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“Violence, aggression, anger stem from the same source,” Luang Por Teera warns the bevy of white co-eds gathered at his feet, his English delicately broken: “Fear.” The penultimate episode of The White Lotus, season three, begins as a series of simmering confrontations interspersed with glimpses of the long-anticipated Muay Thai fights. Vicious kicking. Elbowing. Sweat and pain, but also prayer. The bumping of gloved fists. Ritual. Muay Thai is the national sport of Thailand, a country that identifies as 90 percent Buddhist. Life is suffering, and so is boxing. “The only good-faith response” to violence, Teera tells his faithful, “is to sit with your feelings.”
Nonviolence isn’t just the righteous path but the self-interested one. “Violence does spiritual harm to the victim and to the perpetrator,” Teera says. He preaches in the language of absolutes, but over in Bangkok, Rick seeks what a Buddhist might call the middle way. He has spent 40 years carrying the audacious story of his father’s death at the hands of a remorseless real-estate magnate, only to find the monster of his nightmares is shriveled up. The most menacing thing about Jim Hollinger is the cane he hobbles around on. Rick can’t shoot this man dead; he can’t even bring himself to punch the dusty bag of bones. At the critical moment, Rick just about musters the vengeance to tip over his desk chair. “You killed my father. Prepare to flop over backward.” What, I wonder, would Teera say about a smidge of violence in exchange for a whit of spiritual harm? Rick immediately sends Sritala’s bodyguards inside to help right Big Jim, so maybe it’s a moral wash.
Of course, that accounts only for the physical violence Rick intends to cause. To more capably play the role of a big Hollywood director, Frank has a drink in Sritala’s courtyard. Then another. He starts out stumbling over his lies — he can’t name a fake film he’s directed or a real film she’s starred in — but whiskey reawakens his roguish ways. By the time Rick is done upending old man Hollinger, Frank’s watching videos of Sritala in her heyday — MC Hammer meets Peter Pan with “a little Pippin.” If we know Frank, he’s thinking about fucking her, and/or being her, and/or having her watch. “The secret to life is knowing when to stop,” Rick tells himself as he debates how to punish Jim for his half-remembered crimes. It’s Frank who doesn’t know when to say when. He gives himself a karma hall pass. Strippers, shots, lines, and what have you. Will Rick have to answer for this violence, too? What’s the spiritual harm assessed for inciting spiritual harm?
And what does the Buddha say about silencing your girlfriend’s calls? Gary’s boring dinner party on Koh Samui can’t distract Chelsea from Rick’s harrowing absence. She splits the evening between phone-stalking Rick and insulting Saxon. To be fair, Saxon gives as well as he gets, accusing Chelsea of dating Rick for his money. The reality is sadder and more futile. “I want to heal him,” Chelsea tells Saxon, who’s completely flummoxed. He might not have respected her, but at least when he thought Chelsea was a gold digger, he understood her life choices.
Without his phone to obsessively track macros or manage his FanDuel account, Saxon makes a sport out of proving to Chelsea that he’s not “that kind of guy.” For example, he declines to play Gary’s sex games. According to Chloe, her old man isn’t jealous that she slept with the Ratliff boyz; he’s simply jealous he wasn’t there. As a kid, Gary says he was repeatedly exposed to his parents’ loud sex; what he really wants is to catch Chloe in bed with another man and then vanquish him like he could never vanquish his own father. “His worst nightmare was actually his erotic fantasy,” Chloe confides pleadingly. I’m impressed Greg came up with something so imaginative and sold it so well that Chloe is sincerely disappointed that Saxon doesn’t want another threesome. Lochlan would have said “yes.”
Perhaps Chelsea does see something in Saxon worth healing. Instead of saying goodnight in the hotel lobby, she invites him to her room to teach him how to meditate. They sit across from each other, knees brushing, on the bed, which does not strike me as the natural place. When he makes a move — a little light hand-holding — Chelsea doesn’t berate him. She gives him some self-help books, which leads me to fear our girl is at least mildly horny for this frathole.
Other attendees include Tim, who continuously pops benzos from Victoria’s stash as if it’s Mary Poppins’s bottomless carpetbag, and Victoria, whom I prefer on booze. Lorazepam made her loopy, but gin and bad company make her hilarious. She’s not content to simply save Piper from the “cu–u-ult” — somehow a three-syllable word coming out of Parker Posey’s mouth. She wants to save all these women from the rich weirdos they live off. “Come to North Carolina,” she tells Rupert’s gorgeous Thai girlfriend. Victoria’s so sure of her own worldview she doesn’t stop even when the Thai girlfriend claims to truly love her LBH. “Are you scared of him?” she asks.
Rounding out the party are Belinda and Zion, who convinces his mother to attend. For one thing, Greg will keep coming to the hotel if she doesn’t, and for another, he’s a hungry boy. I don’t love what it says about me that Belinda — the only consistently openhearted person in The White Lotus franchise — is the character I relate to least. Greg sits her down and tells her a plausible story: Tanya’s death was mysterious, yes, but it wasn’t his fault. Rather than spend the rest of his life under suspicion, he wants to spend it being rich and anonymous. He tells Belinda that Tanya always regretted the spa they never opened together and then he offers her a hundred thousand dollars because it’s what Tanya would have wanted. To me, this sounds like a great starting offer. By inviting you to his home, Greg has demonstrated his power over you but also revealed he can afford a little more hush money.
Rather than kick off negotiations, Belinda asks for a night to think about it. Bad move. Even if your plan is to call the police, just lie! You don’t spook a dangerous man. Back at the hotel, Zion, the voice of reason, rightly tells her to take the cash; Belinda, who needs to Google “accomplice to murder,” wrongly tells her son that taking the cash would make her an accomplice to murder. “Can’t I get one fucking break?” she moans. YES! YOU CAN, BELINDA! THIS IS THE BREAK! Put the money under the mattress. Or put it into Thai Bliss, a boutique spa from Belinda and Pornchai. It’s not like Belinda knows Greg did it. She just suspects that behind every sunburnt LBH in paradise, there’s a shady past, and the Thai police already know what.
Which, I suppose, brings us to Tim Ratliff, whose fate seems more tied to this island with every episode. He’s got three options here. One is to hide. Join the ranks of LBHs and hope Victoria deigns to join him. Or doesn’t deign! As much as Tim loves his family, his wife can be a real pill, especially without pills. The second is to seek. Tim’s brief audience with Teera brought him to tears, and Tim does reiterate to Greg that the monk is the real deal. Tragically, though, Tim’s imagination fixates on option three: Die. In this week’s familicidal fantasy, Tim adds Saxon — who tells his dad he would be nothing without their investment firm — to the hit list. In Tim’s mind, these are mercy killings. Let everyone he loves return to the sea.
When Tim goes to do the deed, however, the weapon is missing from its hiding place. Can you imagine the unbearable guilt that would have crushed Gaitok if this Blue Devil™ killed his family with the hotel gun? Gaitok is a Buddhist. He doesn’t have to hang at Teera’s feet or actively make Buddhist decisions because Buddhism infuses his instincts. He confesses to Mook that he’s not getting a promotion at work after all because he’s too “soft.” And while I don’t recommend using that particular word on a first date, I admire his self-knowledge. Gaitok did not stop the hotel burglary, nor did he want to. “I don’t want to hurt people,” he says.
He’s a good man in the wrong line of work, but Mook won’t take pacifism for an answer. At the Muay Thai fights, she eggs Gaitok on. Violence is ingrained in us. Kneeing another person is human nature. I don’t know if Mook is paper chasing or genuinely believes ambition is more important in a partner than compassion, but she’s determined to lead our Gaitok off the path of enlightenment and straight into a life of dukkha. They’re not a good match. As they watch, Gaitok recognizes Valentin’s cueball friend Vlad as part of the heist crew, foreshadowing a showdown. You know what else the Buddha condemned besides violence? Stealing.
Back at the White Lotus, the girls are drowning in rosé and resentment. Laurie thinks Jaclyn’s a slut, but everyone, including me, thinks Laurie’s a sad sack. Anyone holding on to the fact that Jaclyn hit on another woman’s husband one time 15 years ago is bad company. Even Kate can’t resist joining in. Like any self-respecting depressive who’s unready to address her self-sabotaging, Laurie bails on their impromptu intervention before entrées. Instead, she meets Val & Co. at the boxing, where Laurie magically transforms. It made me doubt whether these women really haven’t changed in the 25 years since high-school graduation. Are they the same people, or are they just the same people to one another? Is Kate this dull in Austin? Is Jaclyn so defensive in Santa Monica?
Because as soon as Laurie defects, she’s fun. Aleksei notices. They bang — and I really do think that’s the term for it — which I think will be good for Laurie despite Aleksei immediately asking for $10,000. Not for services rendered, of course. He just needs the money to clear his old, frail mother’s debts. Laurie’s not lying when she tells him she’s not that rich — she’s got palimony problems! Regardless, Aleksei ticks off the forms of payment he accepts: bank transfer, PayPal, and Zelle. No Amex, but what about Cash App, Laurie? How many American divorcées do you think Aleksei has successfully convinced to help him rescue his sick mother or ailing sister or three-legged dog from the long arm of Putin’s Russia?
Luckily, the jealous girlfriend knocks on the door before Aleksei can drug Laurie and use her unconscious face to open the BOA app. Laurie jumps out a window but not before spotting the stolen jewels on the daybed in Aleksei’s walk-in closet. Some observations: One, why is this dude’s place so nice? And two, even for the plunder of a smash and grab, that seems a sloppy hiding place.
“It’s like Disneyland for rich bohemians from Malibu in their Lululemon yoga pants,” Piper Ratliff tells her family across the hotel breakfast table all the way back in episode two. Now, she’s spending her first night at the meditation center, where the food isn’t Michelin starred and a single pipe is leaking a tiny bit. The Princess and the Water Plop. The monastery isn’t the White Lotus, and it’s not the real world that Laurie has ventured into either. It’s like Disneyland for disaffected rich kids from suburbia in their mala beads and AirPods Max — a grungier holding pen than Piper’s four years at UNC but still a holding pen. The real world is where a middle-aged law-firm associate just banged the hotel bandit. It’s where her dad screwed over his investors. It’s where Lochlan hand-fucked his older brother.
Which explains why Lochlan is keen to stay in the monastery’s insulating cocoon. Buddhism may be Piper’s earnest spiritual path, but that doesn’t mean this meditation center isn’t a kind of hostel. It’s a gap year or a postgrad diploma in avoiding your parents. That Piper’s motives are mixed is clear from the disappointment she feels when her brother says he might hang around too. You can’t gatekeep enlightenment, Pipes. By all means, give Luang Por Teera your money, but don’t kid yourself that religious pilgrimage isn’t tourism. Victoria’s a judgmental shrew, but she wasn’t (totally) wrong when she told her daughter, “You’re not from China!” Or Thailand or India or any of the other places people travel in hopes of shedding their enervating Westerness.
There’s only one more day between us and checkout, and it’s completely unclear what will happen or how many guns it will happen with. Do we know for sure that the gun belonging to the Vladivostok set is real? Rick throws his gun away without using it! (What would Chekhov have to say about that?) Does Gaitok confront Val to win Mook’s heart? Do Sritala’s armed bodyguards come looking for the man who rendered their boss akimbo? Does Fabian lose it because none of his colleagues turned up to his recital?
After seven hours of watching these people lumber around this fragile world, no one stands out as competent enough or sinister enough to commit a murder on purpose. As it was after the season premiere, my money is on the monkeys.
