Masha has a very real threat closing in.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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Once they wake up the next morning, sober, they find they’ve been locked in. 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. I’ve covered this pretty extensively above, but it’s also the biggest split from the book so far.
#NINE PERFECT STRANGERS NEW EPISODES SERIES#
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.Įpisode 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Napoleon’s speech about his son is heartbreaking so is Melissa McCarthy’s Frances breaking down about the family she’d hoped for.
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. 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. (“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.”) 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.
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.
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.
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