Finally, for everyone complaining that this season of The White Lotus has been too slow—more like a meditative yoga session than the drug- and sex-fueled romp they’d been wanting—Episodes 5 and 6 have offered some long-awaited excitement. But they’ve also taught us all an important lesson. Maybe we should have been a little happier savoring those slow moments and letting that beautiful B-roll wash over us. Because now the worst has happened: Incest is back on HBO, baby. Plus, an (imaginary) murder-suicide, a (sort of) secret affair, a politely tense Gary-Belinda exchange, the long-awaited debut of Jim Hollinger (or his voice, at least), Sam Fucking Rockwell, and a big Hollywood production starring Sritala!
These episodes didn’t just give viewers the excitement they’ve been asking for—plenty of the guests finally got their hands on what they’ve been seeking, too. Saxon got Lochlan laid (and, whoops, got in on the action himself), Jaclyn got the male attention she’s so thirsty for, Piper got her parents to consider signing her permission slip to move to Thailand, and Rick got his gun and that meeting with the big bad. But when you’re staying at The White Lotus, getting what you want can be more than you bargained for. As the monk Luang Por Teera says: “Everyone runs from pain towards the pleasure. But when they get there, only find more pain. You cannot outrun pain.” Episode 6 is the inevitable hangover from all of last week’s parties, because in Mike White’s universe, there can be no wild times without some karmic reckoning.
Who’s the Dead Body?
My grand theory from Episode 4—that Tim would use his ill-gotten gun against his family and himself—briefly appeared to come true, until it was revealed to be just a twisted daydream from Tim (for now, at least). Gaitok managed to recover his gun from the Ratliffs’ villa through what can only be described as divine providence. Remember that prayer Tim offered up in the last episode, asking God or whoever’s out there to tell him what to do? Whatever divine entity heard Tim seemed to guide Gaitok to the exact right drawer in the Ratliffs’ nook-and-cranny-filled suite.
Gaitok’s discovery might have saved the Ratliffs—even if Victoria would rather be dead than poor—but I can’t help thinking it might have doomed someone else. We find out later in the episode that Gaitok is a crack shot with a pistol, but his boss asks whether he’d have it in him to turn the gun on a real person. Just a few episodes ago, I wouldn’t have thought so. But now Mook is after him about that promotion, and Gaitok’s got the wind of ambition in his sails. He had seemed pretty content with his job before he got mixed up with her, but love is a powerful motivator. Now, Gaitok’s in pursuit of a job as a tatted-up bodyguard, or at least some respect from the employees and patrons of the hotel. And I’m worried that he might go too far to get it.
I also wonder what Mook’s role is in all of this—could she be egging Gaitok on for a fight she knows he’ll lose? So far, she hasn’t done much other than breadcrumb the poor guy (and lure him away from his guard station justtttt in time for his gun to disappear). There’s no way Mike White hired one of the world’s biggest pop stars solely to play the one-dimensional love interest of a pining security guard. Something tells me that Mook’s background role so far—and the fact that she’s been giving Gaitok just enough attention to keep him strung along—could mean she’ll play an important part in distracting him when someone needs to get their dirty work done.
My eye is also on Greg/Gary, who’s in an even worse mood than usual after his girlfriend slept with one or maybe two Ratliff brothers on his yacht. But he has another, even bigger headache than Saxon at the moment: that no-good, meddling Belinda. Greg seeks her out to deliver a personal invitation to a mansion bash he’s throwing, in a conversation that puts them on something like equal footing: She has the ability to expose him, but he has the money and the wherewithal to keep her from telling his secrets. But does he really expect her to show up? Or is he depending on the implicit threat of their chat to bring her to the last house on the hill?
Chloe, at the insistence of Greg, also makes a point of inviting Saxon and his brother—maybe Greg wants to get all his biggest enemies in one place with a very convenient cliffside drop-off:
If I were Belinda or Saxon, I definitely would not go to his house—a party, no matter how lavish it may be, is not worth taking a drop off that cliff for. So maybe Greg, desperate to silence Belinda or get Saxon out of the way, will hire someone to do his dirty work at the hotel instead. And maybe Gaitok will be the one who tries to defend her—and ends up floating face-down in a lily pond for his efforts.
A Wellness Check on the Guests
Saxon’s not worthy of many superlatives, but he may have the worst case of hangxiety ever committed to the screen.
Sure, he overindulged, but the real reason for his nausea and pounding headache is those nightmarish memories from last night.
It looks like they’re in hell because they are: Those red-tinged flashes of memory show us that Saxon and Lochlan’s brotherly love has gone a little too far—even further than we initially thought. Saxon remembers Chloe going back and forth between the brothers—but when she locked in on Lochlan, her little magician, Saxon was left to his own devices. (Chelsea kept to her word and refused to cheat on Rick, leaving just the three in the most devilish possible devil’s threesome.) So Saxon jerked off right beside them, in the same bed, eyes locked on his brother, apparently turned on by the sight of scrawny Lochlan and Chloe going at it. So far, so fucking weird—but for a while, blessedly (!), that’s all Saxon can remember. Still, he can’t even look at poor, debaucherous little Lochie without throwing up.
But then he makes the mistake of hanging out with Chelsea and Chloe by the pool—and sure, it can be tempting to have a hungover debriefing after a wild night with your pals! You fill in the gaps, you reminisce on the dumb shit everyone did, and you make plans to run it back again. But this time, Saxon should have nursed that hangover all by himself—or gone with his family to get some spiritual counsel from the monks. Because when Chloe jokes that maybe Gary wants to have a threesome with her and Saxon, he says he’s never had one with a guy before. “What about last night?” Chloe asks, before telling him what he (and we) could have gone our whole lives without knowing: While Saxon was jerking off last night, Lochlan reached over for a little brotherly tug.
At least Chelsea, perhaps guided by the teachings of Rumi, appears unfazed:
Mike White has said he takes a perverse thrill in making gay sex weird again: “I just think transgressive sex is sexier. I guess I’m old school. There’s this Gothic vibe of walking through a haunted hotel or haunted house and people are having sex behind closed doors.” Last season, he also slipped in a bit of light incest: Tanya sees Quentin and his “nephew,” Jack, having sex, but it turned out (bless us) that they weren’t related after all.
So, as if to thumb his nose at anyone who thought he wouldn’t go all the way, White gave us some real incest this time around. After all, he’d promised us a darker season than the first two, and we should have listened: Nothing’s more sinister than one brother jerking the other off as they (almost sweetly?) lock eyes. What can I say? Lochlan’s a people pleaser.
All this time, Saxon’s been convinced that he’s totally normal, and Victoria’s been going on and on about the Ratliff family’s good values (and thinking Piper is the black sheep). Saxon aggressively flaunted his heterosexuality and turned up his nose at anything that smelled like sexual deviancy. Now, his discomfort with anything other has circled back around to tap him on the shoulder: Maybe he’s not so different from all those “gender goblins that tuck their dicks in between their legs” and the “ladyboys” he sneered at a few episodes ago. Perhaps Saxon will embrace the Buddhist style of celibacy that Frank is practicing, realizing, finally, that he can’t fuck his way to satisfaction. Or, more likely, he’ll suppress it like the good old Southern boy he is and keep chasing sex (with nice, normal women) to prove to whoever’s watching that it’s not a thing. It’s definitely not a thing!
Like Saxon, Tim’s also been watching every idea he ever had about himself get blown to smithereens. He’s actually a little further along on that journey; he’s made it all the way from denial to depression, fantasizing about what he could do with Gaitok’s gun (as we can see in the episode’s opening sequence). That scene, which shows one of the paths Tim could take, reminded me quite a bit of Victoria’s tsunami dream from Episode 3. In each scene we get a shot of Tim and Victoria from a distance, thinking about what they’re going to do:
And a shot of each from the back, after they’ve made their choice (Tim holds up the gun, and Victoria walks into the water):
Both Tim and Victoria are standing in front of bodies of water, which echoes what Luang Por Teera says about death—when a person dies, it’s like they’re a drop of water returning to the ocean.
The similarities between the two scenes lead us to realize that Tim is having a vision of his death just like Victoria was; he hasn’t pulled the trigger yet. When he goes back to bed, alive and (un)well, Victoria reassures him that everything will be all right. They’ll bring Piper back to Durham, and she’ll live a normal life, just like them. Tim says he’s not worried in the slightest, and that may very well be true—at least when it comes to his daughter, who would probably be much better off in Thailand than in Durham (even a threadbare cot on a concrete floor has to be better than the public humiliation of your family’s fall from grace).
Victoria’s been trying to drink herself to sleep because Piper finally revealed that she’s running off to join the Hare Krishnas Buddhist monks in China Taiwan Thailand. Victoria has insisted on seeing the monastery for herself, and you can’t blame her for doing her due diligence: Beneath all the outrage about bongo-banging Hare Krishnas, her mother’s intuition might be telling her that Piper visited the monks one and a half times before deciding, Yep, this is the place for me. So the Ratliffs go on a little family field trip, Tim and Lochlan in tow—the latter boomeranging back to his sister’s side after last night’s bacchanalia.
Piper’s manner completely changes at the temple. With her family, she’s all spiritual knowingness and holier-than-thou energy. With the monks, she puts on her customer-service voice and acts like a little girl again, fluttering and uncertain. Her outfit to visit the monastery even looks like something Victoria would have dressed her in for Sunday school:
And we finally get to hear Piper’s reasons for coming to Thailand and pursuing Buddhism in the first place: “I’ve been feeling a little lost,” she tells Luang Por Teera when they meet. “Lately, it’s felt like everything is pointless. And the things my family cares about, I just don’t care about, you know?” Piper is teetering between childhood and adulthood (neither of which her parents prepared her for), and she’s hoping that the monastery will show her the way forward—if Tim and Victoria can be convinced to let her go. The most successful characters on The White Lotus are the ones who manage to give up their privileged pasts and the identity they came in with (like Quinn in Season 1). I’m hoping Piper can make a similar getaway, because if she thinks her life is hard now, it’s about to get a whole lot worse.
Piper then fetches Tim to talk to the monk himself—Victoria’s too busy making the rounds like she’s at a country club garden party. Luang Por Teera explains to a rumpled-looking Tim why Piper and other Americans come to his prayer center (a crushing sense of meaninglessness, rich parents, etc.). But then Tim asks the question that’s really been weighing on his mind: What happens when we die?
Luang Por Teera says: “When you’re born, you are like a single drop of water, flying upward, separated from the one giant consciousness. You get older, you descend back down. You die. You land back into the water, become one with the ocean again. No more separated. No more suffering. One consciousness. Death is a happy return, like coming home.”
It seems like his words bring Tim some peace, even if he hasn’t quite gotten around to dying yet. But by choosing to die (and bringing Victoria along with him, as another one of his visions shows in the episode), wouldn’t Tim still just be trying to outrun his pain instead of making peace with it? I don’t think he’ll get out of his karmic debt so easily, especially now that the gun’s back with its rightful owner.
Someone who hasn’t been hiding from pain, instead preferring to revel in it, is Slick Rick. We get the return of his con man persona when he meets with Sritala about an upcoming role in his bullshit movie project. Sritala makes for an easy target; she doesn’t seem particularly worried that Rick doesn’t know the names of her movies or, really, a single thing about her. And she agrees when Rick says he needs to come to her house to get to know what she’s like in her own “habitat,” even though her husband, his real target, is recovering there. But Sritala probably just trusts her ever-present bodyguards—and her cocoon of wealth—to keep her safe from types like Rick.
As if those bodyguards weren’t warning enough, both Chelsea and Frank tell Rick again that he needs to let go of this obsession with Jim Hollinger. Frank’s roller-coaster monologue about giving up his own vices somehow hasn’t fazed Rick, and neither have Chelsea’s desperate pleas (Walton Goggins just can’t help misbehavin’). Chelsea’s a bit like a wide-eyed Cassandra this season, sounding the alarm about what’s coming but going unheard by Rick and Chloe, who brush off her predictions as vapid anxieties. (And maybe they don’t listen to her because she’s so wrong about so many other things—like her conviction that she and Rick are soulmates. But maybe they are soulmates, in a way: She’s like Sisyphus and he’s like a rock, and she just keeps trying to push him up the hill in the direction of something like happiness.)
Another Sisyphean task? Keeping Laurie, Jaclyn, and Kate’s friendship alive after this trip. Jaclyn’s sleepover with Valentin might finally be the undoing of the trio’s toxic bond, but it’s been a long time coming. Kate sees him leaving Jaclyn’s room early in the morning and relays this info to Laurie, expecting to have just another gals gab over breakfast. But this news hits Laurie a little harder than some gossip over politics or Botox. It was fun when she and Kate were picking apart Jaclyn’s plastic surgery or much younger husband—choices that really only affected Jaclyn herself, as much as they might have rankled the other two. But ever since he was introduced as their butler–cum–energy healer, Jaclyn’s been pushing Valentin in Laurie’s direction. And when they were at the club together, he gave Laurie more attention than Jaclyn, something that Laurie might not have experienced much in their friendship. Even if she didn’t even want Valentin, she still lost him to Jaclyn, and she got made to look like a fool along the way.
Jaclyn, meanwhile, hears back from her husband, Harrison, just a few hours too late. For a little while, something that looks a lot like shame comes over her.
But she covers it up pretty smoothly when the couple eases into their familiar pattern of long-distance phone sex; it seems like, for her own sake, she’s convinced herself that nothing even happened last night.
But Laurie won’t let it go that easily, and we finally get the confrontation between the women that’s been building with every sly glance and dubious compliment they’ve traded over the course of this trip. Laurie pretends, at first, that this is just some friendly sex talk between friends—“So, how was it?” she asks, trying to get the dirt on Valentin. But Jaclyn insists, again and again, that nothing happened, even when Laurie drags Kate in as an eyewitness. Laurie tries different tactics, reminding her that “what happens in Thailand stays in Thailand,” asking whether she and Harrison have an open marriage, ordering more drinks to loosen her up, proclaiming, “Never mind, forget it! It doesn’t matter.” But Jaclyn doesn’t crack, and maybe Laurie doesn’t even want her to. Maybe she’s winning by catching Jaclyn in a lie and forcing her to dig herself deeper into it—because then at least Laurie can call herself honest, unlike her so-called best friends, and she can walk away from this long-smoldering dumpster fire of a friendship thinking she was in the right all along.
I mentioned in my recap of Episode 2 that the three are like mirrors of each other; here, each of them wants or expects the others to behave a little more like her. Laurie assumes that Jaclyn was acting out of competitiveness, but she probably just slept with Valentin because she was horny and needed attention. Laurie also thinks that Kate should have the same sense of crusading justice that she does, and she retaliates when Kate doesn’t get behind her (and doesn’t drink with her). Kate, in turn, thinks that Laurie could learn a thing or two from her nonconfrontational stance—and we can all assume that she’s inwardly judging Jaclyn for cheating on her husband, no matter what she says.
And Jaclyn thinks that her friends should be as blind to her faults—and as forgetful about the past—as she is. (Conveniently, she also doesn’t seem to remember that she’s been talking just as much shit about Kate and Laurie as they have about her). But that’s the thing about old friends: They don’t forget, and they’ll always remind you—by force, if necessary—of the versions of yourself you’d rather leave behind.
But Jaclyn isn’t the only one who can’t keep her hookups a secret: When Zion finally gets to Thailand, he walks in on his mom tangled up with Pornchai. I felt for Belinda when she so sweetly (and awkwardly) came on to her massage instructor in the previous episode, and I’m rooting for some real love to blossom on this show for once. But I don’t quite trust Pornchai’s offer to help Belinda open a spa in Thailand: She’s gotten burned like this before, and it’s good policy to beware of anyone who wants to start a business with you after one night of sex.
I also fear that Belinda’s absorbed some dangerous lessons from White Lotus guests (or from too many rewatches of Scarface): “First you get the money. Then you get the power. Then you get the woman,” she tells Zion over breakfast, lecturing him to focus on studying instead of getting laid. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, I guess, but this doesn’t seem like great advice when the rest of the episode has been warning us about the dangers of pursuing money, power, and sex. Instead of threatening or killing Belinda, maybe Greg will just try bribing her or funding that spa she’s always wanted. Would she sell out like that? Or will she seek justice for Tanya, who never did right by her anyway?
Microaggression of the Week
As soon as Piper tells Victoria she’s moving to Thailand, a true crime documentary about the Luang Por Teera cult starts playing in Victoria’s mind. And she’s already started on her narration:
- “If that strange man is going to have my baby, he better be the best Buddhist in China.”
- [Bowing to two monks] “Will my daughter be safe?”
- “I saw how they live. It’s grim.”
- “What’s next? You want her to shave her head and start banging a bongo in Times Square?”
But to Victoria’s credit, she does manage to get a tour of the prayer center and probably learns more about life there than Piper has bothered to figure out. Her scheme to have Piper spend a night at the monastery is pretty clever; she’s banking on her daughter’s taste for creature comforts to save her from her future life of shaved heads and bongos.
The Nicest Mean Thing Uttered in Episode 6
In this episode, the “nicest mean things” are nice because they’re meant to make the listener reflect on their spiritual decay; they’re mean because who wants to hear about all of that, anyway?
When Saxon’s nursing his hangover by the pool, he asks why Chelsea didn’t hook up with him the previous night. She tells him, “Once you’ve connected to someone on a spiritual level, you can’t go back to cheap sex. Hooking up with you would be an empty experience.” Saxon asks how she could even know that—as if it isn’t obvious—and she answers, “Because I know. Because you’re soulless.” Yesterday, Saxon would have scoffed at that and maybe even at the idea of having a soul. But a bad hangover (and intrusive thoughts about your brother giving you a hand job) does have a way of making you feel pretty soulless, and Chelsea’s words appear to hit home with our gorilla-chested lothario.
Tim receives a similar message from Luang Por Teera. It might not have been meant as a personal dig, but he could certainly read it that way: “Many young people come here from your country. I think because maybe spiritual malaise, lost connection with nature, with their family. Lost connection with their spirit. What is left? The self, identity, chasing money, pleasure. Yeah? Heh heh.” A few episodes ago, Tim, like Saxon, wouldn’t have been so receptive to Luang Por Teera’s thoughts on his lifestyle. (Tim’s a pillar of the community!) But by now, he’s seen for himself the downside of chasing money and pleasure, and Luang Por Teera’s words seem to ring true to our fallen patriarch.
Let’s hope Saxon and Tim take heed of these two spiritual gurus and get some healing, even if it’s too late for them to outrun their mistakes.
What Are the Monkeys Trying to Tell Us?
As Lochlan sits beside Piper to meditate, Luang Por Teera says: “Let’s shut down our monkey mind, yes? Close your eyes. As thoughts emerge, acknowledge them. Say hello.” Earlier, Lochlan had told Saxon that he couldn’t remember anything from the night before. But his memories, summoned by Luang Por Teera’s invitation, come flooding back in. He remembers making out with Chloe, taking off his swim trunks, and … wait, that can’t be right … grabbing hold of his brother’s dick?? Luang Por Teera then says: “Very gently, let them go. Goodbye.”
Something tells me Lochlan won’t be able to wave those thoughts goodbye so easily.
