Spoilers below.
This week on The White Lotus, we got a break from seeing incest on our screens—but there were still some strong implications of, uh, familial relations, thanks to a revelation Chloe makes about Greg/Gary. On a less sexual note, this episode sees several men grappling with their relationships with their fathers, or with masculinity in general (poor Gaitok!). Again, this could tie back to Mike White’s interrogation of Western religion this season. In episode 4, Jaclyn criticized the male-dominated nature of Christianity. It doesn’t seem coincidental that some characters are now confronting or contending with patriarchal figures in their lives.
Let’s start with Rick. He and Frank (posing as a director named “Steve”) finally sit down with Sritala and her husband, Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn), at their home. At last, Rick comes face to face with the man he believes killed his father. They make suspicious looks at each other, but Rick waits to make a move while Frank stumbles his way through their farce. He can’t name any of Sritala’s movies and tells her the role he had in mind for her is a prostitute, unaware that she thinks it’s supposed to be based on her life. (Did Rick and Frank seriously not touch base before this?) Frank knows he’s bombing so bad that he orders a drink, despite being proudly sober.
Rick invites Jim to chat one-on-one about “business” in Thailand. In Jim’s den, Rick looks upon old photos of the hotel owner on display. He discreetly takes a gun out of his jacket pocket and stuffs it into his pants.
Meanwhile, other members of the group are gathering at Gary’s house for his big, mysterious soirée. Victoria would rather not go (not “the boat people!”), but she’s all dressed up anyway, so why not? Saxon continues to get negged by Chelsea, who still stands by her man Rick, even though he won’t answer her calls. “I want to heal him!” she tells Saxon, explaining that she’s drawn to Rick’s sadness. They’re two opposites, like a yin and yang, and eventually one of them will win.
At least Gaitok and Mook finally go on their date! It starts off as a sweet outing where he picks her up on his motorcycle and they eat at an outdoor night market. But he breaks the sad news that he’s not getting promoted to be a body guard because his boss, Pee Lek, doesn’t believe he has a killer instinct. Gaitok wants to prove him wrong, but he respects the Buddha’s teachings of nonviolence. Mook plays a little bit of devil’s advocate. Violence is okay in self-defense, isn’t it?
Things seem like they might just get violent at dinner with the Blonde Blob, who are still simmering in the tense aftermath of Jaclyn’s one-night stand with Valentin, which Kate discovered and Laurie resents. Jaclyn finally tells Laurie off, saying she claims to be a victim of her life when in fact she could avoid her suffering if she made different decisions (i.e., choosing to sleep with Valentin and choosing not to marry her dud of an ex-husband). As they go back and forth, Kate tries to appease both sides but ends up offending Laurie. Laurie calls Kate out, too, for being fake and pretending her life is perfect. Laurie chooses to go to the muay Thai fight that Valentin invited them to—alone.
Back at Gary’s, more confrontations ensue. Victoria interrogates a young woman about her older boyfriend: “Why are you with this middle-aged weirdo? Does he have a lot of money? … Are you scared of him? I can get you out of this.” God bless her. Around the same time, Saxon demands his father, Timothy, tell him if there’s something wrong at work. (Timothy’s several drinks and lorazepam pills deep, by the way.) His entire career is tied to his father’s, so if something is awry, he wants to know about it. “I put my whole life into this basket, your basket,” Saxon says. Without it, he’s nothing. “I can’t handle being nothing.” My dude, please get yourself a hobby! Timothy insists nothing is wrong, but his son’s words only make him feel more guilty.
Gary pulls Belinda aside to have a private chat, and she sits at a distance from him, clutching her purse and fearing for her life. He’s aware that she recognizes him and that she knows of Tanya’s death—which he claims he had “nothing to do with,” rather unconvincingly. So, he offers her some hush money: $100,000 to start her own spa business in memory of Tanya, in exchange for her keeping quiet on his whereabouts. He claims he just doesn’t want the headache of legal issues and paperwork involved with the investigation, and he would rather live his life in peace out here in Thailand. He also pulls at Belinda’s heartstrings, saying Tanya felt guilty about leaving her hanging. But Belinda is too righteous to take the money and run. Instead, she asks for time to think about it and rushes out of the party with her son, Zion. Back at her hotel, Zion urges his mother to take the deal, but she worries it’ll make her an accomplice to murder. Can’t Belinda please just get a break?
In Jim Hollinger’s den, Rick’s investigation takes a turn as he begins to reveal his real intention behind this meeting. He shares he lost his father due to Jim’s business in Thailand decades ago, and he knows it’s true because his mother, Gloria Hatchett, told him so. “Gloria Hatchett?” Jim asks, in either pure confusion or with a hint of recognition. (I’m leaning towards the latter. What if this man didn’t kill Rick’s father, but he is Rick’s father? Maybe he was the one doing shady business in Thailand and stayed to start a new life.) None of that matters to Rick as he rushes to Jim and holds the gun to his head, ready to enact his revenge… but he can’t do it. He lurches to hit him, but as the old man holds up his arms, he can’t do that either. Instead, he pushes Jim’s chair over, simply knocking him to the ground, and runs out. He scoops up Frank from watching Sritala’s old films, and they rush out of the house together. Rick even alerts the security guards that the old man fell over in the den. They speed away in their boat, and when they get to safety, Rick disposes of the gun. He got his closure. Now, they party.
Mook and Gaitok’s date continues with a muay Thai fight, which Mook uses as a teaching lesson. See, she tells him, it’s human to fight! (Mook being pro-violence wasn’t on my personal list of White Lotus predictions.) Elsewhere around the ring, Gaitok spots Laurie there with Valentin and his friends. Then he makes a startling realization: Those friends, Vlad and Aleksei, were the men who broke into the hotel and robbed the gift shop. And Valentin had intentionally distracted Gaitok at the gate as the perps drove in. Gaitok doesn’t do anything then and there, but I can see the wheels turning. Another theory: With Mook egging him on and his boss questioning his killer instinct, I wouldn’t be surprised if Gaitok tried to impress the former and prove the latter wrong by killing Vlad and Aleksei (and maybe even Valentin). Last time we checked, the gun was in his possession too. Was he responsible for those gunshots in episode 1 in an attempt to bring justice?
Over at the Buddhist monastery, Lochy has a change of heart during his overnight stay with Piper. He would like to stay here with her. “I don’t feel like going home, like, ever,” he says, and we all know why. Piper seems uneasy about the news; she wanted to do a solo eat, pray, love journey. Now she has to do it with her little brother?
As if things couldn’t get weirder with Gary, Chloe approaches Saxon with her own proposition. You see, Gary has a kind of sexual fantasy where he walks in on his woman sleeping with another man. It stems from a moment in his childhood when he overheard his parents in bed together and watched them from the slightly open door. Would Saxon be down to sleep with Chloe, so that Gary could watch and then barge in? Fulfilling that fantasy would be “like winning his mother back from his father,” Chloe says. Saxon, who is still recovering from the fact that his brother jerked him off last night, has had enough weird sex for the week. (And maybe ever?) He refuses Chloe’s proposal, and he and Chelsea leave.
On the walk home, Saxon wants to prove Chelsea wrong; he can be in touch with his spiritual side, if she teaches him. She shows him how to meditate in her room, but when he starts touching her hands, she jolts away and starts to literally throw books about spirituality at him and kicks him out. Meanwhile, Rick and Frank are in a club in Bangkok with topless women and dancers.
While Laurie is out, Kate regrets how they treated her, but Jaclyn does not; that drives a wedge between them too. Laurie has another problem to deal with though. She goes home with Aleksei after the match (finally! go Laurie!), but their night goes awry when their post-coital pillow talk turns into a grift. He laments for his sick, elderly mother in Russia, whom he’s unable to visit due to his expired visa; it would cost him $10,000. He asks, would Laurie give him the money? She’s rich, isn’t she? They are literally still naked in bed, and he is asking her for ten grand via Venmo or CashApp.
Luckily for Laurie’s bank account, another woman (likely Aleksei’s girlfriend) starts banging on the door looking for her man. Laurie shimmies into her clothes and hides in the closet, passing the stolen jewelry and snake necklace the armed robbers took from the hotel shop. She’s just about to slip out the window when the woman finds her and whacks her on the head on her way down. Once Laurie is in the clear, she hails a taxi back to the hotel.
Timothy is once again wrestling with his guilt, especially with Victoria’s aversion to poverty and Saxon’s devotion to his career replaying in mind. He goes looking for the gun in the drawer where he hid it and realizes: It’s gone.
And thus, the scene is set for The White Lotus’s season 3 finale next Sunday. Will Timothy go looking for the gun again? Or will Gaitok use it for a heroic act? Will Belinda turn Greg in? Is Rick really free? We have one more week left in Thailand to find out.
