TV Recap: "Nine Perfect Strangers" - Season 2, Episode 5 "Prague"

Recap:

David (Mark Strong) wonders if Masha (Nichole Kidman) is going to try and kill him again.

Inside Masha’s room, David listens as the guru tells him that she will take him on an advanced psychedelic journey. Masha asks if he is afraid to go deeper, and he is not afraid of much, so he encourages her. Getting him to lay down, Masha places her prototype device (drug machine I guess) on him and starts her story in Prague in 2001.

From within David’s mind, we see how Masha and the billionaire meet. David is about to make an appearance on television, and Masha tells the wealthy man that he is just one of many rich people who come to Eastern Europe coming in to strip the country of wealth. David takes what Masha says to heart and uses her talking points in his interview.

David wonders how he saw the past, and Masha explains that memories are destroyed and rebuilt every time they are recalled. With the right triggers, people can get a new understanding of the memory, and thanks to the device people will be able to experience these memories once again.

Back in his memory, David is amazed by the vividness of the hallucination. The David of the past asks Masha for her name, and she tells him it’s Mila. David asks her to dinner. Masha brings him to the loudest and darkest hole in the wall pub. They talk about the future and then proceed to drink the bar dry then they dance.

They leave the bar and head to McDonald’s and finally end up heading back to David’s hotel room. While David is on the phone, and Masha is walking around his suite, we hear David mention that he needs to talk to his son Peter before he goes to sleep. (Ah, David cares about his son.) The two lay on the bed and have sex.

In the present, David awakes from his drug fueled trip to the past, and he doesn’t want to leave the journey. Masha asks him to trust her and to let her take him somewhere else beyond the night they spent together in Prague.

Masha can take David to the delivery room where she has given birth to their daughter. David is shocked to find out her daughter was his too. He tells her he never forgot her, he could have helped her, but Masha tells David she didn’t want his help. David asks if Tatiana knows about him, and whether he can meet her. David wants to get to know his daughter and for her to know him. (Oh David, for the guy who says he does research on everything, don’t you know her daughter is dead.)

Telling David that she has more to explain, Masha proceeds to describe how she once saw him with a Russian businessman that she was researching and writing about. The Russian was a dangerous man to investigate and after confronting him, she became a target of his anger, over the line of questioning she had about his business dealings.

Returning home Masha is frightened and finds Tatiana on the couch watching Crabapple Clubhouse with Brian (Murray Bartlett). The next day, Masha is concerned about a van watching her from the street. She quit her job, changed her name, and moved. Masha even admits to reaching out to David for help, pleading, and then threatening. David states that none of her messages ever reached him. Had he known, he would have come to her instantly.

Masha tells a shocked David that she waited for him to help, but he responds that he never knew anything. Then we watch as Masha describes how she believes it was the Russian bad guy who had Tatiana killed, and we see Masha holding Tatiana’s lifeless body after getting hit by a car. (I wonder how much of this is real. Did Russian bad guys really kill her daughter or was this just a tragic accident. My guess is tragic accident. Also, Kidman’s hysterics don’t really convince me she is reliving the death of her daughter. There is something that just doesn’t seem right about this tale of misery.)

The next morning David tells Masha that he has never experienced anything like he did. He wants more people to experience what he did. David admits to failing Tatiana and apologizes to Masha for having to carry the guilt on her own. Masha forgives him. This leads to the two kissing and having sex. Of course, everything in the hotel is bugged, and Martin (Lucas Englander) shakes his head in disgust as he listens to what Masha and David are doing.

Review:

This episode was expected. The story of David and Masha was set up from the first episode and now we have it out of the way. Masha is not a likeable character, and I feel like no matter what Kidman does, I can’t sympathize with her. The fact that her backstory now has Masha as some kind of investigative journalist who ran afoul of Russian gangsters is ridiculous. I feel like this woman is so clouded with grief over the death of her daughter that she is rewriting history to try and make sense of what happened, and the rewrite is not accurate to the truth.

Mark Strong is such an underrated bright light of joy on the screen. He has usually been cast as the villain of many films and watching him play a normal person is refreshing. His David is a billionaire who lives above everyone else, but Strong makes David likeable, and human. The fact that I find it easier to connect with David over Masha makes me happy. I don’t like Masha.

Line of the Night Award:

There was not one piece of dialogue that really stood out to me. However, a good actor can make his facial expressions explain more than any written word. Harrison Ford did this well in Patriot Games when the Seal Team raided the terrorist camps. No dialogue, just Ford’s visceral facial responses to a bloody scene.

For this episode, Lucas Englander gets the award. As Martin, he looks so annoyed and angry with a strong layering of disgust as he listens to Masha and David have sex. In this moment he tells us that Martin believes in the science of what they are doing but is annoyed by the pompous nature of Masha’s attempts to extort money out of David.