How Nine Perfect Strangers Season 2 Ends
In Nine Perfect Strangers Season 2, Nicole Kidman returns as Masha Dmitrichenko to lead a group of people as they confront their trauma through a unique form of therapy that involves psychedelic drugs and surprising revelations.
This time, nine people are brought together in the Austrian alps for treatment under Masha. By the end of Season 2, airing July 2, they realize they have all crossed paths in some way before.
Here's a rundown of the main characters and how they all learn that they are connected in the surprising finale.
The characters and their trauma
Masha Dmitrichenko (Nicole Kidman) selects the attendees for her retreat, which she now leads in an old mansion called Zauberwald that belonged to her former mentor, Dr. Helena Von Falkenberg. It's through Falkenberg that Masha learned about using psychedelic drugs in a therapeutic way. Masha did it herself while processing the grief of the death of her daughter, who was hit by a car, and found it helped her feel like she was with her daughter again. Falkenberg's son, Martin (Lucas Englander), helps Masha run the retreat, guiding the nine participants on their respective trips.
There's one couple on the trip, Wolfie (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) and Tina (King Princess). They are both musicians, and Tina is a piano prodigy who has lost the ability to play the piano due to some kind of mental block. Tina quickly realizes that she knows one of the group members, Brian (Murray Bartlett) because Brian performed with puppets on a children's TV show, and she was a guest on it once.
Brian showed up to the retreat with one of his puppets in tow, which speaks for him when he doesn't have the courage to speak for himself. He lost his job on the TV show when he had a nervous breakdown on camera.
Agnes (Dolly De Leon) is a former nun, who is here to work through some guilt that she felt while working as a nurse in a hospital in a war zone. She keeps having flashbacks to the moment when a pregnant patient died under her watch.
Imogen (Annie Murphy) is attending the retreat with her mother Victoria (Christine Baranski), in an effort to spend more quality time with her. But she is aghast when her mother shows up with a date, Matteo (Aras Aydin). While her mother is occupied with Matteo, Imogen connects with another group member, Peter (Henry Golding), and they hook up throughout the retreat.
Like Imogen, Peter is also attending the retreat because he's traumatized by one of his parents. His mother and father are divorced, he wants to feel closer to his father, a billionaire media mogul named David Sharpe (Mark Strong).
How the drug trips go
Participants ingest the psychedelics by drinking a specially concocted tea out of a water bottle. In some scenes, they are lying in bed or on a yoga mat with a silver disc on their chest that injects the drugs into their system. Everyone has a different reaction. Participants are even encouraged to dance at one point. In a memorable scene, Agnes, Wolfie, Tina, and Brian go soak in a tub filled with wine at a nearby spa. Agnes is so racked with guilt about the patient she lost in a war hospital that she runs away from the group and breaks into a church, looking to do confession.
Sometimes Victoria can't get out of bed, and Imogen is shocked to learn that she has ALS. Matteo, the man she thought was her mother's date, is also her caregiver. In one dramatic scene, Victoria has a seizure in reaction to the medication, and Imogen becomes hysterical.
Matteo spends a lot of time during his trip thinking about his parents, who died in a war zone. But he says he doesn't mind the grief, that he sees it as a sign that he loved them a lot. 'My grief is not all that I am. I was a boy who was loved.'
The drug trips strain Wolfie's and Tina's relationship. Tina feels like she was brought to the retreat against her will; she thought she was being taken to a normal spa. Wolfie relives the moment when she met Tina and fell in love with her when she was watching her onstage. Tina thinks back to the moment when she was on Brian's TV show and talked about wanting to become an astronaut. She has felt like she played piano to fulfill her own mother's dream for her, even though what she really wanted to be was an astronaut. And Wolfie's pushiness about playing the piano reminds her of her mother's pushiness about playing the piano, leading her to burst out, 'I'm f***ing my mother!'
During Sharpe's trip, he relives a magical one-night stand he had with Masha during a business trip. That one-night stand led to the birth of Masha's daughter, who was hit by a car later in life. Masha brought him here to give him a large dose of the drugs so that he could 'meet' his daughter. She also hopes that he will enjoy the experience so much that he will invest in the therapy, which is in dire need of funds.
How Nine Perfect Strangers ends
The group finds out that Masha selected them for the retreat because, like her, they all have a connection to Sharpe.
Sharpe's news division revealed footage of Brian's outburst on children's television, ruining his career. Sharpe's company pulled funding for the music program that Wolfie adored. As a nurse, Agnes tended to victims in war zones bombarded by bombs that Sharpe's company made—bombs that also killed Matteo's family members.
Imogen's father developed the satellite technology that guided bombs funded by Sharpe's company, and he ended up killing himself because he was so horrified that the technology he developed was used for such violent means. But Victoria begs Masha not to tell Imogen because she's worried that the news would destroy her.
Sharpe says he doesn't deserve all of this blame, arguing, 'Aren't we all flawed people just trying to do our best?' To appease the group, Sharpe promises to cut his company's military contracts and donate the money that they have made to charity.
In the most dramatic scene of the finale, Masha's assistant Martin confronts Masha outside in the snow, afraid that Masha is gunning to take over his family's property and cut him out. He shoots Masha, but she survives. While convalescing, she tells Martin he can have the property and run the psychedelic retreats.
Overall, the characters seem to find closure in the finale. Tina finds the ability to play the piano again, but she and Wolfie have decided to part ways. Masha cheers up Tina by telling her that the episode of Brian's TV show where Tina was a guest was her daughter's favorite. Her daughter would watch it over and over again, and Masha wanted to see who Tina grew up to be.
Imogen and Peter share a passionate goodbye kiss as they part ways and vow to never be apart again. Imogen also vows to visit her mother more, now that she knows that she has a terminal illness. Agnes and Brian have become fast friends, playing with little marionette puppets they got in a gift shop nearby, and she convinces him to take his puppeteer skills to hospitals to cheer up children in need.
As everyone is leaving the retreat, Sharpe takes back what he says about cutting all military contracts. Masha shames him by leaking a recording of the moment when he made that promise to the group on YouTube. The participants find out about the leak when they leave the retreat and their cell phone service is restored.
A month later, Masha meets Sharpe in a McDonald's. Sharpe wants to invest in Masha's psychedelic drug retreats and incorporate it into an arm of his company. When she hesitates, he shows her the blackmail that he could use against her, footage he bought from her assistant Martin of the chaotic moment when Victoria was seizing, and it looked like her team had lost control of the whole project. She signs the document in the end, and the series ends with the two locked into a passionate kiss. 'You may not love your family but you can't get rid of them,' she says.
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