Russian Doll: Time, Many Worlds, and Computer Simulations

For the first episodes, the Netflix series Russian Doll seems to be a darker reworking of Groundhog Day. Fatal accidents on the night of or day after Nadia’s 36^th birthday party keep bringing her back to the bathroom sink in the party apartment during the festivities. Nadia retains her memory of all the repeats, and the memories cumulate in an orderly fashion, e.g. she does not on loop 2 have memories of loop 1 and on loop one have memories of loop 2. So it is possible to regard each loop as having its own local time, embedded in order in a super-time experienced only by Nadia. This far we are within the Groundhog temporal metaphysics.

The Many World Metaphysics of "The Man in the High Castle"

The Amazon series in which the Axis powers won the Second World War is based on the premise that things might not have turned out with North America split between a Greater Nazi Reich in the east and the Japanese Pacific States, a largely lawless Rocky Mountain area separating the two. It is not too hard for us to imagine at least one war outcome different from this. 

The metaphysics of the series has it that both these possible worlds are actual, as are others, and that information transfer and human travel among them are possible. The political and human consequences of interacting worlds fuel much of the drama of the series. I am going to put aside world politics, fascism, terrorism, life, death and the longings of the human soul to focus, instead, on what I am sure got the audience clicking into episode after episode: the metaphysics of plural worlds.