Is there anything better than that first full day of vacation as you languorously sun yourself by the hotel pool? Episode 2 of The White Lotus picks up on true day one of our Thai getaway, following the blue-blooded Ratliffs; the three “longtime” (not old!) friends Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate; odd couple Chelsea and Rick; and our longtime friend Belinda, as they settle into the routines of the resort. It’s time to stretch out on a lounge chair, order some room service, and watch along as the guests snipe at each other and sow chaos everywhere they go.
Who’s the Dead Body?
It still feels a touch too early to pose any credible theories about the identity of the body that floated past Zion in the Season 3 premiere. We’re still watching the chess pieces get set on the board—there’s the Ratliffs’ various dysfunctions, psychosexual and otherwise; Chelsea’s ongoing gentle parenting of her balding boyfriend, Rick; the flirtations between Belinda and Pornchai, and between Gaitok and Mook; and the merry-go-round of gossip that’s apparently kept Laurie, Jaclyn, and Kate going since high school. But is petty griping among friends or some brotherly ass ogling enough to provoke murder?
The more subliminal violence of comparing biometric health scores and PTSD therapy disguised as “meditation” does, however, erupt in a scene of real danger when masked robbers invade the resort’s in-house boutique. As Chelsea repeats, with great melodrama but to mostly unconcerned listeners: “I almost died!”
In his recap of last week’s episode, The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh noted the resonances between this season’s cast of characters and the previous denizens of the White Lotus, and the robbery calls back to the attempted burglary of Nicole Mossbacher’s $75,000 bracelets in Season 1. That crime was an inside job—Paula had given her crush, Kai, the intel to break into the room and steal the jewelry. And this robbery also seems like it might have been an inside job orchestrated by at least one of the resort’s employees: Distractingly hot Russian wellness consultant Valentin holds up security guard Gaitok at the front gate as the robbers’ SUV cruises on through. And even Chloe could have been involved—she was behind a curtain in the dressing room the whole time and somehow didn’t realize that her new friend was being held up at gunpoint? Seems fishy!
While I don’t expect the same robbers to be the ones who come in and shoot up the place in the finale, we do see that Gaitok is willing to sacrifice himself for the good of the resort when he stands up to the fleeing thieves. When a rogue gunman (or multiple, given the sound of all that gunfire in the premiere) inevitably storms the White Lotus again, I think Gaitok would happily take a bullet for Mook, or even one of the hotel guests—even if they don’t deserve it, and they definitely do not.
This episode’s robbery might have nothing at all to do with that floating body, but I do expect plenty of ripple effects to come from the heist regardless. Could the thieves have been the bodyguards of Jim Hollinger, the resort’s owner and Sritala’s husband? Jim’s nowhere to be found, apparently back in Bangkok after recovering from a stroke. But his henchmen did appear in the first episode and seemed shady enough—Gaitok certainly doesn’t trust them, and I trust Gaitok. Or maybe the robbers were somehow tangled up in Rick’s scheming? The camera lingered on him a beat too long as he comforted Chelsea, the first time he showed any sort of tenderness to his poor, sweet, Mancunian party-girl girlfriend. (And things did work out well for Rick—they got their room comped, and it seems like he might not have been able to pay for it otherwise.)
Or maybe Greg has already run out of Tanya’s money and is looking for more violent solutions for his spending problems. Belinda notices him for the first time later in the episode; maybe his crimes will finally catch up with him in the season finale.
A Wellness Check on the Guests
The guests, despite having their every dictatorial whim met by the resort’s staff, are not doing very well. The morning montage finds them recovering from binge drinking, gossip huddles, and, um, masturbation sessions from the night before. (Only Belinda is woken up by an alarm, which reminds us that some people are here to work.)
We’re also treated to the first traditional White Lotus breakfast scene; every season, guests at the White Lotus stick to a strict breakfast schedule, ensuring that all the main cast members eat—and cross paths—at the same time. Show creator Mike White delivers this season’s first breakfast-related drama with a painfully awkward contretemps between Kate (one of the three blonds, as I’ve been calling them) and Victoria Ratliff. You’d think that the two Southern matriarchs would hit it off, especially when Kate reveals that they once spent “an entire weekend together” at a mutual friend’s baby shower—but Victoria is unfazed by Kate’s very practiced gestures of politesse. Victoria’s just here to spend time with her family, she insists when her kids say she was a little rude—maybe she’s looking out for the exact kind of social-climbing sycophants that Kate complained about in the previous episode. Or maybe she, like certain other members of her family, has something to hide.
After breakfast, each guest is given their personalized wellness plan, designed to help them run away from the ailments—spiritual, physical, or otherwise—that haunt them back home. This is the first iteration of the White Lotus chain that seems to have a mission like this (or a mission at all, besides buffets and $10,000-a-night rooms), making overt the hotel’s goal to help travelers come back freed of their worries. Instead of, you know, leaving the resort, experiencing the local culture, or having an actual conversation with the people around them, the guests are using their time at the White Lotus to treat their problems—but there’s no getting away from who they really are and what they really want. Saxon gets a sports massage and legitimately expects a happy ending; Chelsea monologues about her enneagram number (she’s a nine, a peacekeeper) to her uninterested masseuse; Lochlan floats in a sensory deprivation tank that makes literal his sense of paralysis within the Ratliff family unit; Victoria gets a massage, but she has to pop some pills to actually relax first. At least between Belinda and her massage instructor, Pornchai, there’s a bit of give and take, as they alternate practicing their signature treatments—but then Belinda catches sight of Pornchai’s shirtless bod and a crush starts to form before our very eyes.
These treatments each say something about the identities of this season’s guests—identities that, in the words of Dr. Amrita, may be bringing them suffering—but during Rick’s stress management session with her, he insists that he has no identity at all. “I don’t need to detach. I’m already nothing,” he says to Dr. Amrita, who’s really just trying her best here. But, she responds, “Even ‘nothing’ can be an illusion you tell yourself.” Rick remains unconvinced, but it’s hard to imagine that someone played by the great Walton Goggins has no identity at all—there’s a lot of character work going on in those beautiful brown eyes! Even if we haven’t figured out slithery Rick and his shady schemes, there’s got to be some gas in his tank—enough that by the end of the episode, he leaves Chelsea behind to pursue the aforementioned Jim Hollinger all the way to Bangkok.
Piper, Lochlan, and Saxon are also trying to sort out their identities—either in opposition to, or in service of, their parents, whose own sense of self (moneyed, drug-addled space cadet; puffed-up, bullish businessman) is pretty shellacked into place. Unfortunately, the siblings are also doing their self-discovery by prodding into each other’s sex lives. For her part, Piper seems intent on maintaining some boundaries. When Lochlan breaks the news that Saxon thinks she’s a virgin, she unsurprisingly storms off, not willing (yet) to play the sex games her brothers are having so much fun with. And why would Lochlan ask his sister, of all people, such an intimate question? Perhaps he just wanted to puncture her self-satisfaction after she revealed that she feels a presence on the other end when she prays (it’s pretty clear that he does not, despite her attempts at spiritual indoctrination). At the very least, Lochlan seemed interested in what kind of reaction the query would provoke in Piper; it could be that he wanted to see whether she would be as … forthcoming as Saxon’s been. Whatever the case, it seems like Lochlan, otherwise a fairly reserved and polite kid, might be falling under the corrupting influence of his brother.
Speaking of Saxon, well, he’s still on the prowl and still coming up short—although he may have finally found the apple of his roaming eye in Chloe, who seems unbothered when Chelsea says, rightly, that he’s a wanker and a douche.
The Ratliff parents are not the idealized version of family values that Victoria insists they are—the rotten Saxon apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. At the end of the episode, we finally find out what those calls from The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post were all about: Tim is wrapped up in some “money laundering, bribery situation” with old colleague Kenny Nguyen (a delightfully unexpected cameo from Ke Huy Quan). Tim claims he “only made $10 million out of your stupid fucking scheme,” but his steamrolling and bullying might not be as effective with the feds as they are with someone like Pam, their put-upon White Lotus wellness consultant. The FBI has already raided Kenny’s office, Tim is definitely implicated, and he needs a lawyer, like, yesterday. Like Season 1’s Mark Mossbacher and Season 2’s Dominic Di Grasso, Tim’s a crumbling—and borderline pitiable—patriarch whose personal crisis threatens to break apart his carefully managed family.
Similar to the trio of Ratliff siblings, the threesome of Kate, Laurie, and Jaclyn continue to circle each other throughout the episode, primed to strike—lovingly—at any weakness they see. Their dynamic—two against one, and then one against one, and then a different two against one—reminds me of the backhanded compliments you give when you’re trying to suss out whether the person you’re talking to hates the person you’re talking about just as much as you do.
At the beginning of the episode, Jaclyn and Kate have their turn talking about Laurie’s problems—divorce, a real hellion of a daughter, a stalled-out career—and later, Kate switches over to Laurie to complain about Jaclyn’s competitiveness, overidealized marriage, and vanity (“Did she sandblast her face or something?”). The show’s most deliciously dishy dialogue comes in these scenes, as the three friends balance their primal urge to talk shit with the obligation to follow every teardown with a glowing compliment. In his interview in Time, White explained that the women are mirrors of each other, and they use these reflections—Jaclyn as a model of narcissism; Kate as the picture-perfect housewife; Laurie as the hard-charging but emotionally bereft career woman—to size themselves up and tear the others down.
And speaking of mirror images, we can’t neglect to mention the dinner party that Chelsea and Chloe set up for their LBHs. Chelsea is triumphant that Rick and Greg have so much in common, besides their receding hairlines—both say their former lines of work were, you know, “this and that”; they both have much younger, hotter girlfriends; and they both really struggle to sustain a dinner conversation. We cut to their dinner table after Victoria (unaware that her husband is wrapped up in a scam of his own) gives a lecture on being “hypervigilant” about scammers—because her children were born gorgeous and rich, they’ll inevitably attract them like flies. Rick and Greg are certified scammers; Chloe, who Rick insists is a sex worker, is probably working a con of her own. Could Chelsea be a scammer, too? What’s she getting out of dating Rick, anyway?
Now that we’ve done wellness checks on all the guests, let’s get to two of the people who make the White Lotus run: Mook and Gaitok. So far, they haven’t gotten dragged into any of the guests’ petty conflicts, the downfall of several past employees on the show. Instead, we get a romantic drama running parallel to the guests’ domestic ones, as Gaitok seeks to woo the lovely object of his affection. Mook seems to be holding him at bay, at least for now, but maybe she does admire his bravery in facing off against the hotel robbers—or maybe she’s just taking pity on him because of his head wound. We can only hope that they’ll ultimately stroll off arm in arm (or motorbike beside motorbike) like Lucia and Mia at the end of Season 2—but they’ll have some hotel shenanigans to survive first.
Microaggression of the Week
At dinner, the Ratliffs’ servers appear to be kathoey—a Thai third gender, often considered to bridge masculine and feminine identities. The Ratliffs’ response goes from curiosity (“Dad, are they women?” Lochlan asks) to some vaguely disrespectful speculation (“Ladyboys, maybe?” Tim answers, using the Western translation for kathoey, now largely seen as a pejorative). Predictably, this prompts an off-color joke from Saxon, this season’s spokesperson for toxic masculinity: “You know what they say: Having sex in Thailand is like eating a box of chocolates. You never know which one’s gonna have nuts.” Victoria, a classic boy mom, eats that up with a spoon.
This one goes beyond microaggression to just a … thoughtless, ignorant slur, but it paints a pretty picture of how the Ratliffs are relating to their new environment (and to one another).
The Nicest Mean Thing Uttered in Episode 2
As Ben predicted last week, it’ll be hard to avoid calling out the three blonds in this section. (They’ve perfected the art of delivering cutting remarks with syrupy smiles and plausible deniability.) You can take your pick of two-faced exchanges or whispered asides in this episode, but the conversation the ladies have after getting the results from their biometric tests was my favorite:
Laurie: “He said that my fat mass was under 25 percent, which I guess is pretty good.”
Jaclyn: “That is really good. Is that right?”
Laurie: “That’s what he said!”
Jaclyn: “Wow!”
Laurie: “You seem surprised.”
Jaclyn: “No! That was about the same as mine.”
It’s pretty clear Jaclyn was expecting to have a lower fat mass than anyone who’s ever taken that test. You can’t blame Laurie for going in on her later:
It’s only a matter of time until these ladies take the “passive” out of “passive-aggressive.” Maybe one of them will turn out to be the mysterious gunman after all.
What Are the Monkeys Trying to Tell Us?
Speaking of Laurie—we get our first monkey mention of the episode when she pounds on a glass door and Kate thinks a monkey is out to get them:
We also get a cut to a monkey scratching itself at the end of the self-care montage, and at the end of the episode, one of the performers appears to imitate that monkey (and yes, Kate, he does appear to be wearing a loincloth):
In a year that kicked off with a movie that likens man to chimpanzee, it’s not hard to jump to the conclusion that we might not be so different from our simian sibs after all. Maybe the guests will get closer to their spiritual sides during their stay—but it seems more likely that they’ll start behaving more like animals as they clamber over one another for status, sex, and survival.
