The seventh episode of The White Lotus’ third season opens with a wordless montage of images from a Muay Thai match. Later, we briefly see a few characters watching the event, in a scene that leads to a major realization for Gaitok but not much else, plot-wise. Muay Thai is more a motif, here, than a driver of action, as many subsequent boxing interludes tie together multiple storylines. Which serves to underscore the episode’s most conspicuous unifying theme: violence. Is it necessary? Is it natural? Is it a sign of strength or, as per Piper’s Buddhist-monk idol Luang Por Teera, fear? Should people—specifically men—resist violence or embrace it?
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The latter question is one example of the episode’s other big theme: choice. Creator Mike White’s script puts the most trivial quotidian decisions under a microscope: Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie scrutinize their dinner menus; Mook responds to Gaitok asking what she’d like to eat at the night market by exclaiming, “So many choices!” Smug characters like Saxon and Victoria assume that a lack of better options has led the young women at Greg/Gary’s party into love affairs with rich, balding older men. But this penultimate episode also seeds each storyline with sticky dilemmas that could have lethal consequences—ones the deciders may not anticipate. These existential conundrums are worth examining, one set of White Lotus denizens at a time.
Gaitok and Mook
Finally, Mook gets a personality! Though there have been hints of her pragmatism in the past, this episode cements the impression that, as sweet as she may act, Lisa’s character sees herself as upwardly mobile and, unfortunately for Gaitok, wants a man who’s equally hellbent on success. At their night-market date, he confesses that he’s not getting promoted to bodyguard. “Pee Lek thinks I’m soft. He says I don’t have a killer instinct,” he tells Mook. “He’s right. When they came to rob the hotel, I didn’t want to fight.” An earnest adherent of Buddhism, he echoes Luang Por Teera in pointing out to her that “the Buddha condemns violence.” Mook doesn’t hide her disappointment. “It’s good that you have strong morals,” she concedes. “But you need to live in this world… I thought you were more ambitious.” She doesn’t let the topic drop, later that night, either. “It’s human to fight!” she says, watching Gaitok enjoy the Muay Thai match.
It’s this same event that presents Gaitok with the crucial choice he’ll be forced to make before the end of the season. Across the stadium, he spots Laurie, Valentin, and friends—and a flashback to the jewelry-store robbery confirms that he recognizes one particular bald head. What will he do with this information? Will his commitment to nonviolence lead him to leave the Russians alone? Will he confide in Pee Lek or another co-worker, even though he has reasons to mistrust them? Or will he repress his true nature and try to take down the thieves alone, in an attempt to become a man Mook could love?
Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie
Laurie may be right that Jaclyn is behaving terribly—what married woman sleeps with a guy she’s been trying to set up with her friend all week?—but her bitterness is really bumming out her best frenemies. So, even though Laurie drops the bombshell that Jaclyn hooked up with Kate’s husband, Laurie’s gal pals gang up on her. (By the way, has anyone else noticed that the trio’s names start with J, K, and L—three alphabetically consecutive letters whose order echoes the hierarchy of power within their friend group? Mike White’s mind!) The subject of Jaclyn’s tirade? Laurie’s choices: “You could’ve hooked up with Valentin if you wanted, but you chose not to. You chose to work at that company your whole career. You chose to marry Brian. You always choose the short stick. Is it bad luck? Are you life’s victim? Or are you doing it to yourself?”
The attack is enough to make Laurie choose to meet Valentin and friends at the Muay Thai match. She fulfills her mission to hook up with a Russian, only to learn she’s put herself in yet another foreseeably bad situation. When he hits her up for $10,000 with a sob story about a sick mother that’s so generic, it’s insulting, Laurie can no longer enjoy even the pleasure of her conquest. To further her humiliation, the apparent partner of said hot guy storms in and chases Laurie out the window, smacking her repeatedly. On her way out, Laurie spots a heap of jewelry that includes the gold snake bracelet that was stolen from the resort’s shop. She wasn’t present during the robbery, so it’s unlikely she recognizes the bracelet. But at the very least she’ll have deduced that a scammer scrounging for cash couldn’t have come by this loot honestly. So, like Gaitok, she has to make a choice about what to do with that information. I mean, could you blame her for wanting revenge on men who preyed on her worst insecurities?
Belinda and Greg/Gary
Did anyone aside from Belinda actually believe Greg/Gary was planning to murder her in the middle of his pool party? This is a guy who made sure he was on a different continent when those gays were trying to murder Tanya. Of course his first move is to bribe Belinda. When they finally have their private chat, he assures her that he had nothing to do with Tanya’s death but has elected to stay in Thailand because he wants to avoid the legal red tape around his wife’s death. (This raises the question of how he was able to collect his inheritance without alerting U.S. authorities to his whereabouts—a possible plot hole.) He couches his offer of $100,000 as a posthumous gift from Tanya, who always regretted backing out of Belinda’s spa plan. (Maybe this makes me a terrible person, but my first thought was that he’s lowballing her. Tanya was worth $500 million!) And he’s shocked when Belinda tells him that she’ll have to think about it.
Back at the resort, she explains to her son Zion that taking the money wouldn’t just be morally wrong—it would also make her an accessory to a murder. Zion points out that if she refuses Greg/Gary’s deal, the guy who had his wife killed might see no other option but to come after Belinda and Zion. So poor Belinda, who loves her son more than anything in the world, is in a real pickle. Even if they managed to flee Thailand in time to escape Greg/Gary, turning down the bribe would mean abandoning her well-deserved work trip and bidding farewell to Pornchai, his fantasy of starting a spa together, and the implicit promise of personal and professional fulfillment. Can she overcome her fundamental goodness in order to save herself and Zion? Is a choice made with a figurative but potentially literal gun to one’s head even a real choice?
The Ratliffs
Regardless of who dies in the finale, I can’t imagine anyone ending the season as bigger losers than the Ratliffs. Episodes 5 and 6 inverted the relationship between abrasive eldest boy Saxon and the meek baby of the family, Lochlan. The latter brother initiated not just their drug-fueled kiss on the night of the Full Moon Party, but also some, er, hand stuff while Loch was hooking up with Chloe. Now, Saxon is a haunted man; was he ever the libertine he pretended to be or just a naive edgelord? When he demands that Tim tell him what’s up with the business around which Saxon’s life revolves, it’s clear he’s in the midst of an identity crisis. When Chloe begs him to have sex with her in front of Greg/Gary, he recoils. And suddenly, stripped of his nihilistic-finance-douche persona, he’s interested in Chelsea’s spirituality as well as her body.
Loch, for his part, blocked out the incest at first. When the memory blindsides him during meditation, he becomes desperate to join Piper on her pilgrimage. (Her unenthused response suggests she’s more eager to escape her family than she is to study Buddhism.) “I don’t wanna give in to my dark sh-t,” he says. No one tell Victoria that all three of her children are now turning to Eastern religion in hopes of healing the trauma of growing up Ratliff.
Meanwhile, Tim is, by all appearances, financially and reputationally ruined. And he’s digging himself deeper by doubling down on his lies to Saxon and Victoria. The episode ends with him searching for the gun that Gaitok has already quietly taken away. That said, it would be very out of character for The White Lotus to keep teasing Tim’s murder-suicide fantasies (enough already!) and then actually have him make the choice to commit murder, suicide, or both.
Rick and Chelsea
Rick’s big moment is finally here. When we join him and his old buddy Frank, they’re arriving at the home of White Lotus Koh Samui owners Sritala and Jim Hollinger in the guise of filmmakers courting Sritala for a role in a Hollywood movie. This is, of course, a ruse to put Rick in the same room with Jim, who, according to his mother on her deathbed, killed his do-gooder dad. As Frank keeps Sritala distracted, reliving her 1980s heyday, Jim takes Rick to his office. After chatting about Jim’s happy daughters and evolution from “young and hungry” upstart to cautious “king of the hill,” Rick proffers a non sequitur: “Someone once said the secret to life is knowing when to stop.” (Choices!) Jim replies, understandably, that he has no idea what that’s supposed to mean. The confrontation ends when Rick pulls his gun, takes a few impotent feints at his nemesis like a junior high bully who delights in watching his prey flinch, then frustratedly tips over Jim’s chair, grabs Frank, and leaves. (There’s a compelling theory about Rick and Jim’s relationship—clearly, the name of Rick’s mother rings a bell—which you can read about here.)
It all feels pretty anticlimactic from where I’m sitting, but the encounter apparently satisfies Rick, who confirms to Frank that it gave him “closure.” For him, learning that Jim is “just this pathetic, frail old man” breaks the spell his father’s alleged murderer has had on Rick since childhood. You can see it in the small smile that creeps across his typically pained face as the men celebrate his liberation with a wild night of drinking, drugs, and topless women in Bangkok.
But is Rick’s ordeal really over? Even if I hadn’t been primed by previous White Lotus seasons to be suspicious of any neat resolution that happens before the finale, I’d be worried about the unintended consequences of his choice to fixate on Jim for all those years. For one thing, he’s repaid Frank’s loyalty by putting his sober friend in a situation so stressful, he relapses. Thinking ahead, it also seems likely that he’s put Chelsea—a kind, surprisingly strong woman who loves him more than he deserves—in danger. The Hollingers and their retinue of thugs don’t know Rick has already gotten what he needs out of Jim. But they are well aware that he’s staying at the White Lotus. Will some guys with guns come looking for him there tomorrow, while he and Frank are still sleeping off their hangovers in Bangkok, only to find Chelsea all alone?
I don’t love to prognosticate, but there would be thematic resonance to Rick dooming not just Frank, but also Chelsea because he wallowed for too long in his trauma. “It’s like we’re in this yin-and-yang battle,” Chelsea tells Saxon at the party, “and I’m hope, and Rick is pain, and eventually one of us will win.” If the secret of life is knowing when to stop, then perhaps that moment wasn’t Rick’s decision not to perpetuate Jim’s violence. Maybe it passed years ago, and we’re about to see just how pyrrhic the victory of Rick’s pain over Chelsea’s hope will be.