Nine Perfect Strangers season 2 episode 4 review: A beautifully chaotic spiral into emotional overload

Nine Perfect Strangers Season 2 Episode 4 brings us deeper into the emotional chaos with The Major Lift, featuring a mix of vivid drug-fueled hallucinations, self-destructive contemplation, and unraveling interpersonal dynamics. The episode maintains the show’s signature ethereal quality, but this comes at the cost of pacing and understanding. With numerous characters battling internal tempests, the story increasingly seems adrift—wonderful, but without a reliable tether.

For this chapter of Nine Perfect Strangers, the canvas is set in Tina’s emotional and artistic breakdown, an intense catharsis that serves as the focal point of the episode. The music in her unsettling dream shifts from a liberating gift into relentless torment. Wolfie and Tina slowly start to break their relationship apart as Wolfie makes painfully true career, identity, and romance-related claims about love—who you love becomes less about who's present and more about whom you loved and what they were transforming into.

The rest of the group continues to spiral out of control as well. David's antagonism toward Masha slowly morphs into suspicion of financial foul play, while Masha's behavior becomes more disordered as she starts to engage with people who are there and also not there.

Imogen and Victoria’s maternal conflict is revived in a terribly poignant way, and even supporting characters such as Brian and Agnes become entangled in self-absorbed daydreams and self-loathing. While the show captures the journeys’ sentiments, it fails to interweave the different strands into a cohesive narrative most of the time.

Even with the absence of progress on the central storyline, the episode does succeed in showcasing the chaotic conflict within the characters. Those looking for more narrative progress or answers might find The Major Lift more of a breather than a step forward. It's an installment that favors ambience and feeling over story—and therein lies both its triumph and its downfall.

Tina’s crisis and the price of perfection

Much of the episode's Tina’s storyline focuses on her character and the emotional burdens she bears. Tina’s life-growing resentment toward something as innocuous as the piano—and everything else it encompasses—comes to life during her raw, vulnerable moment with Wolfie. We discover that her musical talent was never a passion of her own choosing but rather a mere path set by parental expectations. It’s shaped everything about her identity, and losing her role means losing her partner, too - and everything else that matters.

In turn, Wolfie struggles to accept this shift. Their bond is no longer reliably grounded on shared dreams and anchors, and everything now teeters on murky waters. Wolfie’s love was premised on the version of Tina that played music with passion, which begs the question: what other bonds remain? Eroding the sense of a painfully realist depiction of how relationships shift…and sometimes collapse when navigating personal growth that sends one partner on a new divergent route.

Chaos, hallucinations, and Masha’s unraveling in Nine Perfect Strangers

Besides Tina’s problems, the others in the group get carried away in increasingly erratic activities. Although Martin attempts to structure the group's psychotherapy drug session into a healing experience, it quickly devolves into strange, even cathartic, dancing. While these moments are captivating, they often feel redundant and do not contribute much to the episode apart from the fact that everyone's emotions are unbalanced.

At the same time, Masha’s storyline amplifies the moody and enigmatic elements. Her reality appears to break even more as she speaks to a still absent Tatiana and alludes to a vague meeting of Tatiana alongside her father. David's suspicions regarding his being financially used escalate the drama, but still, the direction of all this remains unclear. There is a powerful sense of something dreadful about to happen, but nothing satisfying has happened until now.

Final verdict

I'll give this episode of Nine Perfect Strangers an 8/10⭐

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Nine Perfect Strangers' The Major Lift is emotionally potent but, unfortunately, lacks cohesion in its structure. A standout is the personal crisis, featuring Tina, which showcases some of the tenderest and most truthful writing of the season to date. That said, the other storylines remain somewhat unclear, and the overall pacing seems to be slow.

These many disjointed elements could turn into a single, coherent storyline in the second half of the season. But as it stands, the show risks losing its narrative flow—and like many of the characters, the show appears to be embarking on an enchanting but disorienting trip devoid of direction.

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