Russian Doll’s Horse Explained: Why He Keeps Showing Up
Warning: Contains spoilers for Russian Doll season 2.
In Russian Doll, Nadia has multiple interactions with a character known as Horse. He often seems key to the plot, but very little about his presence is ever explained. In Season 1, Nadia and Alan both end up stuck in the same time loop, reliving Nadia’s 36th birthday over and over again. In Russian Doll Season 2, the pair find that they can travel through time by riding on a specific train. While Horse’s actions seem random, there are subtle implications that he is much more important than he may appear.
Horse (Brendan Sexton III, Don't Breathe 2) is first seen by Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) in Russian Doll Season 1, episode 1. While he makes recurring appearances throughout the show, he is rarely seen interacting with other characters. Although he speaks very little, and when he does his meaning is often unclear, Horse is often present for pivotal moments in Nadia’s story.
Russian Doll repeatedly leaves questions about how its universe functions unanswered. While Nadia and Alan learn about their families and themselves, explanations for the mechanics of time in Russian Doll are either vague or guesses voiced by the main characters, at best. However, Horse’s presence in both Russian Doll Season 1 and Season 2 might contain the answers to why Nadia and Alan have such strange experiences with time.
In Russian Doll Season 1, Nadia meets Horse in the park and Horse insists on cutting Nadia’s hair. While this is a strange request, Nadia agrees and the two get inebriated together before falling asleep and freezing to death. Nadia realizes that this means that without intervention, Horse will die on the night of her 36th birthday. Nadia takes it upon herself to ensure that Horse survives the night. This is the start of Nadia re-evaluating how she treats other people, as she makes a direct effort to care about another person. This in turn helps her to connect more deeply with Alan and shapes that bond. These interactions with Horse put Nadia in a position to grow further during Russian Doll Season 2.
At the end of Russian Doll Season 1, the original iterations of Alan and Nadia end up in separate timelines with different versions of their counterparts. After they are each able to convince the other person to trust them, Nadia and Alan both make their way toward a parade. As both pairs walk through the parade, the timelines appear to merge, reuniting the versions of Nadia and Alan that experienced the time loop. This vital parade is led by Horse as the grand marshal.
In Russian Doll Season 2, episode 1, Horse appears to Nadia in a subway station and they yell incoherently, misunderstanding each other, across the platforms. Moments after this interaction with Horse, Nadia boards train #6622 and time travels back to 1982. While the presence of Horse could be read as a coincidence, his presence at both the start and end of the time loop and at the start and end of Nadia’s time travel journey suggests that he is more directly plot-relevant.
It is highly likely that Horse, at least symbolically, had something to do with Nadia’s experience of the time loop in Season 1, as he seems to have been responsible for the collapsing of the timelines in the season finale. After Nadia is able to grow as a person in Russian Doll Season 1 and saves Horse’s life, Horse may have felt that he owed Nadia something in return. Horse is then responsible for Nadia going back in time in Russian Doll Season 2, his gift to her that enables her to process her intergenerational trauma and grief.
While giving Horse agency over time travel in Russian Doll Season 2 might seem like a stretch, the season 2 finale all but confirms it. When Nadia steals her baby self from 1982 the timeline begins to collapse, leaving Nadia and Alan trapped in a confusing convergence of points in time. Once Alan persuades Nadia to take her baby self back to 1982, they seek out the time train but it will not appear. They see Horse wearing an MTA uniform and chase after him, and he is able to lead them to the time train, for a price.
Horse has already been present for key moments that seem to instigate or conclude strange time situations in Russian Doll. The fact that Horse is aware of the time train and its location proves that he has greater knowledge of how time works in the Russian Doll universe than the average person. The fact that he is wearing an MTA uniform for this moment further suggests that Horse has some professional connection to the timeline and may in some way have control over time or its maintenance.
Throughout Russian Doll, Horse has been a repeating presence in Nadia’s story. However, there has never been a convincing explanation for why Alan shares Nadia’s experiences. The answer for this might come in Alan’s Horse-counterpart: his grandmother Agnes (Carolyn Michelle Smith). Introduced in Russian Doll season 2, Agnes is the character that Alan time travels to in 1962, but she has a more consistent presence throughout the season.
In Russian Doll season 2, Agnes is seen in 1982 helping Nadia/Nora off the train after giving her some money, though it is not immediately apparent that she is Agnes as she is styled very differently compared to 1968. In 1982 she is wearing an MTA outfit which ties her to Horse’s later appearance. Agnes’ significance is further implied by her presence on the platform during Nadia’s birth, but even more so by the fact that she is in The Void when Alan arrives there in Netflix's Russian Doll season 2 finale. Working alongside other people in MTA uniforms, Agnes appears to be able to explain more than is reasonable to Alan about how time works, and she appears to have a concrete presence outside of time, despite being dead in the main timeline.
Both Agnes and Horse are seen by Nadia and Alan at different points in the timeline while wearing MTA outfits. Similarly, both seem to show more knowledge of time and the time train than they should be able to possess. All of this suggests that Russian Doll season 2 is setting up a wider system of timeline maintenance at the hands of Agnes, Horse, and others, that may end up being central to the narrative for Russian Doll season 3.
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