‘The White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 3 Recap: The Year of the Snake
A wayward trip into town, a (perhaps prescient) dream, and the return of scary Gary
“It felt a bit like True Romance,” Aimee Lou Wood recently told me about playing Chelsea, the steadfast and unflappable airhead who’s cosmically devoted to Walton Goggins’s Rick Hatchett in The White Lotus. “A bit of, like, a movie. Like Bonnie and Clyde vibes.” Wood and I were chatting during a press day for the third season of the show, and she was describing the experience of filming scenes for this week’s Episode 3, in which Chelsea and Rick venture outside the hotel to find weed and wind up at a tourist-trap live snake show.
In the episode, which aired Sunday, Chelsea accompanies Rick into town in the hope that he’ll chill out. Instead, she’s whisked to the hospital in a Datsun with a venomous cobra bite in the back of her leg after all hell breaks loose—all hell, of course, being the herpetarium of snakes that dear Rick freed and encouraged to “find a really good tree” as he reeled from smoking some unkind bud. (It really does sound quite Alabama Whitman–Clarence Worley–core when I summarize it like that.)
Anyway, Wood adored all of this mess. “I love all the snake motifs,” she said about the show. “Chelsea wore snake rings, and it’s the Year of the Snake now, and it’s all just very—it’s all so symbolic and so kind of mystical. And I love that aspect. And I actually really like snakes and lizards and things like that. I don’t get scared of them. So I was having a great time.”
Her scene partner, however, was not as enthused. “Walton’s really, really scared of snakes,” Wood said. “It’s his biggest fear. So that was interesting. And it’s not the first time in his career that he’s had to pick up a snake. So it’s really bad luck that he keeps having to face his biggest fear.” Wood described Goggins as “on autopilot” and “shaking” while filming with the creatures. And a few hours after my conversation with Wood, the man himself explained what he remembered from those scenes.
“What do I remember?” Goggins said. “I remember 48 hours of a panic attack and extreme fear. It’s not only that I don’t like snakes. That is the one thing that I fear. And probably the only thing that I fear in nature. I just don’t—I don’t know what it is. It’s primal for me.”
In Episode 3, titled “The Meaning of Dreams,” snakes and men alike try to wriggle out of the unfriendly confines of their current lives. Some slither into oblivion. Others try their damnedest to do so, even if it means taking desperate measures like locking away everyone’s electronic devices and popping pills. And then there are those who try to break free of boring routines by speaking their intentions aloud for the universe to hear—intentions like bodyguarding in Bangkok, boning a yogi, and booking time on a Buddhist guru’s Calendly. Some people go to the White Lotus for a vacation, but what most are really looking for is an escape.
Who’s the Dead Body?
Welp, White Lotus guests this season sure are 0-for-2 when approaching someone’s table during a meal with a friendly “Have we met?” opener. Last week, we saw Kate get rekt by Ms. Basket Case Ratliff when she tried to make pleasantries over a baby shower. (What do we think is Victoria’s go-to gift, by the way? I’m going with an engraved silver rattle that tarnishes if you don’t shine it.) And this week, we watch Belinda abruptly get downgraded from blissed-out business traveler to girl, you’re in danger mode when she strolls up to ask Thai Gary if he’s Maui Greg and gets the darkest reception in return.
All that said, I agree with my colleague Ben Lindbergh that it would be quite tonally off-putting to off the beleaguered Belinda, especially when her son just traveled all this way. Which could be bad news for Chloe because, yikes, that look Gary shot her made my hair stand on end.
But Chloe strikes me as a survivor. Sure, she’s naive, but the confidence with which she told Saxon Ratliff “I hear you’re a douche” tells me maybe she’ll wind up all right after all. So, just spitballing here, maybe the outcome of all of this will be a satisfying good riddance to bald rubbish and some sweet vengeance for dear Tanya? In the form of, say, Chelsea busting in to save Chloe from Gary—and then outlasting him, Arquette vs. Gandolfini style? Now that would be some True Romance.
A few others whose staying-alive stock potentially took a dive this week:
- It kind of felt meaningful when Valentin showed off his Vladivostok cityscape thigh tat, and not just in a “This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in many American cities” way. It’s easy to envision the camera lingering on that tattoo on a washed-up leg is all I’m saying.
- Episode 3 opens with Victoria Ratliff dreaming about being swaddled in a duvet and enveloped by the sea. But between that and the Season 3 trailer—in which we see a clip of her telling her husband that if they ever lost everything, “I don’t think I’d want to live”—I’m now thinking this is a misdirection. Though Victoria’s prized ability to black out at the club every day may indeed be extinguished.
- But what of her husband, my main man Timmy Tough Break? His newfound willingness to pop a pill and just rest his eyes for a moment definitely isn’t great. But! All that earlier time going HAM on the treadmill couldn’t have been particularly good for longevity either. For now, I declare this one a week-over-week wash. Bad Dad’s certainly not not doomed, but for now, our found-out fraudster suffers on. Another day in paradise, am I right?
- Conversely, GAHHHH, I’M SO, SO NERVOUS FOR THIS SWEET SOUL WHO MAY VERY WELL WIND UP HEROICALLY THROWING HIS BODY IN FRONT OF EITHER THAT OLD LADY (BOO) OR HIS YOUNG LOVE (AWW). Fare thee well, hotel guard shack king.
A Wellness Check on the Guests
Let’s begin, as “The Meaning of Dreams” does, with the unraveling Ratliffs. Episode 3 kicks off with that down-stuffed dream of Victoria’s, on a night so rainy that it turns the real world into white noise. “This is what it looks like before a tsunami,” her youngest son informs her in the dream sequence, right before everything is liquidated and Victoria becomes one with the sea.
“I had the most vivid dream last night,” she tells her family the next morning. “The house was there!” The family house may not be a home for long if the muffled sounds of Timothy Ratliff’s middle-of-the-night phone call are any indication. While I couldn’t hear what he was saying, the closed captions filled me in: Kenny Nguyen, I met like 15 years ago … Vietnamese guy … worked at Markham Bradford in the division in Asia … set up this fund called Sho-Kal … not my idea … you gotta understand … I’ll be waiting for your call … this is insane.
Other hits played by the Ratliff family orchestra’s smallest violins this week include Saxon finally getting his blender (yay!) but also getting on Gary’s radar (ruh-roh). Lochlan attends a sesh with an actual body language doctor (real ones know) that has him sitting up a little straighter—though not yet straight enough to get the monkey off his back: Saxon reminds him, ominously, that his altruistic quest to ensure baby bro won’t die a virgin is gonna be “all hands on deck” (gulp). And while they don’t know this yet, it turns out Piper didn’t drag her whole fam-damily 35 hours away to interview a guy for her college thesis after all. Or, at least, that wasn’t the only reason. She did it because she wants to apply to come live at a meditation center after college for at least a year’s time.
Victoria Ratliff, meanwhile, slurps the bejeezus out of some spooned yogurt, in the manner of a sentient Baby All Gone. She evaluates a recent masseuse: “I like Pond. She’s so soft but so firm.” And she has this classic great exchange with her kids:
Saxon: I got us invited on a guy’s yacht so we can go cruise around the islands.
Victoria [aghast]: Who did you meet with a boat? Are they decent people?!
Saxon: Yeah, they own their own yacht. They’re rich.
Victoria [teeth stained red from wine]: Just because people are rich doesn’t mean they’re not trashy.
Piper: Most rich people are trashy …
Victoria [drawl intensifying]: I WOULDN’T GO THAT FAR!!!
Moms are so silly, but Victoria is actually right: The proprietor of this yacht is not, in fact, decent people. Gary is legit scary—scarier still once we learn exactly what Chloe thinks she knows about his checkered past. “Gary barely ever talks to me. He’s so secretive,” she complains to Chelsea. “He has an ex-wife, but he never talks about her. All I know is that she was a real mental patient. Like, kill herself bad. One day she was so depressed she couldn’t take it anymore. She just walked into the ocean and never came back. All they found was, like, part of her leg.” To this, Chelsea and I reacted the same.
Chelsea may feel momentarily cheered up knowing that her man isn’t the most inscrutable (and maybe-possibly murderous) person on this island. But she’s still in a bit of a pickle: She’s an Aries, after all, and her soulmate is a Scorpio, and her radical honesty is completely at odds with his hard-to-parse lone-wolf ways. And now, suddenly, this man is telling her that he has to go take care of some business in Bangkok and that the reasons why don’t concern her? As she might put it: fucking hell!
Many White Lotus viewers have wondered over the past few weeks whether Rick would ever turn into the kind of colorful, expansive character we’ve come to expect from a Goggins role. And while it took until the third episode, Mike White finally RELEASES THE GOGGIN in “The Meaning of Dreams.” It’s a joy to watch Rick snap from a man struggling to get through the day to a charismatic con man possessed. (Well, unless you’re Chelsea, scoffing as he turns on the charm.) Pretending to be a producer, Rick uses the vanity of the hotel’s owner against her, buttering her up and offering her a meeting with him and a “director friend” in the big city to talk showbiz. A few minutes later, he uses similar tactics against Chelsea by invoking their “incompatible signs” to get her to shut up.
What is Rick plotting in Bangkok? Still unclear. Why does Rick release all the poisonous snakes? This one, he has a couple of answers. “Evil things shouldn’t be treated like shit,” he tells Chelsea. “It’s only gonna make them more evil.” And also: “I was stoned.” Chelsea tries to soothe him in the only way she knows how. “You’ll never get rid of me,” she coos. “If you kill me, I’ll follow you into the next life and the next.”
During our conversation in early February, Goggins remarked that his real-life primal aversion to snakes is exactly the thing that Rick reacts so emotionally and impulsively to in The White Lotus. “He’s looking for somebody to open the cage for himself,” Goggins said. “You know, he is the person feared in a room. And he didn’t ask for that moniker. You know, he didn’t even ask for this life. A snake didn’t ask to be a snake. Why do we—why do I—look at them that way? You know, I don’t know the answer to that question.”
Microaggression of the Week
Below is a careful transcript of a three-person scene that conveyed a combination of class mechanics, power dynamics, and how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people insight. I shan’t be explaining further.
Rick: SHREE-tawla.
Fabian: ShreetaLA!
Sritala: Sree ta laaA.
Fabian: See ta LA.
Sritala: Sree ta LaaaaAA.
Fabian: Seetala. SeetaLAAA. See tA LAALAGGGHHHHHH.
Everyone: ….
Rick: Sree ta laaaaaa. Soooo sexy. ;) ;) ;)
The Nicest Mean Thing Uttered in Episode 3
It wasn’t so much a thing that was uttered as it was this freakin’ face, otherwise known as the last thing you see before you learn you’ve been auto-rebooked for three days from now—and/or that, whoops, your bestie went MAGA:
Sorry, Daenerys Targaryen: Looks like there’s a new dragon-lady face in town!
The Jaclyn-Laurie-Kate three-headed monster once again left me mesmerized and terrorized in equal measure this week. Any given two of them are never not exchanging glances about the third. Every single one of them is secretly jealous and outwardly judgmental of the others, for ancient and unsolvable reasons. It’s borderline unbearable because it’s so relatable! To sit down at their three-top is to flip back and forth between Friends With Money, The Real Housewives, and one’s own nagging insecurities that everyone is texting about you.
It’s also like following Survivor. There were a couple of times during Episode 3 when Mike White’s former castaway (or is the etiquette “ex-castaway”?) was showing. I rewound a brief, soothing montage of a rainy night that yields to a dewdrop-fresh morning several times. And audiences get taken deep inside the most brutal and unstable alliance in all of human society with this longtime gal-pal trio. Every late-night drink with these three is a new tribal council; every meal is a blind side.
“Everybody has old friends; everybody has new friends; everybody’s outgrown friendships,” Carrie Coon told me in February about the group’s dynamic. “Everybody has been forced to confront their own life choices when sitting with friends who are more successful than they are or less successful, and they are trying to figure out how to talk about their lives.” Sitting next to her, Leslie Bibb added, “Old friends, they know you better. You can’t sort of reinvent yourself.”
Ultimately, the nicest mean thing that was uttered in Episode 3 was the ladies’ attempt to get the conversation back on familiar footing:
Kate: Listen, it is a very pretty church. It is not weird at all. And I will take you! If you ever come visit me! In AUSTIN!
Jaclyn: I can’t wait to get down there!!!!!
Laurie: I reeeeally wanna come!!!!!!!
Oof, now that’s chilling, like the girl-talk equivalent of the bad guy in Terminator 2 getting blown to smithereens and coolly reassembling into humanoid form without breaking stride. And this is a cruel thought: Maybe what this all points to is Kate being the eventual goner?! Like, hey, lady, have you heard the good news? It turns out your friends will come visit your beautiful church in Austin after all. The only catch is that you’ll already be in a better place when they get there. PS: SUCH cute jammies, tho.
What Are the Monkeys Trying to Tell Us?
No disrespect to the monkey in the tree that appeared to be eavesdropping while Goggins told his therapist about the death of his father, but I’m going to use this space to focus on the real apelike behavior of the hour: Patrick Schwarzenegger as Saxon Ratliff, who just wants to build his own client list here, dad, and live libidinously and buffen lil’ bro up, like a good primate should.
I laughed out loud at how Andy Greenwald described this character on a recent episode of The Watch: “Patrick Schwarzenegger’s performance is disgusting,” he said. “Like, in the best way. He is hideous, he is loathsome, and so either Mike White saw something in this man and drew it out, or he’s delivering just an incredible performance.” That’s that gorilla mindset!
The other day, I read that Schwarzenegger had lamented that he doesn’t get enough credit for all the hard work he’s put into acting, on account of his half-Arnold-and-half-centuries-of-Kennedies ancestry. So during this episode, I watched him more closely. And you know what? Guy’s a hoot! I got top notes of Bradley Cooper in Wedding Crashers mixed with a little—hear me out here—Jonah Hill in Superbad.
Schwarzenegger’s Saxon vibrates with so much insecurity and arrogance that it’s like I can feel him physically in the room, watching and looming. He glugs down blender sludge for the gains, bro, and gnaws ’cue straight off the skewer.
He lights up pathetically at his dad’s sketchy, strategic “you and me, pal!” deployment of fatherly pride, choosing to believe that his old man actually just wants to unplug so he can better romp around with his big, dumb kids. And so he gets the family invited on a yacht to cruise the islands during the full moon because monkey see, monkey do.
Maybe what this curious Saxon creature is trying to tell us is this: We’re not too different after all, whatever our species. Chimp or chump, at the end of the day, we all rest our eyes for a moment. And then maybe we see fire and snakes—or maybe it’s our home, built on a foundation of sand—because that’s what we’re all afraid of. “It’s not that deep,” Saxon mansplains to his family in “The Meaning of Dreams.” And indeed, that is how it looks right before the tsunami.
