Nine Perfect Strangers Recap: Trauma Dump

One of the downsides of Nine Perfect Strangers’s narrative setup — we have the clinic, the guests, and Masha at the helm — is that it inevitably draws its characters into simple “types.” There’s the bitter daughter, the rejected lover, the nice guy with a dark underside. In the first season of The White Lotus, Mike White jumped over that hurdle by giving his characters obstacles in the present rather than drawing too much from their pasts. This is Nine Perfect Strangers’s No. 1 problem: The guests have come to Masha to fix something that has already happened to them, so every character hitch goes back to something that needs to be explained, rather than letting us watch those characters develop in real time.

Then, we have the mystery of Masha herself. “Jesse” opens with a glimpse of Masha’s turbulent past: A title card announces it’s 2014, and we see Masha arrive at Zauberwald for her own psychedelic treatment under Helena’s care in the aftermath of her daughter’s death. How does David Sharpe feature into that past? Did he have anything to do with her corporate career? Could he have been part of her family life in Russia? Whoever he is, their history involves sex and maybe even romance: Masha isolates David in his room for hours upon his arrival, only to visit him at episode’s end, make out with him, and promise that from now on, they will only deal with each other at “arm’s length.”

But Masha is not the only character who gets the flashback treatment in this episode. We learn the most about Brian, whose missing bag Masha was hiding on purpose, to Helena’s disapproval. She lies to him that it had gotten lost in an airport shuttle but uses the moment to encourage him to let out his frustration with the mix-up and be honest about his feelings. This is how we find out that Brian was once the host of a beloved children’s show redolent of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. The Crabapple Clubhouse, as it was called, was Tatiana’s favorite, and it explains why, in the last episode, Imogen and Tina both looked and spoke to Brian as if they already knew who he was. Brian was worried about his bag because it contained Jesse, a bear puppet with melancholic eyes. Like Masha, a card on Brian’s nightstand tells him to have courage and to eat the chocolates that accompany it.

Mr. Rogers used to tell children they were special just the way they were; Brian told kids that “there’s only one of you, and isn’t that wonderful?” On the way to breakfast, he hallucinates Jesse talking to him and telling him to be brave, our indicator that those chocolates were impure. “You’ve gotta go to school,” Jesse tells him. The hallucination throws him back into the set of his show, where he emboldened children to face their own social anxieties. It’s kind of creepy, but there is something here: Zauberwald’s social dynamics aren’t unlike the school cafeteria. Victoria would rather eat eggs Florentine than the vegan, gluten-free, sugar-free muffins on offer, and Tina refuses to eat altogether.

I’m already getting tired of Tina and Imogen’s excessive negativity, though Tina wasn’t wrong when she posited that Masha “is not God, she’s a hot lady who wears gowns and touts mushrooms.” Still, there’s a coherence to Tina’s bad attitude that is missing from Imogen’s reflexive snark. That morning, she tried to sneak out of Peter’s room, and though they had a good night together, she insisted he probably wanted her to go, with the plain objective of making him ask her, directly, to stay. It worked, and they wrestled cutely. I’m not sure I’m buying the chemistry between Henry Golding and Annie Murphy just yet; maybe it’ll develop with time, but it surely doesn’t help that their dialogue has lines like, “We live in a society where men are constantly telling women what to do and what not to do, and I don’t want to be part of the problem.”

Besides, Imogen is just mean. She scoffs at people. She makes fun of Matteo’s English. When, in a change of schedule, Masha instructs Martin to send the guests on a foraging excursion under Brian’s leadership, Imogen protests that she’s uncomfortable with having him in a position of power. He was “canceled” for being “a little too demanding,” or “abusive,” in Imogen’s framing. But her protests lead nowhere — people are more willing to forgive Brian’s indiscretions than concede to Imogen, who thinks Victoria’s quickness to forgive comes from the fact that she herself did things like lock Imogen in a closet when she was little. The whole discussion escalates, only stopping when Sister Agnes screams. (Sister Agnes, by the way, is two-for-two on forgiving Brian: Earlier that day, he apologized for confusing her for a Zauberwald employee.)

We also learn, during breakfast, that Tina used to be a famous piano prodigy who is now retired, bitter, and at first hesitant to take drugs. Martin reassures everyone that the point of foraging is to “reconnect with the land” rather than “trip,” and eventually, they set off — all of them save for Victoria, who stays behind, perhaps because of her age and the two meters of snow covering the ground outside. In her room while the rest of the group forages, she dances and looks through an End of Life planner, which suggests she’s keeping something from Imogen and maybe even Matteo.

We get more of people’s past during the foraging trip, for which Brian suggests they pair off. Tina doesn’t want to be with Wolfie, so she goes with Sister Agnes. They bond over their respective losses of faith, and we get some of Sister Agnes’s sense of humor when she refers to Wolfie as Tina’s “roommate” and makes Sound of Music jokes. For her part, Wolfie is eager to tell Brian all about her relationship problems, and how Tina tossed away both of their careers when she decided to not play the piano anymore. I’m curious to know more about Wolfie’s part in the duo, and, if we’re going to base all of the characters on their pasts, about her own history, too — for now, it seems as though she exists solely in opposition to her girlfriend.

It finally shuts Imogen up to hear that Matteo lost both of his parents in “the war” (not specified). She also learns that Peter’s dad is David Sharpe, who, unbeknownst to them, is arriving at Zauberwald in a helicopter as they forage. On the staff side of things, Martin wants to know why Masha moved up foraging on the schedule and why she is so hung up on waiting for David Sharpe’s arrival to start the full protocol. So far, Martin has held strong on rejecting Masha’s advances, even setting boundaries: “You will not dominate me with these kinds of tricks.” Hell yeah, Martin! Speak up for yourself! All Masha takes from this is that Martin is hurt that Helena put her, rather than him, in charge of the clinic. “I just want to be able to trust you,” he concludes.

When the guests return from their foraging trip, they need to make dinner with what they found, still under Brian’s leadership. Jesse gives Brian funny ideas: “Let’s get her,” he suggests of Imogen. Unfortunately, Brian doesn’t listen to Jesse at first. But as Imogen continues to provoke him, along with everyone else, he finally explodes, much in the same way he exploded at his camera crew. The last straw for him is when Imogen tells him he ruined her childhood. “I failed,” he seethes, “and people like you are the proof. All I tried to do was teach people to have a little tolerance, a little compassion for people when they weren’t perfect, but somehow, we wound up with a generation of whiny, judgmental, sanctimonious little tattletales.”

In a flashback, we see the scene of his freak-out, which was recorded by a crew member on an iPhone. He yells at someone for speaking while the cameras were rolling, then flips a table when he sees he’s being filmed. The outburst is pretty bad; I find it believable that, if it happened between the years 2018 and 2020, it would’ve cost him his job. As Brian is getting some air outside, Tina comes to talk to him, revealing that when she was a prodigious piano player as a kid, she went on his show. He listened as she told him about wanting to be an astronaut, which was memorable for her because her parents only ever wanted her to talk about being a piano player. Brian pulls out Jesse to apologize to Tina for freaking out, and I wonder, Has he been holding on to the puppet this whole time?

I have to say, I’m struggling to feel bad for Imogen, even when she’s crying in Peter’s room, wondering why she has to be so negative and judgmental. “I just thought if Brian Tumkin ever met me, he’d like me.” Why would he! You were a bitch to him! She tells Peter that Brian’s show “kept her together” when her dad died, a trauma she doesn’t like talking about. Here’s hoping that as we get to know her more, her character will be revealed as more surprising and nuanced. She is kind of a stand-in for last season’s Lars, a tough person with a wounded sense of self. But there was a greater clarity to what Lars was looking to get out of Tranquillum House — a story — while Imogen’s motivations still seem murky. Does she actually want to get along with her mother or deal with the grief of her father’s passing? Will she really want to get to know Peter in a meaningful way? And, separately, will we get to know Peter in a more meaningful way now that David has arrived and informed Masha that his son is the only reason he accepted her invitation?

Und So Weiter

• What a great Weyes Blood needle drop toward the end of this episode, as Brian reminisces outside! Her album And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow is a balm to the spirit.

• Something bothering me about the casting this season is that, good performances notwithstanding, the actors’ ages all seem off. They are 20 years apart, but it’s hard for me to believe that Mark Strong could be Henry Golding’s father.

• Let me complain one last time about Imogen’s negativity here: She says Brian’s freak-out ruined her childhood, but from the flashback, we learn that it was recent enough to have been filmed on an iPhone. Okay, it would suck to learn at any age that Mr. Rogers yelled at his crew, but “ruined my childhood” implies that the destruction happened in childhood. Maybe I’m splitting hairs, but it just seems like too easy of a line, like it telegraphs provocation in general but not specifically to this character.

• Two episodes into an eight-episode season, I feel like we’ve spent most of the time setting up. I’m eager for these characters to start facing obstacles in the present, rather than being beholden to their pasts. Call me old-fashioned, but I’d love some plot.