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Is it just me or is everything leaning Old Testament? A serpent seduced Adam and Eve into eating from the Tree of Knowledge, for which God booted them from Eden. But hardly anyone talks about what next befell the snake. God cursed that little shit-starter. “Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.” Those are essentially the conditions of oppression that have perpetuated for tropical snakes of all ilk, from the viper to the Naja cobra, from Genesis until 2025, when they finally receive a savior created in their own slithering image.
It’s only fitting that the man who liberates a nest of snakes from a roadside tourist trap is called Rick. Can any other name in the English language exude such slipperiness? Rick is the kind of boyfriend who will empty out your checking account. Rick doesn’t have a permanent address; can he just write down yours? Rick is gonna creep on your sister, especially if she’s not single. (And if he weren’t, he’d tell you he’s called “Richard.”) “Are we ever going to have fun again?” Chelsea begs after an impromptu run into town for weed. Rick needs weed rightthisecond because after another mediation session with Dr. Amrita spent moaning about his dead dad, he’s very nearly experiencing human emotion, which he must extinguish.
So Rick takes a couple of hits off a massive pre-roll and buys two tickets to the cobra show, where you can step right up and pet the lethal little puppies. To be fair to Rick, it is one of the more distressing tableaus ever to be packaged as an Airbnb experience. Distressing for the snakes, imprisoned in tanks so tight they’ve likely never in their whole adult lives had the luxury of unfurling, and also for the workers, who spend their days under a sweltering tarp hoping — and maybe, just a little bit, not hoping — that no guest gets bit. Rick’s weed must have been laced with something, because rather than turn off the emotional faucet, whatever he’s smoked opens the floodgates of empathy. Not for Chelsea, obviously, whom he’s already once told to go find a richer boyfriend to mooch off. No, Rick’s outburst of compassion is for the belly-crawlers. The dust-eaters. The coldhearted killers who ruin Eden for the rest of us.
He bails on the snakey stage show and heads back into the serpentarium, his heart thumping. Look at that sad, debilitated cobra languishing in his cage, regret on his brow. I bet the dad of that cobra was a good man, and maybe he was killed by Jim Hollinger before the cobra was even born, and that’s why he’s a grown-ass cobra traveling the world with a woman half his age. Rick throws open the cage doors one by one, coaxing his brethren to freedom. When Chelsea finally finds him, he has a python (or something) suspended above his shoulders, juggling the beast in the air with all the nonchalance of a snake charmer. You want fun? I’ll show you fun. Almost the second she slips into the tent, Chelsea is bitten by a viper whose venom is deadly if untreated, and she’s whisked away to hospital in the zoo’s old Datsun. Because that’s the thing about fading American Ricks, with their Birks and their Wayfarers and their hangdog looks. They may tramp through the world showing off their pain, but they’re rarely the ones to get hurt. (Before you come after me, I’m sure the Rick you know or the Rick you are is the one good Rick! Best of luck!)
I think it’s fair to say that across all three seasons of The White Lotus, Mike White’s sea has been a biblical presence: roiling, dark, destructive. This week’s episode opens with water washing over Victoria Ratliff’s feet while her kids sit a few yards away on a blue-tinged, predawn beach. Instead of the sympathetic if grand architecture of the White Lotus Thailand, behind her stands the Ratliffs’ own boring, gigantic plantation-style house, the one I’m sure Victoria always dreamed of “running.” White paint with white shutters and white sheers and white people. “This is what it looks like before a tsunami,” Lochlan says in voice-over, narrating the implications of the fast-receding sea. It’s clearly a dream (nightmare?), but I was surprised to learn Victoria was the dreamer and not her husband. What has she picked up on about Tim’s troubles through her personal fog of benzos and jet lag?
The family sits down to dissect Mom’s visions over breakfast and, for a hot second, I was panicked we would be bored to death with overwrought dream analysis. I’ve always been partial to the theory that dreams are a form of mental housekeeping — a way of clearing out the irrelevant. (Conveniently, this theory also discourages people from boring me with the details of their own dreams because the only interesting dreams are inappropriate sex dreams.) Piper suggests the dream might be a warning; Saxon says, “Nuh-uh,” which is his standard response to Piper’s every utterance. Even knowing that the FBI has already raided Dad’s office, I’m inclined to agree with Mom’s simple edict: No more tsunami videos before bed.
Until now, we’ve not had much occasion to look closely at Lochlan Ratliff. Sure, it was odd how he leered at his brother’s naked ass, but whatever, who among us doesn’t want to know what other people look like without clothes on? (Also, why is Saxon sleeping nude while sharing a small room with his little bro? Suss.) But I’m presently concerned that, under the radar, he’s the most fucked-up of the three “wise” Ratliff monkeys. It makes sense to me why Piper wants to spend a year in silence amongst the Buddhist monks because I’ve met her family. And I’ve read Hamlet and Oedipus, so I know that some pukey little boys like Saxon suffer from the deranged drive to replace their fathers.
But the apocalypse porn Lochy’s watching on loop is far more disturbing to me than his brother’s exhaustive menu of actual porn. A lone figure, supposedly standing on a nearby beach, waiting for the 2004 tsunami to take him. (This location is, I believe, apocryphal, because Koh Samui isn’t on the Indian Ocean.) I understand that Lochlan has a big-for-him decision to make about which type of fratty, southern stereotype he’d like to be four years from now, but it is not normal to mainline real-life disaster footage in public like this. He may be quiet, but the indifference to human suffering he’s exhibiting has landed him on my gunman watch list. Pam needs to black-bag this freak’s iPad, like, yesterday.
Which is exactly what happens. Not because anyone is actually worried about Lochlan’s viewing habits; the Ratliffs are far more concerned that he can’t sit up straight or gulp creatine like a real man. Dad finally consents to Pam taking the devices because panicked people from “the office” are calling Saxon now. Maybe they’re worried about the well-being of their bosses; maybe they’re worried about their own jobs. It doesn’t matter. From now on, their calls are going straight to voice-mail. “It’s a rare thing that we’re together like this,” Dad tells his mini-me over Saxon’s objections (“Pam, my ass!”). Perhaps what Dad means is that “it will be a rare thing” when his assets are frozen and his kids are visiting him every other Saturday at Club Fed.
Dad forcing the family to log off to bury his secret is a craven but understandable move. Far more heinous is the way he works over his son in the process. His eldest boy, who wants nothing more than to impress Tim, become him, kill him and eat his heart and inherit his golf clubs. In part, Saxon doesn’t want to give up his iPhone because he wants to stay on that grind, always hoping to bag a client that will finally get Dad’s attention. We watch his father read this longing in Saxon and react in real time. “I’m so impressed by you,” Tim tells his categorically unimpressive son. This is a man who moves the ball, who gets the signature. It’s so easy to see how he convinced himself that the world would never make him answer for anything at all.
When the devices walk away, it leaves plenty of free time for the Ratliffs to pursue new hobbies. Dad, who has been unable to sleep through the nightmare of his financial ruin, dips then double-dips into his wife’s stash of Ativan. I guess some people just really need their phones! Saxon decides he’ll use the eight hours a week he ordinarily spends listening to The Joe Rogan Experience to help his little brother get laid. This is, coincidentally, the same task Jaclyn has set for herself in connection to Laurie, whom she’s urging onto their health mentor, Valentin. They say there are only seven plots in fiction anyway, so this repetition really doesn’t bother me. Plus, combined with the vague sexual insinuations between the brothers, the enterprise feels destined for calamity.
Frankly, so does the Jaclyn-Laurie-Valentin love triangle that’s forming. Sure, Jaclyn is asking Val about his love life for her friend’s sake, but why is she doing it so kittenish? “We’re so happy that you’re here and you’re safe,” she tells her Russian masseuse, a pleasantry I’m sure he’s heard from every other rich, liberal, Western guest he’s bedded since the Ukraine War broke out. Laurie’s not wrong to say her reiki session with Val is charged, too. But Val is an enlightened practitioner of Eastern spirituality who used to be in shipping in Vladivostok. Now, he greets guests to the White Lotus in some kind of ceremonial loincloth. Maybe he’ll give the whole party a happy ending.
Over supper, Laurie tells “the girls” — always “the girls” to my mind — about what it feels like to be not-touched by a man like Val, especially after such a long time without being touched or not-touched by a man. The conversation is a slow-motion train wreck written in the direction of Trump. You can almost imagine that Mike White reverse-engineered the dialogue, knowing that Trump was its destination. Reiki → Paganism → Christianity → Texas conservatives → The myth of independent voters → Did you vote for Trump? Kate hopes she can just smize past the issue, but if she had any manners at all, she would put herself to bed now and save her friends the trouble of staying up super late to gossip about her. And though Kate may look hurt when she overhears them hours later, no woman who looks this cozy in a “let’s dish” pose could possibly have doubted this outcome.
So, let’s pull up some tub chairs and dish! What do we think is happening with Gaitok, who sweetly believed he could convert a complete failure to stop gun crime as a hotel security guard into a post with Khun Sritala’s personal bodyguard? It’s so naïve that it’s almost cute. Shoot your shot. At the end of the episode, though, Gaitok is informed he has a 7 a.m. on the books with Fabian, who initially wanted to fire him over the burglary. You fire someone Friday at quitting time — not the beginning of a 12-hour day. So what do we think is going on? It’s surely not a call-up to the big leagues, either.
Unlike Gaitok and Mook’s story line, whatever’s going on between Belinda and Pornchai feels disconnected from the rest of resort life, perhaps because we never see them interact with guests. Even Belinda’s presence in Thailand still feels contrived to me. I want nice things for her, don’t at me, but there’s something about an all-expenses-paid, three-month work exchange that requires you to get cradled by a hot masseuse in a plunge pool that’s either (a) a little fishy or (b) entirely implausible. Did someone suffer a violent death in her hotel room, thereby making it unsuitable for actual guests? Who is running the spa in Maui? Was Belinda about to bring a lawsuit against her employer and this “exchange” is a last-ditch attempt to buy her off?
She’s having a mildly flirtatious white-tablecloth dinner with the aforementioned hot masseuse, presumably another perk, when she finally places Greg d.b.a. Gary’s face. He used to date her former friend Tanya McQuoid! Of course! That’s it! The sensation she knows him has been nagging at her so persistently since she first spotted him that she cannot resist going over to his table ASAP, where he’s dining with three other people who barely know him. Rick, who is heading to Bangkok tomorrow to meet up with an old friend called Frank. I don’t even need to meet Frank — that’s how perfectly he’s been named. Chelsea, who is stoked to learn that Glenn, or whoever, has a boat. And Gary’s girlfriend, Chloe, whom he catches making eyes at SaxRat.
I expected this showdown between Belinda and Greg to be awkward when it finally occurred, but instead it’s straight-up menacing. Gary just denies being Greg. Denies knowing Tanya. Denies having ever laid eyes on Belinda. Hates the White Lotus, even though he’s sitting in one. Never heard of Maui. Not now. Not him. Not ever.
What is this dude’s long game? According to Chloe, they’ve been on the island for a year now, but Greg hasn’t even come up with a plausible cover story for this kind of run-in? Surely, this LBH knows that Belinda is going to immediately return to her (possibly haunted) hotel room and Google him. Digital detox is for the wealthy!
Or, perhaps, this isn’t Gary’s first run-in with his past since coming to Koh Samui. Maybe he knows that a cover story won’t work. This is a man who killed at least one wife that we know of. So maybe, just maybe, he has a more nefarious way of covering his tracks.
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