For more on The White Lotus, sign up for The White Lotus Club, our subscriber-exclusive newsletter obsessing, dissecting, and debating everything about season three.
“Denials” isn’t so much an episode of television but its aftermath. Last week’s “Full Moon Party” was taut; storylines overlapped in ways literal, spiritual, and metaphorical. This week, we deal with the scattered fallout from that meticulously choreographed explosion, and we learn how jaw-droppingly far some guests pushed the limits of “What happens in Thailand stays in Thailand.”
There’s no way to put it delicately: the Brothers Ratliff had hand sex with each other, and it is one of the most chaotic, deviant things I’ve ever seen on TV. Showrunner Mike White does not show us Lochlan jerking off his older brother live, but across a series of flashbacks as the brotherfuckers sober up. It’s Saxon who starts recovering fragmented memories earliest, though his brain takes care to reveal the night to him slowly — protecting his delicate ego for as long as possible.
In the first flashback, we glimpse Saxon making out with Chloe, bathed in ominous red light. Typical, I thought momentarily. The finance bro gets the girl and not the mini-Houdini.
Then we catch sight of Lochlan on top of Chloe, her feet at his ass. Before we can process that the magician is really going for it, the camera pans to Saxon, who appears to be masturbating as he watches. It’s grotesque. It’s pathological. These guys will never speak again, I worried. The Ratliffs are over.
Alas, I could not know that additional memories — new angles on old experiences — were still leaking back into Saxon’s consciousness. He gets dressed and walks onto deck, likely thinking that his mother was right: Sometimes it’s the indecent people who own the yachts. Only when he’s outside under the ferocious Thai sun does his mind peel back the last layer of the onion: That hand jogging up and down under the bed sheets as Saxon builds to orgasm really belongs to his baby brother. Ta-da!
Unable to comprehend the enormity of what’s transpired, Saxon ignores it. Perhaps if he flips on the blender and belittles his sister like it’s just another Tuesday, it can be just another Tuesday. Saxon might be better positioned to assimilate his new reality if he’d ever actually listened to Piper talk about Buddhism, specifically the part about the not-self. Because Saxon is obsessed with being Saxon. He is the most important son of a most important man. He is a hetero stud bucket. He is 12 percent body fat, 70 percent Adderall, and 100 percent all-American.
Buddhists, though, reject the notion of a permanent self — of 100 percent anything. They eschew ego for the very reason that it does cause suffering. If Saxon’s brain was set up to believe that he could behave in different ways across different environments, then maybe he could accept that sometimes Saxon goes wake-surfing with his Kappa Alpha buddies, and sometimes his brother does hand magic on him in Thailand. Instead, Saxon’s sense of himself is obliterated. He spends the episode vacillating between freaked out and fragile, quick to yell and near to crying, sometimes simultaneously. By the time he finishes catching up with Chloe and Chelsea by the pool, I elevated him to the rank of Ratliff most likely to suicide — more likely than even his pitiful father, who is already drafting a note.
I’m significantly less concerned about Lochlan. He doesn’t recall what happened on the yacht until several hours later, when he’s accompanying Piper at a group meditation. Unfortunately, one side-effect of shutting down your chattering monkey mind is that it makes room for new thoughts to pop up unbidden. “Very gently let them go,” the monk Luang Por Teera — played with a beatific smile by Suthichai Yoon — tells them, then mimics waving good-bye. It’s good advice, but you try imagining waving good-bye when your hand is already busy imagining the circumference of your … Good-bye! On second thought, a monastery is exactly where Lochlan needs to be. Buddhism’s practices — meditation, non-judgment — can be so therapeutic that some people debate whether it’s best understood as a religion at all. Maybe this wouldn’t be a bad place for Lochlan to spend a gap year working out his shit, along with his sister.
Like Victoria, I was initially skeptical of Piper’s white Buddhism, which seemed as much a form of rebellion as a spiritual calling. Addressing Luang Por Teera about her thoroughly western malaise, though, Piper can hardly make sentences through her tears. She’s bereft. She’s desperate to separate from her family, ideally without hurting them or getting hurt, which is impossible. She doesn’t explain herself well, nor does she have to; Teera already knows her story because he’s heard it a thousand times.
And he’s met terrified parents like the Ratliffs, too. Good(ish) people who want what’s best for their children but struggle with the idea that “what’s best” might not be a law degree or a McMansion. Just as Teera knows Piper’s distress, he knows the distress of Tim, whom Victoria charges with vetting the monk. Western malaise isn’t the prerogative of only the young. Tim is a cautionary tale of what can happen to a man who defines himself by his attachments.
“What happens when we die?” Tim asks Luang Por Teera. Their tête-à-tête is affecting but also comic perfection. (I hooted at Yoon’s delivery of the line “Great question, haha.”) The monk’s answer is so lucid and comforting that I repeated it to my death-obsessed 4-year-old like it was directly from the dharma and not a bit of dialogue from a TV show. When we die, we get reabsorbed into the ocean, he says. Death is like coming home. We’re all sea spray. These are the scenes you hire Jason Isaacs, who can communicate absolute desolation with only his watery blue eyes, to play. In the midst of the farce, White writes the Ratliffs with incredible pathos — an entire family living on the edge of tears.
I’ve started wondering if any of the Ratliffs make it out of Thailand. The White Lotus doesn’t typically play like a murder mystery, but this week, White insists that we treat it like one. He wants us to visualize death and understand how nearby it is. It’s the macabre image of the graying puffer fish that washes ashore, and it’s the silhouette of the human body that Gaitok perforates with bullets. Tim has not one but two suicidal fantasies across the hour.
In the first, he kills only himself. In the second fantasy, Tim takes Victoria with him, sparing her from the life of poverty that she’s told him will kill her. Thankfully, by the end of the episode, Gaitok recovers the gun from the Ratliff’s hotel suite, perhaps sparing an entire family from self-inflicted violence. But at what cost to himself? At the firing range with Pee Lek, Gaitok turns out to be a pretty accurate shot. His boss is impressed but still not convinced that Gaitok has the mercilessness for the job of opening and closing the parking gate. It’s infuriating. What’s a man to do? There’s really only one way to prove a killer instinct.
There’s also more gun chat between Rick and Frank, whom Rick persuades to play the big Hollywood director casting Sritala Hollinger in his next picture. First Frank procured the gun for Rick; now he’s a conspirator in the plot to confront Big Jim (Scott Glenn, whom we hear but don’t see in this episode). It made me wonder what Rick did in a past life to earn these return favors.
In comparison to the Ratliff family’s self-destruction and Rick’s Hamlet campaign, the juvenile bickering between the ladies feels quaint. At breakfast, Kate’s so eager to tell Laurie whom she saw walk-of-shaming it from Jaclyn’s villa that she’s practically fizzing. But the goss doesn’t elicit Laurie’s trademark cackle. She’s pissed at the deception. Leslie Bibb’s face when she realizes that she’s trespassed on more fragile territory than she bargained for is priceless, but this is what happens when you stray from your Christian values. “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building up others according to their needs”: Ephesians 4:29.
Almost immediately, Laurie tells Kate that she’s going to say something. Nay, that she has to say something. It’s like all three of them are auditioning for the role of “biggest piece of work.” First, Laurie’s rude to Valentin, who truly doesn’t deserve it; he’s just a single man working for tips. Later, she’s caustic with Jaclyn. It’s not that I don’t sympathize with Laurie; I (kind of) do. But Jaclyn’s clearly in a freefall if she’s cheating on her new if hard-to-reach husband, who finally calls to explain that his phone died. All week? Borrow a charger, dude. It’s a film set — not a digital-detox resort on Koh Samui.
It’s fascinating to me that Jaclyn is caught off guard by Laurie’s questioning. I would have workshopped my cover story infinity times before turning up to the pool. Some people don’t need to rehearse, I guess. They were born to play themselves, which is the point Laurie makes. Jaclyn has always been needy and dishonest. Kate is prim and dishonest. Laurie is petulant and dishonest. “We’re still the same people we were in the tenth grade.”
If it wasn’t for the fact that Greg/Gary’s maybe plotting to kill her, it would seem Belinda is on a completely different TV show from the rest of the guests, each trapped in a bespoke hell. Belinda, however, is in a vacay rom-com. The worst things to have happened to her so far would make for mild punchlines. Her son walks in on her in bed with a new man. Her eccentric boss invites her to see him sing, which will be horrible, I think, even if the actual singing is good. I want Belinda to stay in this private popcorn movie. I want Belinda and Pornchai to start their dream spa, get married, and have gorgeous babies. I want Zion to fall in love with his new dad. Belinda deserves this. All she needs to do is not do anything that could directly or indirectly lead to her own death.
That may prove impossible. By the end of the episode, “Denials” looks less like the tail end of a storm and more like the eye of it. On the docket for the coming evening are at least five separate occasions with the potential to be calamitous. Lochlan and Piper are about to get in their bunks at sleepaway Buddhism camp, a place so “grim” by Victoria’s standards that she wagers a single night there will be enough to dissuade Piper from returning.
In town, the long-foreshadowed Muay Thai fights are finally happening. Expected attendees include the Vladivostok organized-crime group and maybe the three girls, but definitely Laurie. At one point, an invitation is extended to Gaitok, but presumably he has better ideas for his first date with Mook.
Back at the hotel, Fabian has invited a coterie of colleagues to watch him sing live for the first time ever, which could easily end in public humiliation. In Bangkok, Rick and Frank have just infiltrated the home of Rick’s dad’s supposed murderer, which could easily end in homicide.
And, most menacingly, Greg’s hosting a dinner party! Chloe will be there, for sure. Her attendance is part of her atonement to Gary, who wants to meet the tourists his girlfriend hooked up with. Chelsea will be there because Rick’s not back until tomorrow, and her reaction shots are too gleeful for White to ever let her eat alone. And Saxon will be dragging along his parents in exchange for Chloe and Chelsea committing to never again mentioning what happened on yacht night.
Belinda and Zion are firmly on the “maybe” list. “I think we should talk,” Greg, in his paper-thin Gary disguise, tells Belinda when he makes a trip to the hotel to extend an invitation. I pray she won’t go to the house on the hill, and yet it’s easy to see why she might believe it’s better to address the situation than to live in fear. She would be wrong, of course, but it does sound like her — well-intentioned and trusting.
And that’s where The White Lotus leaves us: on the cusp of more suffering. The players have been so carefully positioned on the checkerboard that it’s hard to believe next week isn’t the finale. Historically, Mike White doesn’t start killing off cast members until the night before check-out, but perhaps the patterns that once proved pleasurable are ready to be interrupted. Season three has been darker; it stands to reason it might be deadlier.
In the immortal words of Frank, as he rips off his mala beads and kisses his karma good-bye, “Fuck, here we go.”
