The White Lotus Recap: To Love!
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When our castaways were cruising on the hotel junk rig in the season premiere, internecine feuding felt inevitable. The Ratliffs were peeved by Rick’s cigarette smoke; Chelsea was disappointed by how easy it was to provoke her boyfriend’s temper. Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate — immediately reverting back to the bitchy girls who ruled Nowhere High together — sniggered at the scene from behind designer sunnies. One drawback with an intimate spa resort is that the people you meet at check-in are the same ones sharing your sound bath.
But five episodes in, the problem isn’t being stuck in paradise with other people. It’s being stuck anywhere with yourself. It’s being stuck as yourself in front of other people. The gun count ticks steadily up this week, reminding us that all this wellness ends in death. But for Buddhists, dying is an opportunity to unbind from the past and start again. Someone will leave Thailand in a body bag, which is to say, reborn.
“Full Moon Party” is a neon riot of action punctuated by the season’s zingiest jokes. There’s inappropriate sex between married Jaclyn and her “butler.” (“Shia LaBeouf!” she cries, stumbling over a Russian toast.) There’s overdue workplace sex between Belinda and Pornchai. (“This is consent,” Belinda declares. “Do you guys do that here?”) There’s drug abuse, there’s brotherly love, and there’s Frank, a semi-reformed ne’er-do-well on a batshit path to enlightenment.
Played by Sam Rockwell (Leslie Bibb’s S.O.), Frank is introduced halfway through the season to hand Rick a gun (gun No. 3) that Rick almost certainly could have gotten another way. (For example, he could have lifted gun No. 2 from Gaitok.) Frank and Rick are old pals, but like all the middle-aged men that we’ve met in Thailand, they speak of the past vaguely, as though they’ve been eternal-sunshined. Becoming an LBH is a form of rebirth, too.
Instead of finding a scandalously young girlfriend on these shores — the typical LBH play — Frank found religion. In a single monologue, he divulges more about his inner life to Rick than Rick has ever divulged to anyone. Frank doesn’t dwell on what led him to flee the States, but the pull factor that landed him in Thailand was Asian girls. When he first arrived, he had sex with thousands. Some of them turned out to be, in Frank’s words, “ladyboys,” which was revelatory for him. What if the desire to fuck Asian girls was really a desire to be a girl getting fucked by his own self? He hired a series of middle-aged white men with thinning domes to fuck him while he was dressed to resemble a girl while also staring at an actual girl, who Frank also hired, because that’s what you do if you have a lot of time and money and, I guess, curiosity. “Inside, could I be an Asian girl?” Frank asks, while Rick “mm-hmms” along in the role of active, impartial listener. It’s unclear what Rick is meant to take from his friend’s exquisitely deranged road to self-discovery, but perhaps it’s as simple as this: Revenge isn’t the only exit from “the never-ending carousel of lust and suffering.”
Do our insides have to match our outsides? It’s the same question Piper Ratliff is posing. Just because she’s a white girl from South Carolina with a pill-popping steel magnolia for a mother and a white-collar criminal for a father, is she destined to marry a family friend named Beau in a plantation wedding? Given Tim’s descent into and Victoria’s withdrawal from prescription drug misuse, perhaps this isn’t the right moment for Pipes to confess that she’s bamboozled her parents into helping her check out a local meditation retreat. Or maybe it’s perfect. The Ratliffs are a family in upheaval. Soon, they’ll each be pressed to find new ways of being.
“You’re not from China!” Victoria yells at Piper in protest of her post-graduation plans. In other words, your outsides don’t match your Buddhist impulses. She worries that her daughter will be a different person if she ever comes home, which is, of course, Piper’s dream. She loves her parents, but she’s embarrassed by her own upbringing — the old-fashioned, tax-evading values that produced a cocksure idiot like Saxon. I sympathized with Victoria’s earnest fear of losing her only daughter despite the fact that she registers her objections in punch lines. For example, she’s not convinced that the monastery is legit just because the abbot has written books — so did Charles Manson and Bill Clinton! And just because Buddhism is a religion doesn’t mean this center isn’t a perverse sex cult: “Look at the Catholics!”
Tim says very little to his daughter, perhaps because he’s not boarding the return flight to Charleston himself. There’s a gun in his pocket, for one thing. Maybe he’ll never use it — an aborted suicide attempt at the end of the episode suggests he won’t — but that doesn’t mean Tim is leaving Thailand. Maybe he’ll become another LBH, serving out a life sentence in a tropical prison. Old men in a hellish bardo of their own making.
The Ratliffs hatch a madcap family plan to visit the monastery together tomorrow. For now, Victoria vows to drink herself to sleep in lieu of lorazepam, which, unbeknownst to her, is inside her husband’s pocket. (Gaitok’s gun! Millions of dollars! What won’t Tim Ratliff steal?) It’s hard to know how seriously to take Victoria and the Case of the Stolen Pills. On the one hand, a possible side effect of benzo withdrawal is psychosis. On the other, maybe she was always indulging on a modest “as needed” basis — a fun little treat for vacation. Because while Victoria’s miffed that her stash is missing, she’s not phoning the concierge to demand a 24-hour physician bring her a goody bag.
Only a confrontation with Gaitok — who, again, has abandoned his post at the security hut — briefly jolts Tim from the benzo brain fog. Regardless of what Fabian said a few episodes back, Gaitok’s job basically is to smile at people before lifting the flimsy gate that has zero chance of stopping trespassers. This shy, dopey, lovesick kid should not be responsible for a firearm. It took him a beat too long to even realize that he could confirm what happened to the missing firearm by watching the security footage. Tim, though, keeps his cool under pressure. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says without missing a beat when Gaitok challenges him over the gun. It’s like Tim’s already practicing selective memory for the depositions to come. “I cannot recall.” “I don’t remember deleting the relevant emails.” “I have no specific memory of stealing $10 million with my alleged business partner, Kenneth Nguyen, who I have no specific memory of ever meeting.”
For all Fabian’s concern about hotel security, that empty tunic can’t spot a snake in the grass. When Gary comes to the White Lotus asking questions about Belinda, he assumes that she’s caught his roving eye. When Belinda tells him the real story — that Greg is wanted for questioning in Italy in connection to his wife’s mysterious death — Fabian tells her to quit gossiping. LBHs with colorful pasts are what keep the White Lotus Thailand afloat. I was siding with Belinda, who’s so spooked she can’t speak of Greg above a whisper, until she suggests alerting Interpol. Even if the police eventually arrest Greg for the years-old homicide of his wife, he’s going to be very angry and possibly unpredictable in the meantime.
Deterred by Fabian, Belinda engages Pornchai for protection instead, which is a pretty smooth move. It’s role-play from here. Belinda is the damsel in distress. Pornchai is the hero who slays a dragon to save her. (Okay, fine, he evicts a lizard that’s been hiding behind the wardrobe.) Belinda asks Pornchai to stay the night, just this once. It’s a double room, so she can’t allow circumstances to shove them into the bed. She has to ask for what she wants, and then she gets it, consequence-free. I’m not sure that’s ever really happened on The White Lotus before.
It’s not the only bed-hopping on “Full Moon Party.” In the episode’s most gleefully choreographed story line, the victory-lapping ladies spend a night at da club with the Vladivostok set trying to figure out if they could have anything even slightly in common. Some of them met in ballet class, though not Vlad, the bedazzled one, or Kate, who played softball. Some of them like to have fun, though not Vlad, who prefers conversation about his childhood trauma, or Kate, who wills the night to end on multiple occasions. Val asks Laurie to dance, but once the group is on the floor, it’s more of a sexy scrum. That girl is on fire, though, ripping shots and skinny-dipping at the hotel after-party with Val and Aleksei, who is burly enough to perhaps be the masked owner of gun No. 1. Jaclyn makes eyes at some girls who glower at her across the club, because Jaclyn loves a gaze. She always has, one of her oldest friends might add (provided Jaclyn was standing far enough away not to hear them).
Last week, Jaclyn struggled to get her young husband on the phone. This week, she proves to herself that she doesn’t care if he calls. I felt in my bones that she would sleep with Val, but still I hated to see it. Mike White’s insistence that none of us can really outgrow or outrun ourselves is emerging as season three’s relentlessly bleak motif. Who you are at the White Lotus is who you are. There’s not enough Reiki on the planet to fix it.
At least we finally make it to the Full Moon Party, which looks sick. The girls get cute T-shirts (from NYC artist Scooter LaForge). You’ve seen people twirl fire batons before, but on Ko Pha Ngan, they’re jumping fire double Dutch. Even Saxon “I am the drug” Ratliff drops molly. It’s a good night for the kids, who are still rolling when they tender back to the yacht in the blue predawn. Earlier in the episode, when Chloe floats a foursome, Chelsea says she’s too much of a romantic to ever cheat on Rick. Chloe, meanwhile, predicts she will sleep with the magician despite worrying that Gary would kill her if he ever found out.
Instead of a foursome, this transient little squad plays a performative kissing game, like teenagers. Chelsea makes out with Chloe; Chloe makes out with Lochlan. Lochlan, obliged by the rules, gives his brother a wee peck. When the girls aren’t satisfied, he goes back in for a full, hands-on-the-face smackeroo. Saxon looks stunned, but his younger bro wears a sly smile. Is it weird? Yeah, for sure. But nothing they can’t pretend never happened in the morning.
“You do everything right, but still at any moment something can come along and upend everything,” Victoria says. She’s catastrophizing over Piper’s plans to emigrate, but we know she’s not wrong. Her problems are colossal. She has raised a daughter who’s ashamed of her, a son with incestuous tendencies, and another that’s a complete ass. She’s married to a man who is so afraid to disappoint her, he thinks it might be better to kill himself than to talk to her about what’s happening. But it’s the first half of Victoria’s comment that I found myself ruminating on later. What is it that Victoria thinks she got so right? How would Kate answer that question? Jaclyn? Tim?
We all know that people don’t get what they deserve; life is more complicated and less fair than that. Like catastrophizing, thinking you control the world around you is a cognitive distortion. And it’s one we all make. Watching Laurie drone on about her palimony payments, I cringed — not just at her, but at every boring story I’ve ever told tipsy. It was excruciating to watch Jaclyn seduce Val — not because I care about her, but because it reminded me of the shame that follows being carelessly selfish. The White Lotus is at its best when it shows you something so ugly and so relatable that you find yourself reaching for the remote, fighting the unbearable urge to switch it off. It makes your TV into a mirror.