Russian Doll season 2 recap guide: Episodes 1 to 7

Russian Doll season 2, episode 5 recap: Exquisite Corpse

Russian Doll season 2, episode 5 quickly confirms that Nadia has now entered her grandmother when she was much younger in 1944 Budapest. Not long after getting off the train, Nadia runs into young Delia (Franciska Farkas), who takes her through a secret mirror passageway to a safe place in their apartment building.

Nadia learns from Delia that the Germans have not yet put all the possessions onto the “gold train” yet, instead everything is being stored in a warehouse. With Delia’s assistance, Nadia is able to retrieve her family’s stolen goods. She hides them inside an old tunnel behind several bricks and marks the spot with an ‘X,’ and creating a map to go with it.

Then Nadia tracks down Lazlo Kiss (Ákos Orosz), the priest who’s grave she and Maxine found in present-day Budapest. Knowing he’s a sympathizer, Nadia trusts him to send a letter to Vera after the war with a map to where the goods are located. It works and when Nadia gets on the train again, she gets off a few decades later to find the items.

An ecstatic Nadia and Delia are excited to discover that the goods are exactly where the map said they would be. They immediately take the items to an appraiser and transfer them in for…Krugerrands. That’s when Nadia realizes that nothing has changed. These are the same Krugerrands that Nora will steal with Chez in the 1980s.

She puts them under the couch, the same place we saw Nora and Chez take them from in the season 2 premiere. Nadia then sees her young mother, Nora as a child, and tells her a story about how someday, she’ll steal that gold. Of course, at this point, little Nora has no clue what her mother is talking about.

The episode ends with the most confusing train ride yet, as Nadia wanders from train car to train car, each one leading to the different phases of her ancestor’s life, from Nora to Vera to young Vera and then back again to New York. Somehow, Nadia gets stuck in the 1980s, back insider her mother just as she goes into labor with…herself.