Diksha Sundriyal
The second season of Hulu’s ‘Nine Perfect Strangers’ brings back Nicole Kidman’s Masha Dmitrichenko in a new wellness retreat in the Alps, where she plans to test her psychedelic treatments on a different group of strangers. The season picks up a while after the events of the first season, which ended with Masha fleeing Tranquillum House, and for good reasons. By the time we come around to this season, she has already gained some notoriety.
She has been featured in The New Yorker, she has been the inspiration for the novel written by Melissa McCarthy’s character, Frances Welty, and is also the subject of several federal investigations. Despite all this ruckus around her name, she has focused on working on a form of therapy that pushes the boundaries of her psychedelic treatments. However, this has not been tested on humans so far, and that’s what brings us to the plot for this season. SPOILERS AHEAD.
Masha Receives an Offer From an Old Friend
Even though Masha has found a lot of success in America, this is not the place for her to be anymore. She is served with one subpoena after another, and it seems that the only way she can get away from this is if she accepts the offer of running a new wellness centre, this time in the Alps. Called Zauberwald, this is the place that Masha went to years ago after she lost her daughter and was trying to find a new direction for herself. Back then, it was run by Helen, who introduced Masha to the drugs that she is now experimenting with. A flashback reveals that she came there in 2014, completely devastated over Tatiana’s loss, but over time, the drugs helped her see her daughter. In the present day, the desire to see her daughter has transformed into the feeling of being haunted by her. She sees the little girl everywhere, and that does not bode well for anyone.
Helen invites her to come back and run the place, which is in dire need of revival. The invitation is sent through a man named Martin, a pharmacologist who is working on the same thing as Masha, but in a more scientific manner. When he points out that the retreat is too isolated for anyone to serve her any court orders offline or online, she accepts his offer. Running the wellness center means bringing in new people, but this time, there is no element of surprise as Masha and her tricks with drugs have become too famous. Still, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have some cards up her sleeves, and the first thing she does is carefully choose the group where she believes that every person would complement each other’s healing journey.
Masha Finds a New Focus Group for Her Radical Treatment Methods
The guests start to roll in one by one, and we see the vastly different backgrounds and problems they come with. The first to arrive are Imogen and Brian. Imogen is there to work on the fraught relationship with her mother, Victoria, who arrives separately, with a young lover, Mateo, by her side. This frustrates her daughter because it shows how unserious Victoria is about the whole thing. Another thing that we discover is that Victoria has been at the retreat several times and is known for not paying her bills. This time, however, Helen assures Masha that she already has Victoria’s credit card on file. Meanwhile, Brian Tumkin is there to work on what seems to be his rage issues, which flare up right on his arrival as he discovers that one of his bags is missing.
It seems that Masha intentionally kept the bag aside because she wanted to see how Brian would react to it. Of course, she later returns the bag, which turns out to have his puppet, Jesse. Before coming to Zauberwald, Brian was quite a popular children’s TV show host, where he helped young people find ways to deal with their emotions. But one day, he couldn’t control his own emotions and had a breakdown on the set, which went viral and ruined his career. Now, he is here, trying to make sense of things, while hallucinating that his puppet Jesse talks to him and advises him on all sorts of stuff. Masha reveals that she used to watch the show with her daughter, and thinking about it makes her emotional.
Another guest is Sister Agnes, whom Brian mistakes for an employee at the retreat, and she carries his bags to his room. He even tries to tip her, but she leaves before that. He discovers her identity later that evening when all the guests gather in the common room. He is embarrassed, but she puts him at ease by showing that she is not angry with him or bothered by their interaction at all. The next guest is Peter Sharpe, who is supposed to be with his father, David Sharpe, a famous billionaire who is too busy with his work to arrive on the same day as anyone else. Peter and Imogen immediately bond with each other, and she spends the first night with him, in his room, partly because she doesn’t want to be in the same room as her mother and Mateo.
The last duo is that of a musician couple, Tina and Wolfie. Tina was a piano prodigy, but now, she can’t hear the music anymore. Wolfie hopes that Masha’s unorthodox ways might help her break through this block, but it only frustrates Tina because she thinks she has been brought into a cult under false pretences by her overbearing girlfriend. Wolfie, however, claims that she told Tina they were going to a therapeutic retreat and that she even gave Tina the book about Masha, but her girlfriend is too self-indulgent to consider her thoughts and opinions.
Masha Feeds on the Intense Tension in the Group
On the first evening the group spends in Zauberwald, Masha shows up in the common room, where everyone expects to be updated about how the program will proceed. However, she notices that David has not arrived yet, so she decides to hold off on that part of the process until he arrives. This makes everyone curious about David’s identity and why it is so important for him to be there. At the same time, it also frustrates them, particularly Tina, who feels betrayed by her girlfriend and refuses to eat or drink anything offered to her because she knows it will be drugged. David does not show up until the next evening, but the fact that he has been chosen for this program concerns Helen on several levels.
To begin with, he is a very well-known person, so if anything goes wrong, it would ruin Zauberwald, and that’s not why Helen brought Masha to run the therapy in the first place. Similar concerns are shared by Martin, who believes that Masha’s unorthodox and intense method should be reigned in. He also seems to harbour a grudge because he thought Helen would put him in charge, but she chose Masha. This tension also reflects in the group, particularly charged by Imogen, who directs the anger for her mother towards Brian. She is rude and unsympathetic towards him, blaming him for ruining her childhood and exposing himself as an abusive person. Her taunts make an already unstable Brian even more sensitive, but fortunately, the other people in the group don’t think so badly of him.
The Foraging Assignment Forces the Group to be Honest About Their Feelings
The next morning, he is put in charge of leading the group on a foraging assignment. When Imogen talks about how unfit he is for the task of leading, causing an argument, Sister Agnes screams to shut everyone up and help Brian claim his space. The team is divided into three parts: Brian and Wolfie, Tina and Sister Agnes, and Imogen, Peter, and Mateo. Victoria chooses to sit this one out, and the documents in front of her suggest that not only is she going through some financial problems, but she also has serious health issues that she most likely hasn’t shared with her daughter. As the group ventures into the biting cold, spending time away from their partners and with each other does them good.
Wolfie shares her concerns about Tina with Brian, who gives her some solid advice about not being too pushy. Tina shares the part about her music block with Sister Agnes, who reveals that she also felt a similar block when it comes to God. Meanwhile, Mateo reveals that both his parents died in a war (he doesn’t specify which one), which makes Imogen a little sympathetic towards him. They all manage to find enough things to make their dinner, which they are told to prepare themselves, after the poisonous stuff is removed from their findings. After a tiring day, everyone is hungry, and being in the close quarters of the kitchen only makes things worse. Imogen, once again, targets Brian, but this time, he lashes out at her, pointing out that her problem is with her mother, not with him.
Both leave the room in rage and tears. Later, when Peter finds Imogen packing up her stuff, he calms her down, and she tells him that she was obsessed with Brian’s show, even as an adult, as she found a father figure in him, something she never really had after her father passed away when she was young. Meanwhile, Peter’s father arrives at Zauberwald, and Masha instructs to quarantine him from everyone else. Later that evening, she visits his quarters, telling him to do away with his laptop and other devices. In a more interesting turn of events, they kiss each other, revealing that they already know each other and that Masha’s intention of making David a part of the group is more than what she has let on so far.
Read More: Where Was Nine Perfect Strangers Season 2 Filmed?
