<i>Nine Perfect Strangers</i> Season 2 Finale Dives into the Messy Side of Healing
Spoilers below.
The second season of Nine Perfect Strangers began with the promise once again that wellness can be bought, transformation can be accelerated, and pain can be rearranged into something beautiful if you just surrender to Masha (Nicole Kidman) and her boundary-pushing program. But in the finale, creator David E. Kelley delivers a knotty and provocative response to that thesis. The episode, called “Batsh*t,” peels away the illusion of healing and forces the retreat’s guests to confront more destabilizing questions: What if we’ve been building peace on lies, and what happens when those lies are finally dragged into the light?
During a tense gathering, the connective tissue between this season’s strangers is revealed to be David Sharpe (Mark Strong), the billionaire media and weapons magnate whose legacy of exploitation has touched every guest in devastatingly personal ways.
The connections are intricate and brutal. David’s media empire “endlessly” covered Brian’s (Murray Bartlett) scandalous meltdown on the set of his children’s show; Wolfie (Maisie Richardson-Sellers) lost a music scholarship when David’s company ceased funding for tax reasons. Sister Agnes’s (Dolly de Leon) humanitarian work in war-torn regions was bankrolled by David’s company. For Matteo (Aras Aydin), the connection is most visceral—David’s smart bombs killed his parents and siblings. Even Imogen (Annie Murphy) has a direct connection to him: Her late father created the satellite guidance technology used in David’s explosives.
Masha orchestrates what becomes a trial by peers, inviting each guest to speak their pain aloud in the presence of its source. She offers no prescription, no easy path to forgiveness. Instead, she asks them to collectively determine a fair sentence for David’s crimes. What begins as catharsis slowly curdles into something more unsettling: a surreal mix of therapy, tribunal, and theater.
David tries to assume the role of repentant titan, announcing his intent to withdraw from weapons manufacturing. But his performance begins to unravel when Peter (Henry Golding), his son, reveals that David once learned to cry on command for a 60 Minutes profile. The tears come now, just as they did then—telegenic, empty, and rehearsed. When Imogen presses him about remembering her father, David blankly replies, “I can’t picture him, to be honest.” “Sometimes, neither can I,” Imogen spits back, before slapping him in the face.
As tensions mount, the cracks in the retreat’s serene facade split wide open. Martin (Lucas Englander) follows David outside, where he’s stepped away to get satellite reception and make the call to shut down his weapons business. But the cold, snow, and heavy psychedelics trigger something deeper in Martin, his trauma flaring as he hears the hallucinated voice of his late mother, Helena (Lena Olin), taunting him. On a narrow, ice-slicked bridge blanketed in falling snow, Martin confronts both Masha and David about his family’s business, which he believes he should run. In a moment heavy with symbolism and dread, he raises a shotgun and fires. The blast misses but startles Masha, who slips and tumbles backwards off the bridge, vanishing into the void below.
As she falls, time slows. She sees flashes of her daughter Tatiana (Alyla Browne), and then—suspended in the liminal space between life and death—she finds herself cradling an imagined version of the child. “I need to let you go just for this moment,” Masha whispers, allowing herself to feel the full weight of her grief.
When Masha regains consciousness, she appoints Martin, the emotionally damaged man who wounded her, as the retreat’s heir. “I believe in you,” she tells him. It’s not a clean redemption but a recalibration of his life perspective. Through her faith in him, Masha helps Martin realize he has the capacity to take over.
Not everyone is redeemed, but most are genuinely changed. After Wolfie ends her relationship with Tina (King Princess), Tina sits alone at the retreat’s piano and, for the first time in years, plays a song straight through. When Tina approaches Masha afterwards, Masha quietly reveals why she brought the musician to the retreat: Tatiana once adored Brian’s long-cancelled children’s show, but her favorite episode was the one featuring Tina.
“She would be your age now,” Masha says. “I wanted to see who you’d grown up to be.”
Tina looks at her with new understanding. “How’d I do?”
“Lovely,” Masha replies, pulling her into an embrace. “David Sharpe hurt a lot of people. But he led me to Wolfie, who led me to you. Hopefully, you now have been led back to yourself.”
Brian, now separated from Jesse, the puppet bear from his show that also served as an emotional shield, listens in quiet joy as Sister Agnes suggests he might bring laughter to children again in hospitals, schools, and refugee centers. “Cheering up kids that need it most,” she adds with gentle conviction. Imogen and Peter, sharing an uncertain but gentler intimacy, trade plans for how to see each other again. Even Victoria, Imogen’s self-involved mother, shows a flash of humanity. “Just send the private jet,” she instructs Peter. “Don’t send the private jet,” Imogen corrects with a smile.
But David, unsurprisingly, doesn’t evolve. After Masha leaks a video recording to the press of David vowing to exit weapons manufacturing during the retreat, the pair meet up at a McDonald’s in Bavaria—a deliberately unglamorous “neutral location” Masha chose. In the finale’s final moments, he reveals he’s launching a new venture: psychedelic therapy. David has acquired footage of the retreat guests’ most vulnerable psychedelic episodes, purchased from Martin, and now wields it as leverage. His proposal to Masha is as insulting as it is calculated: work for him at a salary of $100,000 a year—with no equity or business control—and sign an NDA to keep quiet about his methods.
“You’ve got nothing but debts,” David says coolly. “I just have to snap my fingers. I’ve got a whole corporate division devoted to making sure you spend the rest of your sad, penniless life crawling from courtroom to courtroom like a slug.”
Masha doesn’t flinch. She signs the NDA, then kisses him. “We’re family,” she explains. “We share a daughter. We always will.” Whether she’s referring solely to Tatiana or a more abstract bond—shared guilt, power, trauma—remains somewhat unclear.
That ambiguity is the point. Nine Perfect Strangers has never trafficked in tidy resolutions. It lingers in the murky space between recovery and unrest, performance and transformation. The season doesn’t end in triumph; rather, it ends in complexity and the uncomfortable recognition that healing isn’t a destination but an ongoing reckoning with pain. Sometimes, the most honest thing we can do is admit we’re still broken and still trying to put ourselves back together, one imperfect shard at a time.
elle
