‘The White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 5 Recap: “You Think He’s Dangerous?”
As another firearm arrives, we find out the mystery behind last week’s lost gun
So we are going to need to talk about that cameo.
Yes, other things happened in this week’s episode. We will talk about them—eventually. What we need to do now, though, is discuss Sam Rockwell’s ultra-chaotic appearance on The White Lotus, a once-in-a-century corpse flower burst suddenly out of the leafy calm of its host, its magnificent, repulsive, compulsively enticing jewels on hideous display for all.
Rockwell—who in real life is dating Leslie Bibb, a.k.a. Kate, the world’s unhappiest girls trip attendee—plays an old pal and drinking buddy of Walton Goggins’s Rick. Now residing in Bangkok, where Rick has traveled for the extremely to very, very, very extremely ill-advised purpose of confronting the owner of this season’s White Lotus resort—whom he believes killed his father—the two meet for a drink in a swanky hotel bar.
Only that drink, for Rockwell’s character, is chamomile tea. While Rick sips whiskey, his onetime partner in debauchery informs him that he’s now sober—a sharp break from the days of yore, when Rick suggests that he was always the wildest one at the party. And the newfound sobriety isn’t the only big change: He’s embraced Buddhism and celibacy as well. Why, you ask? Sorry, don’t bother—Rick doesn’t either, but that doesn’t stop Rockwell’s character (whose name we don’t learn, though I am imagining he adopted something grandiose and Thai for himself) from unburdening himself about his life since his emigration (he needed to leave the U.S. for, uh, reasons). With a youth pastor’s cadence, he embarks on one of the most bizarre monologues in the recent and perhaps total history of recorded film.
“You know, after about a thousand nights like that, you start to lose it,” Rockwell murmurs of his amorous first months in Thailand. “I started wondering, where am I going with this? Why do I feel this need to fuck all these women? What is desire? The form of this cute Asian girl, why does it have such a grip on me? ’Cause she’s the opposite of me? Is she gonna complete me in some way? I realized that I could fuck a million women—I’d still never be satisfied. Maybe, maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls.”
Maybe he’s doing a bit! He’s doing a bit, right?
He is not doing a bit.
“So one night I took home some girl. Turned out to be a ladyboy, which I’d done before, but this time, instead of fucking the ladyboy, the ladyboy fucked me. And it was kinda magical. And it got in my head what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls getting fucked by me and to feel that.”
And the Emmy goes to … Walton Goggins’s face:
Mike White, my cap is off.
Goggins’s response to Rockwell’s tale was a defining theme of this week’s episode: Characters saying, literally or figuratively, “What?” when the person they’re talking to says something unhinged.
Then there’s Piper, who finally broke the news to her parents that she plans to move to Thailand and join the local monastery after graduating from college. Her parents—which is to say her mom, Victoria, because the Lorazepam-addled and newly armed Tim is off in another dimension—take it as poorly as we’ve all been expecting. Meaning that it was high time for Parker Posey to cook. She offers up a series of counters that are too spectacularly weird to be offensive: “But you’re not a Buddhist,” she drawls. “Honey, you’re not from China.”
“You’re gonna live in some dirty monastery for a year with a bunch of grungy kids who have no purpose?”
“What if it’s a cult, Piper? We need to look into it.”
When Piper counters that the monk who runs the monastery has written “major books,” Victoria fires back:
You do not gotta hand it to her, etc. Victoria’s evidence for the pervasiveness of cults includes Hare Krishna, NXIVM, and, uh, the Catholic church. My personal favorite from the anti-monastery barrage, though, might be when she shouted, “You want to live in Taiwan?!”, which prompted:
So, yes, Tim has a gun now. It didn’t take Gaitok long to figure out who stole the gun from the security booth at the end of last week’s installment. Turns out that the booth, yes, has security—less courtesy of Gaitok, as we’ve seen, than an array of cameras, including one trained on the booth itself. And, sure enough, there’s Tim skulking around the scene of the crime and leaving in a hurry.
Not that he’s going to confess. When Gaitok confronts him, Tim plays dumb, and Gaitok can’t very well go to his bosses, with whom he’s already on thin ice in the wake of the jewel heist, to intervene. Even the dance moves of Mook, who’s on duty to perform for the guests, can’t do much to take Gaitok’s mind off the pickle he now finds himself in.
Others aren’t finding distraction quite so hard to come by. Saxon and Lochlan party it up with Chelsea and Chloe at the Full Moon Party, popping pills in their—or at least Saxon’s—pursuit of the thoroughly spoken for older ladies. Lochlan’s goofball performance seems to make some inroads with Chloe, who takes to calling him the “little magician,” and the brothers do eventually see some action—with each other. Saxon did call it:
Brotherly love, you say?
Belinda gets word from Fabian that Greg-turned-Gary is asking about her, which can’t be good (more on that later), but she takes a load off with Pornchai, who wrangles a lizard out of her room and finally leans in for a kiss. I will not settle for anything less than a marriage at this point—these two must be protected. (Tick tock: Beloved son and romantic impediment Zion is due to arrive tomorrow.)
Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate, meanwhile, have the big night they—or at least Jaclyn and Laurie—have been waiting for courtesy of Valentin and his similarly muscled and tattooed buddies from back home in Vladivostok. They start at a club, where their handsy dancing with the Russian trio does not please a nearby gaggle of Russian women, at least one of whom seems to be a girlfriend.
Jaclyn continues to lay it on thick about how Valentin and Laurie should totally hook up, and the group travels back to the villa at the White Lotus—to the dismay of Kate, who puts on her pajamas in history’s least subtle hint that everyone should shut the hell up and go to bed. They do, eventually—but it’s Jaclyn, who still hasn’t heard from her husband back home, who pulls Valentin into her room with her. (They leave the villa’s door open—don’t they know that prowling giant lizards can get in?)
It’s hard to say if Laurie will be mad if she finds out: Yes, Jaclyn’s been playing matchmaker the whole trip, but is Laurie even particularly interested? It seems likely that we’ll find out. In the meantime, she danced her way to her own bed solo to get her beauty rest.
Who’s the Dead Body?
Rick’s sitdown with Sam Rockwell had a purpose beyond catching up—Rockwell passed him a gun, which means there are now two firearms in play: Tim’s stolen one at the resort and Rick’s freshly acquired one. (For those keeping score at home: Thanks to our friends from Vladivostok, there have also now been two full-frontal ding-dongs on display as of this week. Will the tie hold?)
Rick’s acquisition of deadly force ahead of his planned confrontation with Jim Hollinger doesn’t bode well for Hollinger—but they, and the gun, are still in Bangkok. Assuming he doesn’t kill Hollinger on sight—as they said goodbye, Rick asked Rockwell’s character if he could help him with some “roleplay” the following night, so he’s clearly got something planned—will Rick try to bring the gun back to the White Lotus?
There, Greg seems to be nearing an endgame. Belinda, of course, knows that he’s less interested in her spa treatments than the fact that she’s worked out his Gary facade and is threatening his glittery new life in Thailand with, y’know, the consequences of having his wife murdered and stealing her fortune.
“Maybe we call all the police,” Belinda suggests to Fabian after laying out what she knows. But Fabian blows her off: There will be no calling of police at the White Lotus, he says.
“It’s bad form to talk about a guest in this way,” he says. “Some people here have colorful pasts. It’s really not wise to stir anything up.” It’s not that he doesn’t believe Belinda—it seems like he does! Is Fabian protecting Greg just because he’s a regular at, and doubtless reliable income source for, the hotel? Or are the two in cahoots in some way? Either way, things are looking grim for Belinda, even with Pornchai, and soon Zion, by her side.
Has a more damning prediction ever been made on The White Lotus?
Meanwhile, the dynamic between Lochlan and Saxon is weird and getting weirder, their incestuous undertones now escalating to full-on making out. Then there was a drunken Lochlan issuing a cheery threat that sounded a bit like a prophecy:
Each season of The White Lotus has featured a character like Saxon: a wealthy, white, privileged jerk who makes the other wealthy, white, privileged guests at the resort seem relatable by comparison. In the show’s previous installments, that character—Shane Patton in Season 1 and Cameron Sullivan in Season 2—avoided any comeuppance. Maybe this time the resident jerk won’t be quite so lucky.
But if Saxon is too obtuse to detect any danger in the air, others are more attuned to the risks posed by the people around them. “Gary might kill me,” Chloe told Chelsea as she contemplated making a move on Lochlan. “I honestly think he’s capable of it.”
He sure is—though that didn’t stop her from making out with the little magician later in the evening on the yacht. Nothing good can come of Gary getting wind of it.
She has a point! And there’s always a chance Kate could finally snap and go on a rampage:
A Wellness Check on the Guests
Tim is not thriving. He wasn’t thriving before, but he is really, really not thriving now. While Victoria railed about sex cults and grungy kids, he stared slack-jawed into space, only returning to the conversation when Victoria shouted that she and Tim would march down to the monastery in the morning to prove once and for all that it was no place for Piper—“Right, Tim?”
Those anti-anxiety meds don’t seem to be doing much to soothe our suddenly broke future jailbird, whose family remains none the wiser about what’s going on back in the States. He has, or at least attempts, a heart-to-heart with Piper that swiftly devolves into him singing a hymn to himself. Most worryingly, he’s still got that gun, and as the episode comes to a close, we see him penning a farewell note. Look, man, a massage won’t change much about the underlying situation—but if you’re not going to open up to your family, maybe at least consider browsing the brochure of wellness treatments?
Most of the other guests took the opportunity to embrace the excesses of their moneyed vacations. Good for them—but there are doubtless some nasty hangovers in the offing.
Microaggression of the Week
There was nothing particularly micro about Rockwell’s soliloquy on “ladyboys.”
A runner-up: Fabian talking to poor, panicking Gaitok and blithely accusing him of having the shits.
The Nicest Mean Thing Uttered in Episode 5
“I like the little magician. I just like innocent, young guys. When they see you naked they shake and you can see their little hearts beating inside their chests.” —Chloe
This one’s just mean, but, well, what can you do?
What Are the Monkeys Trying to Tell Us?
No monkeys this week! The jungle falls silent when the predator is nearby….
