Warning: This article contains spoilers for Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers season 1, episode 4.
Hot on the heels of white-people-wellness drama The White Lotus, Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers, based on the eponymous novel by Liane Moriarty, swept in to inform us how über-rich people spend their money (Lamborghinis and plastic surgery), and why they’re so very sad. Michael Shannon’s Napoleon Marconi might object at this point and remind us he’s a high school teacher who got in on a discount, but the vibes of this David E. Kelley (of Big LittleLies) are unmistakably a look into a wealthy world, and one with a sense of impending doom with that. Will someone die by the end of this series? It’s not guaranteed the way it is in The White Lotus, but it sure does seem less and less likely with each episode that we’re all getting out of this alive — as illustrated in the final shot of this week’s episode: the mural scrawled onto Masha’s wall declaring “IT’S GOOD TO DIE.”
But before we get into the murder of it all, this week’s episode has forced us to consider what exactly this show is doing when it’s talking about wellness. Liane Moriarty, co-creator of the series and author of the novel upon which it’s based, has been vocal about the fact that her book was intended as a satire of the wellness industry, and a critical one at that. So far, it’s not clear that the show will be making that same statement, despite plenty of moments that are certainly intended to draw a laugh at the expense of existing wellness treatments. (“Dozens of wellness institutes are doing this,” Masha solemnly informs Manny Jacinto’s Yao of their practice of secretly microdosing their guests: “You know that.”)
One big difference revealed in this week’s episode — that the guests all choose to stay in Masha’s care even after finding out that she’s been giving them psilocybin without their knowledge — raises some big questions about how the show will treat Masha’s “methods” as this all plays out.
While the show is happy to poke fun at the relief the guests hope to find in meditation or smoothies, many of the moments we’ve seen under Masha’s care haven’t been about “wellness,” they’ve been about dealing with real trauma and rage, in moments that feel (and are meant to feel) very serious. Napoleon’s speech about his son is heartbreaking; so is Melissa McCarthy’s Frances breaking down about the family she’d hoped for. In Moriarty’s book, the characters we meet do ultimately find real transformation and move on from their pain, but it seems to happen explicitly in spite of Masha and her attempts to “heal” them — in the series, the moment these characters agreed to continue being drugged by Masha (and the subsequent moments when her treatment seemed to be working, like Heather having a breakthrough on her intimacy with Napoleon), the show asked us to take it more seriously too.
The big fear in watching this is that the show will ask us to excuse Masha’s methods with the argument that it ends up working for these guests. It’s one thing to explore alternative treatments, and another to tacitly endorse psilocybin dosing as a one-size-fits-all treatment for trauma, which the show risks doing if everyone agrees to take more and solely ends up the better for it. Going back to all the murder hints the show has been dropping, though, we’re probably in for something much darker than the group uniformly leaving as psilocybin evangelists. For now, I’m still assuming that the other shoe will drop — and hoping against hope that Delilah’s bipolar disorder plotline is not about to be used for evil.
Episode 4 of Nine Perfect Strangers revealed huge bombshells that basically guarantee the ending of the series will be nothing like the ending of the book, so read on for what they were and how they might affect what happens next.
Our mission at SheKnows is to empower and inspire women, and we only feature products we think you’ll love as much as we do. Please note that if you purchase something by clicking on a link within this story, we may receive a small commission of the sale.
The guests are willingly taking drugs
I’ve covered this pretty extensively above, but it’s also the biggest split from the book so far. In Moriarty’s novel, once they find out that they’ve been given a high dose of psychedelics, it’s too late for them to do anything but ride it out. Once they wake up the next morning, sober, they find they’ve been locked in. No one stays willingly under Masha’s care, and the big bonfire party scene we see at the end of episode 3 only happens in novel after Masha has been led away in handcuffs.
The fact that guests are staying here after giving, as Masha put it, “constructive consent” to being drugged by her changes everything about how they’ll go into what happens next.
Lars is a journalist
Okay, you’ve probably suspected this one for a few episodes now, much like Zoe Marconi — who but a journalist would be so flagrantly desperate to sneak their Apple Watch into a no-tech-allowed wellness retreat? But episode 4 confirms the series’ spin on Lars Lee, whom Liane Moriarty had written as a high-profile divorce attorney in the novel. In the series, he’s there to potentially write a devastating exposé on the unorthodox practices taking place at Tranquillum House — and in yet another twist, Masha is well aware of his intentions and simply so confident in her LSD-wellness praxis that she’s certain he’ll end up writing a rave review instead. Either way, we now know that Lars is for sure going public with some version of events — which really raises the stakes for Masha to either ensure what he’s writing is positive or somehow prevent him from getting out his exposé.
Masha has a very real threat closing in
Last week, an exchange between Tiffany Boone’s Delilah and Masha indicated one potential source of the threatening texts Kidman’s character has been receiving: the family of a former guest named Connelly, who apparently sued Masha to no fruition following his stay (“I won. No negligence,” Masha reminds Delilah, who replies: “That doesn’t mean they’re over it.”) This week, further threatening texts indicating Masha is being watched and the end-of-episode break-in confirm that someone is coming for the wellness guru.
If these nine perfect strangers aren’t the ones to bring Masha to justice for her crimes in the TV show (as they are in the book), maybe whoever broke into Masha’s office will be.
Yao is cheating on Delilah with Masha
In Moriarty’s book, Yao and Delilah have a casual sexual relationship and he has an intense crush on Masha, a fact by which Delilah is slightly irritated but to which she’s largely immune. Episode 4 of the TV show made two differences from that clear: Masha and Yao are lovers, helpfully illustrated with a sex scene I’m sure we’ll all be rewatching a very normal number of times, and Delilah is very much bothered by Yao’s other emotional attachments. It also seems like Yao and Delilah’s relationship is much more serious than it was in the book, both given how devastated she seems by knowing he’s come from Masha’s and the fact that they seem to live together.
This matters so much not just because it’s a big change, but because it could have huge implications for Delilah’s role in whatever happens next. In the book, she hops in Ben’s Lamborghini and gets out of town, but her motivations in the show now seem much more complicated and tied to the fate of the people at Tranquillum House. Here’s another place where I’ll put in a prayer that her character having bipolar disorder was not introduced into the series (another change from the book) for any reason other than to show how often people with bipolar disorder are gaslit by those around them. If the series intends to do anything that it believes to be demonstrating her condition, it’s almost guaranteed to be a misfire. The condescension in Masha’s tone when asking Delilah about whether she’d been keeping up with her medication was pitch-perfect; the suggestion of an impending plotline in which Delilah goes “off her meds” and subsequently off the rails is not.
Tony killed someone
Um, did anyone see this coming? Tony, AKA Smiley Hogburn, a name Hulu had no business not changing when they set their TV show in Australia, reveals to Frances in episode 4 of the series that not only did he have a devastating knee injury and develop an OxyContin addiction, he also killed someone in a bar fight, yet another trauma he’s been unable to recover from. Tony tells Frances that Masha was taunting him when she asked if anyone wanted to come out with their secrets: “Has anyone here ever killed anyone?” she’d asked the table the night before, after saying to him: “We all have secrets, Tony…Do you want to come out with yours?”
Here’s what’s really messed up. After asking him that, she turns to the others: “Lars?” she asks. “Carmel?” And then she asks: “Has anyone here ever killed anyone?”
At this point, at least one of the three people she turned to has in fact killed someone, and with how fast and loose the series is playing with the plot of the book — and with how violently Carmel lunged at Lars’ throat at breakfast — I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if we find out there are a few others who have taken a life in one way or another in the group. It creates an odd kind of insurance for Nicole Kidman’s Masha to know she can turn this back on them, and, no matter how accidental each scenario may be, it does inevitably heighten the sense that these characters are in a life-or-death scenario. That, too, would be a rather dramatic departure from the book.
Leave a Comment