Warning: This article contains spoilers for Season 2 of “Russian Doll.” Proceed with caution.

“If you had the chance to change your fate, would you?” That line, famously uttered by another curly-haired redhead, sums up the dilemma that Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) faces at the close of “Russian Doll” Season 2. Unlike her fellow “time prisoner” Alan (Charlie Barnett), who’s seen enough movies to know that meddling with the past is never a good idea, Nadia can’t resist the opportunity to right the wrongs her family experienced. When that doesn’t work, she takes the even more dangerous leap of trying to rewrite her own life story, inadvertently collapsing space and time in the process.

The unlikely duo’s latest time troubles begin four years after Season 1 when Nadia discovers that the 6 train at Astor Place is a portal into the past. Specifically, it’s a portal into the pasts of...

Spoler Alert: Do not read if you have not yet watched “Matryoshka,” the Season 2 finale episode of “Russian Doll.”

In Season 2, “Russian Doll” broke out of its first season’s “Groundhog Day”-style time-loop format with a “Quantum Leap”-like time-travel device that allowed Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) and Alan (Charlie Barnett) to jump into the bodies of their deceased loved ones by taking a trip on the New York City subway. Nadia becomes her mother, Lenora “Nora” (Chloë Sevigny), in the East Village in 1982, and grandmother Vera, in World War II-era Budapest, while Alan is inhabiting his grandmother Agnes (Carolyn Michelle Smith) in Germany during the Cold War in 1944.

The time travel allows them both to explore the pasts that had shaped them long before they were born. Nadia specifically makes multiple futile attempts to change the course of history for her mother and, therefore, herself, all while avoiding the...