‘The White Lotus’ Episode 3: Snakes in the Grass
This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The White Lotus, “The Meaning of Dreams,” which is now streaming on Max.
For the second week in a row, our theme is established early on by Victoria Ratliff, who begins the episode dreaming of impending disaster: a tsunami approaching while she stands on a beach that is simultaneously at this White Lotus location and abutting her house back in North Carolina. When she tells the family about it later, Piper suggests it could have been “some kind of warning,” while of course Saxon scoffs at the idea that dreams have any predictive value. (All abstractions are nonsense to him. If he can’t touch it, snort it, or stick it in his bank account, it’s irrelevant.)
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But it certainly feels like storms are on the way for many of the guests and staffers. So let’s again break things down by group and figure out who is most in need of shelter.
The Ratliffs
They are the most obvious candidates to get hit by a metaphorical tsunami at this point, yes? It’s just that Tim is the only one who knows it’s coming. The resort’s philosophy of discouraging guests from using their devices winds up playing to his advantage in this case. After spending part of the hour frantically fielding and making calls — learning, among other things, that FBI agents have come to his office looking for him, and that the agency has a warrant in his name — he decides to give Piper what she wants by insisting that the entire family gather up their phones, tablets, and laptops, and place them in the ludicrously capacious bag of their wellness counselor, Pam. And then he decides to give Victoria’s anti-anxiety pills a try, to allow himself to sleep through at least part of this nightmare. Apparently, denial can be a river in Thailand, too?
At best, Tim is delaying the inevitable. But it’s entirely possible that he’s making things even worse. He could be getting on a plane back to the States — if not to turn himself in, then at least to be in a closer time zone to his attorney, Chuck. He could be preparing his wife and kids for what’s to come instead of keeping them in the dark. It doesn’t even feel like he’s trying to give them one last moment of familial bliss before the walls cave in, because they’re all arguing constantly. So, he’s hiding phones and popping pills because he just can’t deal with what’s happening. He is a master of the universe. This should not be happening to him. This cannot be real. If you don’t like reality, turn it off.
In the background of all this, we discover a more modest storm coming for the Ratliffs: Piper is not, in fact, here for a senior project, but to research the country she intends to move to for at least a year post-college. This idea seems unlikely to go over well with anyone in the family. Though once they all find out about the mess Tim is in, an extended stay in Thailand might not seem so bad after all.
Lochlan, meanwhile, suffers through the resort’s posture lesson, which his mother has signed him up for. Where even some of the more reluctant treatment subjects like Rick seem to be getting at least a little out of the experience, Lochlan appears impervious to this coaching. He is told that he sits in a defensive posture, and is told it in a way that only makes him more defensive. Imagine the kind of ball he will be curling up into once news of his dad’s legal trouble surfaces.
While Saxon’s not happy to give up his laptop and its treasure trove of porn, he does at least have more luck flirting with Chloe than he did with Chelsea earlier in the trip. In the process, he finagles an invite onto Greg/Gary’s yacht for him and the rest of the Ratliff clan. This will start to bring some of the season’s hotel guests together. But the few times we’ve seen intersections — Tim getting annoyed with Rick’s smoking on the boat, Victoria shutting down Kate’s attempt to reconnect — it has not gone well. Maybe not up to the level of a tsunami, but not clear skies, either.
Rick and Chelsea
This episode is less an impending tsunami for our favorite mismatched soulmates than it is an emotional roller coaster. At times, Rick is his usual closed-off, bitter self. At others, he’s transcendently moved by the sight of snakes writhing on the ground, staging an impromptu jailbreak for them.
But before that, Rick ingratiates himself with Sritala, pretending to be a movie producer as an excuse to spend time with her in Bangkok — and, more importantly, to secure time with her husband Jim. In another meditation session with Amrita, Rick provides more autobiographical detail, explaining that his father was, in fact, murdered. So perhaps he thinks Jim killed his father, and he is here on an Inigo Montoya-esque quest for revenge? Or could it instead be a Luke Skywalker situation, where the man that he thinks murdered his father actually is his father?
We’ll have to wait and see, but in the meantime, recent developments make Rick realize he can’t go another day in Thailand without getting high. He and Chelsea head into town in search of weed, and he winds up with a batch he was not prepared for, which turns a simple attempt to watch snakes perform at a tourist trap into a religious experience for Rick. How can the others not see how profound this is? How could anyone possibly want to keep these poor, noble animals trapped in cases behind glass? So, he lets them loose — the shot of Walton Goggins looking stoned and holding multiple snakes seems destined to be memed — and one of them inevitably bites poor Chelsea.
That she has now been endangered twice in the space of two episodes suggests that maybe she’s the one most in danger of a storm — or, worse, of being the floating body that Belinda’s son will find a few days into the future of all these characters. Or maybe she’s gotten all of the bad luck out of her system with more than half the trip still to go?
Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie
The whole third-wheel aspect of the friend group continues to rotate around and around. This week, it’s Kate who winds up feeling trapped outside the circle, when the other two realize that she doesn’t just live in Trump country, but voted for him herself. Beyond that, it’s a quieter week for the women than previously, outside of Jaclyn continuing to encourage Laurie to have a fling with Valentin, even as Jaclyn herself is obviously attracted to the guy. At worst, it’s gray skies for this trio.
Gaitok and Mook
Some moderate storm clouds are gathering, though, for our man at the security gate. When Sritala commends Gaitok on his heroism in dealing with the armed robbers, he attempts to maneuver himself into a spot on her private security detail. It would be both a promotion for him and another way to impress Mook, who seems to enjoy conversing with Sritala’s two regular bodyguards. But Mook’s feelings for Gaitok remain completely inscrutable — whether or not Mike White intends it that way — and it turns out that Gaitok has misread the aftermath of the robbery. As the bodyguards smugly tell him, Fabian wanted him fired for letting the thieves onto the property in the first place, and Sritala largely took pity on him in letting him stay. At minimum, there’s the suggestion that they may be able to goad him into overcompensating to prove himself, when he really doesn’t seem cut out for the whole heroism thing.
Belinda and Greg
No, they’re not traveling together, but at the moment they seem inextricably linked, both through their shared past with Tanya and their coincidental presence at the same resort at the same time. In fact, it’s thoughts of Tanya that finally make Belinda realize where she knows Greg from, after she simply did a double-take at him last week. At dinner with Pornchai, she talks about how depressed she’s been since the end of the events of White Lotus Season One, between Armond’s violent death and getting the rug pulled out from under her by Tanya. But Greg — who has told Chloe that his ex-wife was “a real mental patient” who walked into the ocean to drown herself — plays dumb, insisting upon confrontation that Belinda is mistaken, and that he’s someone else named Gary.
So, a confused Belinda goes back about her business, and begins to wonder if Pornchai likes her as more than just a colleague when he expresses hope that they dream about one another that night. But even that nice moment is tempered by the sound of something scurrying about somewhere in or around her villa.
It doesn’t sound like a snake, nor like Greg. But Belinda may be inviting the storm at this point.
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