Masha can’t even be bothered to watch over the people she’s forcing into going on her psychedelic retreat.
Photo: Reiner Bajo/Disney
In the first season of Nine Perfect Strangersthere was a clear objective to Masha’s self-serving motivations: Like the Marconis, she wanted her late daughter back. Now that her goal has been achieved — Tatiana seems more alive than ever — and the show is departing from its source material, Masha’s motivations have once again become unclear. Not that they were always clear; we only learned of Tatiana’s existence in the second-to-last episode of the first season. Still, at Tranquillum House, we knew that whatever Masha wanted had to do with the guests she cherry-picked to go through her “treatment.” Her storyline — who shot her? Who is sending her threatening text messages? Will she go too far? — moved concomitantly with the guests’. Now, at Zauberwald, Masha is removed from the experiment she is supposed to be leading. She sets the terms for the protocol, but hardly comes in contact with the guests, save for brief one-on-one conferences in their rooms.
Martin is up to here with her aloofness. “The Field Trip” opens with him begging Helena to either get rid of Masha or save him from the torture of having to work with her, but Helena has more immediate concerns, like figuring out why she is coughing up blood. Masha stands Martin up for the day’s excursion, during which the protocol officially begins. Her absence rattles the group — Martin has to work to assert his authority. People want to shop souvenirs in the village; they crack jokes about the foul-smelling thermos of custom-tailored “medication” they’re about to take in a museum of sorts, filled with taxidermied animals. The goal of the psychedelic trip is to “make an exploration of the past,” an idea that has seized the minds behind this show with unyielding force. Martin leads the group into meditation, then observes and takes notes as the drugs take effect.
Everyone drinks from the thermos except for Victoria, who refuses to partake. When Imogen insists that taking the drugs is not optional, Victoria retorts that “life is optional,” a hint that goes with the end-of-life planner we saw her flip through in the last episode. Is Victoria’s goal to, uh … die during this retreat? She sneaks out at one point for a glass of Champagne and a cigarette at a nearby café, where we also learn that she is losing movement in one of her arms. When she returns to the museum, she is still smoking, which is pretty cool, but hardly enough to rescue her character from caricature. At Zauberwald, some characters’ desires are blindingly clear — Sister Agnes wants to be absolved; Wolfie wants Tina to reconnect with her music; Brian wants to be in better control of his emotions — while others are completely opaque. What does Victoria want? What, for that matter, does Imogen?
From the established pattern, we can expect to learn what really brings the O’Clairs to Bavaria through some flashback sequences in a dedicated episode down the line. Last week, we learned about Brian; this week we have Sister Agnes under the microscope. If hearing the church bells in the village was enough to shake her, taking the drugs only draws her more strongly into her past. At the beginning of the episode, Masha lies side by side with her on the floor of her room and argues, not unreasonably, that self-recrimination might seem virtuous on the surface, but it’s just another kind of indulgence. Sister Agnes counters that there is “no point” in forgiving herself because doing so won’t “bring her back to life.”
During the protocol, we find out who “she” is. Throughout the episode, we see flashes of Sister Agnes’ early life as a nun, first as she decides to heed God’s calling and later when, seeing Tina get sick from the drugs, she seems to remember that she is a nurse. The psychedelics heighten Sister Agnes’s feeling of emptiness, and Martin encourages her to “explore that nothingness,” so she follows the sound of bells all the way to the village church, where she collapses on her knees and prays hard before entering the confessional. Nor is she asking the priest for forgiveness, she relives the death of a mother and her baby at the Catholic hospital where she worked. Sister Agnes saw that the mother was hemorrhaging and wanted to help, but Mother Superior’s instructions were not to interfere with God’s plan, even if there was a threat to two lives. Agnes screams for forgiveness. She is worried she will never hear God’s voice again, but no priest responds to her confession. “Father, where are you?” she begs
Sister Agnes becomes so frustrated that she starts hitting her head against the confessional’s lattice divider, at which point the priest finally finds her and, apparently, calls the police because Martin finds her hours later in a cell at the police department. There, the roles reverse slightly: Martin confesses his own frustrations about Masha’s irresponsibility towards the guests. So there they are, two people feeling guilty and bad about themselves, neither closer to truth nor God. Later that night, looking at herself in the mirror, Agnes will take off her wedding ring and opt for the bed instead of the floor. A crisis of faith for a member of the clergy is no small thing, and yet I didn’t buy the forcefulness with which Dolly de Leon screams in the confessional. Crying, begging, hitting her head: these are all ways to show that Sister Agnes is tortured by her past, but they don’t amount to much more than simplistic gestures. This has been a consistent problem of the season so far. Maybe nine guests — on top of Masha and Martin — are just too many for eight episodes. I feel like I’m getting the Wikipedia summary of these people’s lives when what I want is the Robert Caro biography.
In any case, for the other guests, the tripping goes fine. Tina eventually recovers from her nausea. Brian vibes by himself. Imogen and Peter hallucinate they are playing parts in the story of Heidi and Peter, which they remember from a childhood book, and overall have a blast saying things like Here and Schatz and Bavarian boat motoring. It’s pretty goofy. Matteo is a non-character, so we don’t really see what’s going on with him or how he’s taking the hallucinogens. At least Imogen seems to have relaxed enough — or been embarrassed enough — to apologize to Brian for her behavior. In fact, things are coming up Imogen: She guesses correctly that Peter likes her, and back at Zauberwald they are about to hook up again when they discover Peter’s dad, David, asleep on the bed. It’s very awkward, not only because they bump into David while taking off their clothes but also because Peter seems happy, if surprised, to see his dad, while David looks … neither excited nor disappointed. His demeanor is cold, especially compared to Peter’s belabored affection.
David is also literally cold. While Sister Agnes reconsidered her relationship with God and Imogen and Peter hallucinated role-play, Masha spent the day putting David through various freezing situations. David misses breakfast to take a call from his room, during which repairmen come to drill a signal jammer on his roof. In perfect German, he asks the men what the drilling is all about, but they can’t tell him — all David knows is that when he comes back in, his satellite service is gone. He finds an uncoated Masha sitting outside by a fire, and she tells him it’s too late for him to join the rest of the guests, so he will have to hang out with her for the rest of the day. Earlier, during breakfast, Martin had volunteered to get David so he could partake of the protocol like everyone else, but Masha had told him not to — she had her own plans for his day, including interrupting his satellite service, though she insists that she had nothing to do with that.
The plan, as it turns out, is to go on a walk in the snow barefoot before cold plunging into an icy pond. They have no towels. “I want this every day,” Masha, a sociopath, says. It’s not David’s first cold plunge, but it is the worst: Once they are both submerged, Masha asks him how many times a year he sees his son, a strategy to make sure he’s “coherent.” He can’t give her a number. She tells him that she has worked up to being able to spend as many as ten minutes in the water. He loses consciousness almost immediately after stating he could stay with her in the water that long, “no problem.”
When he wakes up in Peter’s room later, he wonders whether Masha tried to kill him, but she insists that she is only trying to save him. We get another morsel of context about their relationship: They’ve known each other for over 20 years, and he gave her the necklace she has been wearing since he got there, a striking enough piece that even Martin commented on it. Later that night, after leaving Peter and Imogen to it, David is pouring himself a drink when Masha calls him, proving the satellite service on his phone has been restored. Theirs is a battle of wills: She wants him to think about his relationship with his son, and he wants to preserve his mystery. He spots a camera above the bar and raises a glass, and then a middle finger, to Masha.
Will these two storylines — the guests’ experience and Masha’s cat-and-mouse game with David — finally intersect next week? “The Field Trip” felt like two separate shows: one about a psychedelic retreat and one reluctant thriller starring Nicole Kidman. I appreciate that David E. Kelley had to up the ante for Masha this season and find a new direction for her, but as yet, I feel like she is lost, both as a character and as an anchor to the overarching story.
• The gaudiness of Sister Agnes’s crisis of faith was swimming helped by the fact that she hallucinates a statue crying blood. I mean, seriously? That’s how you’re going to signal “nun in trouble”?
• Which tech giant does everyone think David Sharpe is based on? First I was inclined to think Jeff Bezos because of his baldness and general air of pure evil, but now I’m starting to think Steve Jobs because of the turtlenecks.
• “The Field Trip” gave us at least one good chuckle when, upon seeing Sister Agnes with blood running down her face inside the confessional, the priest sighed, “That goddamn hotel.”