The retreat continues in Nine Perfect Strangers season 2, episode 3, but it’s clear that nothing is going as planned for Helene and Martin. Masha has her own plans, and she is manipulating various people to get what she wants.
Caution: This post contains SPOILERS for Nine Perfect Strangers season 2, episode 3.
The episode of Nine Perfect Strangers opens with Helene and Martin together, and we get to see that Helene is suffering from some sort of illness. Now maybe it makes sense why she wanted Masha to do her experiments in her home so much. Is she looking for a cure for herself?
Masha manipulates David Sharpe more in Nine Perfect Strangers season 2, episode 3
Meanwhile, Masha has taken a special interest in David now that he’s at the lodge in Nine Perfect Strangers. She takes him out on a walk, getting him to take his shoes off in the snow by telling him how good it is for the body. After that, she goes for a dip in the icy waters, and of course, David has to join in.
David is one of those men who needs to prove that he can do everything others can. It’s clear that he’s a narcissist, and he remains skeptical about Masha’s treatments. At the same time, we get a sense that the two know each other, but not the full reason how just yet.
After David succumbs to the freezing cold, Masha gets him to a “guest’s” room. It wasn’t hard to figure out that that guest would be his son, who didn’t even know that his dad had made it yet. David and Peter haven’t seen each other for some time, and the reunion between them is awkward. Now I need to know more of this backstory.
One thing we do get confirmation of in Nine Perfect Strangers season 2, episode 3 is that Masha is using a jammer to block signals for the cell phones. David gets a moment where he can use his phone, but that’s only because Masha wants to allow him to do that. There’s clearly more manipulation in this, and I don’t get why the series would point out that there’s little cell reception in the area if Masha was going to use a signal jammer anyway.
Sister Agnes seeks redemption in her high state in Nine Perfect Strangers
Meanwhile, Martin decides that it’s time to run the first experiment. Masha isn’t there to help control it all, and at first, it seems like she has trusted him to run the program as it was intended. However, by the end, it’s clear that he took it upon himself to do this, and Masha will likely be angry about this by the next episode of Nine Perfect Strangers.
Everyone reacts as you would expect when they’re high. Peter and Imogen act out some weird children’s story, while others run around the house to scare away some of their demons. Tina has an adverse reaction to the experiment, which has Martin worried, and he realizes that the whole thing got out of hand.
Sister Agnes manages to leave the premises. She gets into the village, where she finds a church and a confessional box. Now we finally learn why she has turned from her Order. It turns out a woman came into her hospital in labor, but the labor wasn’t progressing the way it should. The woman was bleeding, and Sister Agnes wanted to do something to help. Her Mother Superior said that Sister Agnes shouldn’t question God’s will, and she refused any help to this woman except for what nature had intended.
In the end, the mother and baby both died. Sister Agnes said that she made a mistake putting her faith in Mother, and now she needs absolution from God. It finally makes sense why she has pulled away from the Order so much, and I can’t help but feel for her, especially as she realizes that the priest wasn’t in the confessional box at the time.
Sister Agnes ends up hurting herself, by bashing her head on the confessional box over and over again, until she is eventually arrested. Martin goes to bail her out, and with Tina’s incident and now this, he knows that he may have messed up Masha’s experiment.
Now that David is with the group, there is a chance for the experiments to start properly. However, what happened to Tina? And will Sister Agnes want to continue after the experience she just had? There are a lot of questions to answer in the next episode of Nine Perfect Strangers.
Nine Perfect Strangers airs on Wednesdays on Hulu.