Summary
The White Lotus Season 3 delivers more unpleasant shocks in Episode 6, which finally provides the feeling that we’re rushing headlong into disaster.
I have a personal theory that no boat trip in the history of mankind has ever been an especially good idea, and this is truer in the world of The White Lotus than anywhere else. Season 3 was already cruising for a bruising with the ill-advised full-moon party, and Episode 6, aptly titled “Denials”, shines the harsh light of day on the deeply uncomfortable stuff that happened aboard Greg’s yacht. Boats, man. They’re trouble.
Alongside Lochlan and Saxon taking the concept of brotherly love to dangerously extreme levels, everyone else is trying to ruin their lives at an alarming pace, and every subplot seems to be coming to a boil. Zion finally arrives on the island, Piper pursues her Buddhist fantasies more directly – and to the endless chagrin of her doped-up parents – and Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate are fraying at the edges after Jaclyn dredged up some high-school PTSD by banging the guy she pretended she wanted Laurie to hook up with. Among other things – I haven’t even mentioned Rick or Gaitok’s gun yet.
You Can’t Outrun Pain
Interestingly enough, as the various characters circle the drain of their own neuroses and inch closer to ruin and/or death, the underlying Buddhist philosophy of this season becomes more and more prescient. Mike White knows that the people most in need of some spiritual examination are the types who’d pay a fortune to stay at a wellness retreat only to spend the entire time sneering at the practices. I’m reminded of that old Dorothy Parker quote: “If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people he gave it to.”
This stuff is obvious everywhere, but it’s most clear in the Ratliffs because in their efforts to prove that Piper is on the cusp of ruining her life by living as a monk for a year, they come face to face with the guru whose work she’s so enamored with. And this guy seems to know what he’s talking about, providing pretty sound theories for why so many Americans go to Thailand (“spiritual malaise”), what they’re looking for when they get there (more alignment in their intrinsic values; an escape from the pain that everyone is fleeing from but can never outrun), and what happens when you die (“like coming home”.)
That last one is particularly important since death is very much on Tim’s mind. The White Lotus Season 3, Episode 6 opens with him fantasizing about his own suicide, Victoria discovering his body on the floor haloed by a widening pool of blood, and it closes with him imagining shooting Victoria before he offs himself. I’m not sure graduating from suicide to murder-suicide constitutes spiritual progress, but you can never quite tell.
If you really think about it – and bear with me here – this isn’t as bad as it sounds. This vision follows an earlier conversation in which Victoria had expressed that she’d rather be dead than lose everything and be poor. Tim’s impending financial and reputational ruin is, in his mind, a death sentence for his wife. What he’s imagining is a mercy kill.
Sam Nivola and Sarah Catherine Hook in The White Lotus Season 3 | Image via WarnerMedia
Brotherly Love
It says a lot that Tim’s uxoricidal musings are less worrying than what apparently went on between Saxon and Lochlan. The former wakes up the morning after the night before with a splitting headache, a turbulent gut, and some hazy recollections of masturbating at the sight of his brother hooking up with Chloe. It throws him for a loop all day. At no point does he consider that the reality might be even more horrifying.
Already down in the dumps and confused by both his potentially incestuous sexuality and the fact he might not be as desirable to the opposite sex as he assumed, Saxon turns to Chelsea. And she once again proves she’s the smartest, most reasonable character in the show. Fulfilling the role of guru that an actual guru earlier occupied, she tells Saxon that the reason she wouldn’t sleep with him is that doing so would have been an empty, soulless experience, because he is, himself, empty and soulless. It’s harsh but true.
It’s Chloe who drops the real bombshell, though. When she invites Saxon and Lochlan to a dinner party at Greg’s house – he seems to know she slept with one of them and rather perversely wants to get to know them as a result – she reveals that it wasn’t Saxon beating his meat in the bedroom; it was Lochlan reaching over and giving his brother a hand shandy while he was partially blacked out. Patrick Schwarzenegger summons so much visible revulsion to this news – skilfully timed so that we, the audience, learn about it exactly when he does – that he should win an Emmy.
Side Notes
Disappointingly, “Denials” continues to keep Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate siloed from the main plot, and Rick has now spent two episodes with Sam Rockwell on his personal revenge plot instead of interacting with the other vacationers. It’s a shame because it feels like these two angles would have a lot more to give if they were folded back into the core arc, especially Rick’s relationship with Chelsea, which age-gap concerns notwithstanding seems by far the season’s most genuine coupling.
Walton Goggins and Lek Patravadi in The White Lotus Season 3 | Image via WarnerMedia
The implosion in the girls’ group comes from Laurie after Kate lets slip that she saw Valentin leaving Jaclyn’s room that morning. The revelation seems to awaken some pretty deep-seated man-stealing trauma for Laurie, who spends the day getting progressively more drunk and deliberately antagonizing Jaclyn about being a psycho. The accusation that they’re still fundamentally the same people they were in the tenth grade implies this isn’t the first time Jaclyn has nabbed Laurie’s man.
But what this might have to do with the rest of the plot and characters I couldn’t possibly tell you. It’s the same with Rick. He promises Sam Rockwell in The White Lotus Season 3, Episode 6 that he’ll leave the gun he procured behind when he goes to meet with the man who killed his father, but it seems unlikely. He claims to just want ten minutes with the guy to let him know how much he ruined his life. But going to all this trouble, just for that? I’m not convinced.
Zion’s Untimely Arrival
We already know that Zion’s stay at the White Lotus isn’t going to go well. It was from his viewpoint that we learned a shooting was in the resort’s future, but that was way back in the premiere, and we haven’t seen him since. In “Denials”, he finally arrives… and immediately finds his mother in bed with Pornchai.
He takes it well, to be fair. But that kind of coolness under pressure is going to be tested in new ways as we go, especially since it seems like Belinda is in Greg’s crosshairs. Along with the Ratliff brothers, Greg invites her to his impromptu dinner party, saying that they really should talk –which means half of his proposed guest list are people he probably wants to kill. It’s not exactly a recipe for a good evening.
However, since we know the shooting happens at the resort itself, I think it’s a red herring. And besides, why else would the season have been so careful to introduce other elements and build smaller subplots, like the jewelry store robbery and Gaitok’s increasing deadliness with a firearm? All roads must converge, and while they might take a detour through Greg’s hilltop home, chances are they’ll terminate back where they started.
