Can We Talk About How Matteo Is The Most ‘Perfect Stranger’?
The second season of Nine Perfect Strangers has been a brilliant continuation of Hulu’s adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s eponymous novel. We have a new set of strangers with deeply interconnected trauma being dredged up with the aid of Masha’s secret, psychedelic mushroom brew, as she attempts to lead them towards healing while straddling emotional baggage of her own.
So, you might ask, “What could possibly go wrong?” and the answer is almost everything, but, after the last episode I’m much more interested in what went right.
Let’s talk about Matteo’s session
After Peter reveals to the rest of the guests that Masha has used him as a guinea pig to test her new “beta” technology that allows wearers to relive traumatic events as if for the first time, she asks the group who would like to experience it next, but selects Matteo after he is the only one who doesn’t volunteer.
We knew he’d sneak up on us with some heavy hitting emotional moments as soon as he arrived unexpectedly as Victoria’s much younger boyfriend, who she supposedly just met while traveling, and he awkwardly and vaguely announced that both of his parents died “in the war“, because the rule of Nine Perfect Strangers is that everyone has baggage and depth, whether they wear it on their sleeve or not.
We receive some really important pieces of information over the course of episodes five and six—David is Tatiana’s biological father, and Masha suspects him of being responsible for her murder, after she was targeted during an investigation into his business dealings with satellites, which we learn Victoria’s husband and Imogen’s father worked with before his death.
Those same satellites were responsible for drone strikes that killed Matteo’s family. Matteo was cared for by Agnes in a field hospital, and offered a stuffed-animal version of Brian’s puppet, Jesse Bear, to just completely tie the stories together. As Matteo “relives” a conversation with Agnes detailing how he was found on a soccer field, and a nearby “building” was completely destroyed, killing his parents, Matteo confirms they were “teachers” suggesting the drones targeted and/or destroyed a school, morally tainting David and Imogen’s father respectively.
As Matteo re-experiences the traumatic event, we see how clearly aware he is of what has happened. He experiences the effects of the drug as if it were a lucid dream. The knowledge of his family’s death is so ingrained into his psyche, he does not react to the mental stimuli as if he was living it for the first time.
What is new, however, is his ability to notice a banner with butterflies in the hospital tent. These butterflies “fly” off the banner, and out of the memory, into the room with Matteo and Masha where he happily explains his reaction to the experience, sharing that he was told as a child that butterflies represent the souls of the dead.
Masha confronts Matteo for refusing to interface with his own pain, after which he delivers a beautiful speech where he explains that he wants his pain, because it is his:
These people, they think that they want to run away from their sadness, to bury it in the grave or to wear it like a…like a badge. My family…I miss them so much. Every day. I don’t want not to miss them, to forget that they are gone. My pain, as you say, my grief, it’s happened to me. But it’s not all that I am. I’m a boy who was loved and lost this love. The thing that everyone—everyone fears most in their life, and it’s happened to me, so yes, there is pain. But there is no fear of loss, because…I already lost. So, I can have nothing to fear. There is only one me. And isn’t that wonderful?
Masha is so moved by his self-awareness and emotional fortitude that she ends the session and tells him he’s free to go. When he asks if everything “was okay”, she responds, “Perfect” while Big Thief’s Adrienne Lenker’s croons in an masterfully executed needle drop that carries the scene into Imogen’s reckoning with her mother’s seizure following a dosage of Masha’s medication that wasn’t calibrated for Victoria’s health struggles.
Matteo finally reveals that Victoria’s mysterious ailment is ALS, and he is not only her boyfriend, but her caretaker. While he appears to be fully rounded out as a character in these emotional scenes, one crucial detail is missing. How could an orphan like Matteo form a relationship with the very widow of the man who is in part responsible for his family’s death? It’s definitely too close to be a coincidence, and makes us question his motive for getting close to her in the first place.
Before we have a chance to find out, showrunners drop yet another bombshell, as we discover Masha’s mentor, Helena, passed away in 2022, and most of their interactions we’ve seen thus far, if not all, have been the result of Masha’s psychedelic hallucinations. This opens up all kinds of questions about her power struggle with Martin, and the true nature of their strained relationship.
Needless to say, this week’s episode is bound to have a ton of answers waiting for us, but until then, we’ll still be fawning over our favorite perfect stranger, Matteo.
