and meet the people who are most important to her: There’s her besties, Maxine (Greta Lee) and Lizzy (Rebecca Henderson); her godmother, Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley); her party night hookup, Mike (Jeremy Bobb); her friend at the deli downstairs, Farran (Ritesh Rajan); her unhoused neighbor, Horse (Brendan Sexton III); and her missing cat, Oatmeal (Louie). With us so far?

In the initial version of the night’s events, Nadia leaves the party to hook up with Mike, and they stop at the deli to buy condoms from Farran. Farran is escorting a very drunk man to the back room (remember this for later), but comes back to the register and chats with Nadia before the lovebirds leave to consummate their hookup. As the couple leaves the deli, Nadia spots Oatmeal across the street and runs to grab him — and gets hit by a cab.

Then, she wakes up confused in that East Village bathroom — the same place she started the episode — thinking perhaps she has amnesia. Or maybe the cocaine-laced joint affected her in an unanticipated way. So she relives her whole night, but this time she skips the hookup, takes a solo walk by the river and accidentally falls in. The next thing she knows, she’s back in the bathroom and spitting out a mouthful of water. 

So, it looks like Nadia just keeps dying over and over again.

For the next few scenes, Nadia repeatedly dies in different ways, and eventually she starts to establish the time loop parameters: If she doesn’t die, she wakes up the next day like normal... until she dies again. After one too many stairway deaths (she dies falling down the stairs a lot), she starts exiting the apartment via the fire escape. She consults Ruth, who is a therapist and her mother’s best friend, about what’s happening to her and whether that could be connected to her mother’s mental illness. Nadia’s ex-boyfriend, John (Yul Vazquez), calls her, and she informs him that she is absolutely not doing well. Despite all her efforts to figure out what’s going on, including an attempted trip to Bellevue to see if mental health professionals can assist, Nadia’s ambulance crashes. And she’s once again face-to-face with the bathroom mirror at her 36th birthday party. 

Now, Nadia is starting to theorize what’s happening to her.

Nadia begins to think that maybe her time loop is tied to something religious. After all, the apartment used to be home to a yeshiva, a school for Jewish boys to study their religion. John helps her investigate the history of the congregation, but nothing comes up. While looking for Oatmeal, Nadia wanders into Tompkins Square Park and runs into Horse, who offers her some sage advice: In any new beginning, you’re able to be whomever you want to be. Horse cuts her hair, and then the two fall asleep and freeze to death. When she returns to the bathroom, she’s more confused than ever. “I think a guy who gave me a haircut yesterday may have died tomorrow, and I don’t know how tomorrow deaths work when it’s yesterday again. I mean, is he in yesterday? Or does he even exist?” she says. But she’s in luck — she decides to spend the night guarding Horse’s stolen shoes at the homeless shelter, and as she’s leaving the next morning, she meets a man in the elevator who’s nervously opening and closing a ring box. As the elevator plummets to the ground, he seems as calm as she is — because he dies all the time, too. 

We meet Alan.

After Alan and Nadia die in the elevator accident, we arrive in Alan’s bathroom to experience his time loop. It’s clear Alan is a very type A, straitlaced kind of guy (so, basically, the opposite of Nadia). He starts his death day by listening to affirmations, feeding his fish and waiting for his elderly neighbor to approach so he can hold the door open. He arrives at his girlfriend Beatrice’s (Dascha Polanco) apartment, where it’s clear she’s about to break up with him, but he was about to propose. By the time he’s repeated the day many times, he knows that Beatrice wants to leave him — she says he’s always trying to fix things, and that’s part of their problem — but Alan wants to make it better, and to make her feel better, over and over again. 

Later, he self-soothes with beer, video games and two different types of cake (as one should, post-breakup, pre–time loop death). He tells his mom that he proposed to Beatrice, and his mom nervously asks if she said yes. “Yes,” he enthusiastically lies. As he leaves the hospital where his mom works, he steps in the elevator, where he meets Nadia for the first time. Nadia and Alan wake up in their bathrooms again, totally freaked out, and begin to live the same day. This time, Alan finds out that Beatrice is having an affair with one of her PhD advisers — who, we learn, is the same guy Nadia went home with the first night. Beatrice didn’t want to tell Alan about Mike because she was worried Alan would hurt himself. 

Meanwhile, Nadia decides to track down Alan, which she does by locating the jewelry store on the box he was fidgeting with — it’s where he bought Beatrice’s ring — and the two finally meet again. She asks for his theories about why they’re both caught in a time loop. Then, Nadia has another idea — that she and Alan are the same person — but that doesn’t seem quite right, either. 

At least Nadia and Alan have each other now, so they spiral into the chaos together.

Now that our protagonists know they’re linked, they have to figure out how and why they’re linked in order to fix the time loop. They have some theories: purgatorial punishment for being a bad person (Alan); the bathroom door is a strong gravitational field that’s gaining strength and messing with them (Nadia). We also see some new and exciting (read: horrifying) ways that each of them die: a gas explosion in Ruth’s kitchen (Nadia), a bike accident (Alan), getting hit by a car (Alan), another gas explosion (Nadia), an air conditioner falling out of the sky (both of them), slipping in the shower (Alan), an open manhole (Alan, poor guy) and choking on chicken bones (Nadia — also, yikes).

Nadia and Alan start to wonder if they’re dying at the same time (probably) and whether, since at this point they’ve each died 15 times, there are 15 separate universes where their loved ones are grieving them. Alan can’t remember his first death, though, and they decide that’s the key. Nadia then shadows Alan through one of his nights to trigger his memory. That night: Alan got dumped by Beatrice, drowned his sorrows in beer until he could barely walk and then... he doesn’t remember anything else. 

So, obviously, Nadia and Alan get drunk together and hook up, and Nadia opens up about her family. The reason she wears a gold coin on a necklace is because her Holocaust-survivor grandmother wanted the family’s fortune in a timeless currency: gold. So, she converted her valuables into South African Krugerrands. But when Nadia’s mom’s mental health spiraled out of control, she sold them all. (This storyline is important for later.)

A fun twist: Time starts to collapse.

Alan finally remembers his first death: He died by suicide. He and Nadia realize Alan was the drunk guy she saw that first night in the deli, and perhaps they were meant to save each other. All around them, things are disappearing — fruit is rotting; flowers are wilting. But they also notice that if you cut into a rotten-looking orange, it’s ripe on the inside, which means somewhere linear time as they used to understand it still exists. So they think that if they go back to the deli and fix their first interaction (plus anything else they can think of that they need to make right), they should be able to get out of the loop. 

Nadia starts her attempt by actually going to meet up with John and his tween daughter. While John isn’t there, his daughter is, and Nadia gifts her with the copy of Emily of New Moon that she’d intended to give her long ago. One down. Alan has a true heart-to-heart with Beatrice, fulfilling a part of his quest. Two down.

Where do we leave Nadia and Alan in the end?

The duo wake up again, everything seems closer to normal and they run into each other as planned at the deli — but this time, it’s not their time loop counterparts. Nadia and Alan are each living out that original night in split screen: Present Nadia is fixing past Alan, and present Alan is working on past Nadia (still with us?). Nadia keeps an eye on drunk Alan, preventing him from harming himself, and Alan follows Nadia to make sure she steers clear of any rogue taxis. 

When the two finally accomplish their mission, the split screens merge as the present versions of Nadia and Alan reunite and find themselves following Horse (and a procession of artists) in a makeshift parade (obviously). They’ve both saved each other and now are back in one timeline together. So, Season 2 may hold an entirely new time warp. Who knows?