We all felt it, right? Surely we heard it. Just when Belinda had concluded her rather impulsive accosting of Greg (“Gary,” he corrects her) at the dinner table, and as she returned to her own, the season three theme song started to overlay. Hard. Now, we get some pans of the larger dining pavilion as the melody leads in. And then the beat drops. Volume up; camera’s alive again. It returns to our ensemble, and triangulates a web of knowing and threatening glances. More importantly, it shows us the spider. Greg looks at Belinda, who was already looking at him. Saxon makes eyes with Chloe, and when Chloe returns her gaze to the table, Greg is already piercing her. Gary, rather.
Greg, Gary, Jon Gries—whoever—and his eyes in this exchange were as laid-bare a clue as I’ve yet seen in The White Lotus about any of the show’s mysteries, let alone the central one to the series. The beat of the theme propels us to, maybe, an understanding. This episode—while being all about Rick scheming his way to Bangkok, the FBI fallout from Tim Ratliff’s money laundering scheme (Sho-Kel) with Kenny Nguyen, and the increasingly-snipey worldview tension between Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie—was, more than any of it, about The White Lotus-as-series.
We so enjoyed our laughs in Maui, didn’t we? Oh—that Armand! RIP, of course. We hold hushed and dear our flings in Palermo, and were reminded just two winters ago how thrilling and nebulous and infuriating lust can be. Because Italy sure fucked. We remember Aubrey Plaza’s hands gripping the edge of the entryway table in her hotel room as Theo James advanced on her; Jennifer Coolidge’s tragicomic fall. What memories we’ve made these years. What luxuries we’ve indulged!
Silly us. Greg’s been dogging our ankles this whole time. And, finally, we arrive at a question so dark its like the creak of the floorboard in Belinda’s quarters: are we the mark? I mean, of course we are; it’s Mike White! But the convergence of a narrative throughline this savvy deserves its own pageantry.
All the sudden, it feels a little bit like each season of The White Lotus has been building toward something greater, an actual narrative swelling to the Tanya/Belinda/collection of resorts/systematic undoing of the megarich via vacation crimes macroplot. And, after last night’s “The Meaning of Dreams,” it’s entirely possible that, during The White Lotus‘ season focused most on spirituality and healing, the series’ larger narrative is stitching itself together holistically into something even Piper’s monks might consider transcendent.
The White Lotus episode three recap
At the perimeter
Let’s open at the close.
Like most episodes this season, our attention ended on the lurkers. Kate rises from bed to Jaclyn’s and Laurie’s distant laughter from the fire pit beyond Kate’s bedroom, and she hears her friends ripping the integrity of her ethical backbone. Earlier that night, she’d revealed that, since moving to Texas, she’d started going to church and had changed her politics such that she says-without-saying that she voted for Trump. This baffles Laurie and Jaclyn, who suffer through the dinner and wait until nightfall to shit all over their friend.
Elsewhere, after Belinda’s impulsive exchange with Greg—what exactly, during her monologue about having left Maui because she was in a bad place, drove her to rise from the table and confront him?—Pornchai drops Belinda off after their boozy dinner, and, before she closes the door, Pornchai wishes her good dreams of him. Decidedly not a liquor-fumbled Thai expression, I’m assuming. When she closes the door, she hears reports of footsteps out the window, the creak of a floorboard in the kitchen beyond her bedroom.
Unsurprising, but no less unsettling for it. It’s entirely possible she pressed Greg too far; it was clear in Natasha Rothwell’s delivery that her recognizing of Greg from Maui was accusatory and not, like, hey-whaddaya-know! All to say: the snakes are circling the pit, but Belinda appears fine for now.
Serpent-as-symbol
I mixed metaphors there (an attempt to call back to our spider, Greg) because, as it would happen, serpents were an important symbol this episode. Rick (more on him later) gets high on laced weed in town, and he and Chelsea head to an exhibition of cobras called, aptly, COBRA SHOW. This happens after Rick’s second anger-management course, in which he appears to have a breakthrough with Amrita, which very well might be authentic. What else would explain the violent need for weed?
The breakthrough was mostly decontextualized mutterings cobbled into a wonderful monologue because of Walton Goggins’ acting, but we got some breadcrumbs: Rick’s father was murdered, and, because of that, Rick feels as if his life was stolen; while there is no possibility for happiness, there is possibility for “satisfaction,” he says. We wonder just how Sritala’s husband in Bangkok (Rick’s mark, if you remember) fits into this whole thing.
So affected was Rick by this breakthrough, and so high was he on some apparently-laced Thailand dispensary weed, that he leaves COBRA SHOW, enters the storefront area of the event, and begins to release poisonous snakes from their cages. Not good. In the chaos, Chelsea gets bit, but gets to the hospital in time and is saved. She’s reminded, later, by Chloe that this is her second brush with death in two days. But you really just can’t shake Chelsea, can you? Her belief in her connection with Rick, the resort’s ability to fix Rick so that they can be soulmates together—it’s unwavering.
Where we also saw serpents-as-symbol? A conversation about dreams between the Ratliff family, in which Mom explains her dream last night to Piper, Lochlan, and Saxon—more on the dream later—and Piper wonders if dreams are in any way predictive of the future. Saxon reminds her that people just dream about “snakes and fire” because people are afraid of snakes and fire. And yet, something tells me Saxon wouldn’t think a cigar is just a cigar.
Resort policy
As for Dad, it sure was time for Tim Ratliff to have himself an episode in which he did his very best to be a bit more present in the scenes with his family. He does so by turning tail from the incoming tsunami. Phones away now, actually, everybody! This, of course, after the dream-convo breakfast of incessant calls from colleagues of Tim’s and Saxon’s back at the stateside office, where the FBI has shown up making warrants rain like hunnits at the club. Piper and Victoria are elated to give their phones away; Saxon and Lochlan less so. Without devices, how is one to watch tsunami videos that give their mothers nightmares that look like they were filmed by Alfonso Cuarón?
Indeed, the episode opened with Victoria’s dream: she stands on a beach at The White Lotus, but the Ratliff family home is behind her, amber glow in the windows amidst the blanched moonlight on the beach. All three of her children are there, but Tim is not. The staff from The White Lotus approach her, robe her in what looks to be a bed comforter, and she walks out into the ocean and lets a tsunami wave take her. She blames this, of course, on Lochlan’s tsunami videos. No more concern, there, now that Tim’s pulled rank!
Yeah, well. The whole no-phone thing doesn’t quite do it for Tim, who’s still white-knuckling it every time we see him until Victoria gives him a Lorazepam. Tim, who, later, after he sneaks a second Lorazepam, says he doesn’t take drugs, has found their vegetative allure quite a utility at forcing sleep and passing time.
Resort politics
And, yes, we’ve still got the mess with Gaitok, Mook, Valentin, and Fabian. Which is to say: we know Valentin—the apple of Jaclyn’s, Kate’s, and, more intimately and energetically, Laurie’s eyes—was, at the very least, an accomplice to the jewelry store burglary from last episode; he distracted Gaitok at the gate. Gaitok, who is feeling himself like never before after his role in stopping the burglary, has a brief conversation with Sritala before she leaves for Bangkok. She calls him brave, and, in return—certainly with Mook in mind—he tells her that he would be honored to serve as one of her personal bodyguards.
He does this in such a way that suggests he is saying: You know my worth now, and so do I, so let’s run me up this White Lotus ladder, bosslady. Of course, when Gaitok later tells Mook of this, she is congratulatory and happy for her friend, but romantically noncommittal in such a way that leaves us understandably wondering whether or not Gaitok has mistaken Mook caring for him as her having fallen in love with him. He’s not exactly navigating the friend zone with much grace, either.
Oh, and then the gentlemen who are currently employed as Sritala’s bodyguards later tell Gaitok that Fabian—resort manager with a pop-star dream—wanted to fire Gaitok, but Sritala felt bad, and requested Fabian keep Gaitok on staff. Hours after that, just as the sun is setting, another guard tells Gaitok that Fabian wants to debrief with him regarding the burglary the following morning. Might it be that Valentin got out ahead of anything coming back to him by implicating poor Gaitok?
“Speak of the devil, and he shall appear!”
Back to Rick, now. He remains a big-picture enigma, but we sure got a flash of his predatory charisma, didn’t we? Overfamiliar lean-ins and enchanting eye contact and flattery abound, that Goggins smile dripping with honey in a way that surely had all Justified fans giving a deserved wink to Boyd Crowder. He’s now got Sritala (not so much Fabian, who seems skeptical) under the impression that he is a producer on site at The White Lotus working on a AAA, hyper-secret project. So moved was he by her singing the night prior that he wonders if she’d take a meeting with the director of this project in Bangkok. And, wouldn’t you know it, she’s already headed to Bangkok! Rick’s kicked down the door, and is already making calls to contacts in Bangkok for meetings the next day.
Rick returns to the breakfast table with Chelsea. She asks him what all that was about, and he says nothing. She remembers his sign—a Scorpio—and reminds him that his mysteriousness is incompatible with her, seeing as she’s an Aries. Rick says he needs weed, and wonders aloud how they can be soulmates if their signs can’t even mesh.
The White Lotus episode four preview
It’s clash time. We’re slated to get some big moments with Greg and Belinda, Gaitok and Fabian, Rick and Sritala, Saxon and Chloe, Jaclyn/Laurie/Kate and Kate/Laurie/Jaclyn, and something’s gotta break with Tim’s international white-collar crime. Four episodes remaining in the series, and the fourth installment is set up perfectly to be the crash of the tsunami wave. Who’ll take it head on? Who’ll run?
As always, you can watch it next Sunday night on HBO starting at 9pm E.T./6pm P.S.T. You can also watch it on the Max app anytime after that.
