“The White Lotus” has always had an edge of surreality — particularly in the way series creator Mike White films and blends together images of the show’s surrounding trees, waves and environments. But in the opening moments of “The White Lotus” Season 3’s third episode, White dives fully into the world of the surreal, catching up with Victoria Ratliff (Parker Posey) in the middle of a dream. As she stands on the beach and watches the calm sea in front of her, Lochlan’s (Sam Nivola) voice cuts through the noise like he’s standing right next to his mother. “This is what it looks like before a tsunami,” he says.
Sure enough, one begins to form on the horizon, threatening to wash away Victoria, Lochlan and — strangely — the Ratliffs’ North Carolina mansion, which sits out of place on the beach several dozen feet in the distance. Rather than run, Victoria walks into the tsunami. She awakes moments later, and sees her husband, Tim (Jason Isaacs), having a tense phone conversation on the balcony outside. The next morning, when she describes her dream to her kids, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) offers, “It could be some kind of warning.” Neither she nor Victoria know how right she is, but sometimes you can just sense — for one reason or another — when something’s wrong.
Tim, for his part, manages to secure legal representation in this week’s “White Lotus,” but he has an increasingly difficult time hiding his situation from his family. A voicemail from his assistant about the FBI showing up at his office is followed by Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) getting calls of his own asking for Tim. The Ratliff patriarch’s solution to his growing mess is to “embrace” their resort’s ways by forcing Saxon and the rest of his family to give up their electronic devices to their appointed White Lotus wellness expert, Pam (a consistently scene-stealing Morgana O’Reilly). It’s a desperate move that, thanks to Pam’s friendly attentiveness, results in Tim also losing access to his phone and, therefore, updates about his fast-evolving legal situation.
Snake Bites
Elsewhere, Rick spends his morning posing as a movie producer to Sritala (Lek Patravadi) just so he can get her card and contact details and trying to convince Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) to leave him. His conversation with the latter features some of the episode’s funniest line deliveries, all of which come courtesy of Wood, including when Chelsea admonishes Rick for his secret-keeping. “Scorpio. So secretive,” she says in between bites of a watermelon slice. “It’s not easy for me, Rick. I’m an Aries. I need everything out in the open.” Later, Rick sits restlessly through his second meditation session with Amrita (Shalini Peiris).
“Underneath anger, there’s always a sadness,” she tells him. “Something we are grieving.” Rick responds, “I’ve done a lot of bad things. Trust me. I’ve made a lot of mistakes.” The thing he seems haunted by above all else is the relationship with his father that he never got to have. “He was a decent man, but I never got to know him because he was murdered,” he says with palpable frustration. “And I can’t get my life back… But maybe I can still get some satisfaction.” Chalk that last comment up as yet another reason to believe that Sritala’s husband, Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn), had something to do with Rick’s dad’s murder and that Rick is interested in exacting some kind of (likely violent) revenge on him.
He doesn’t find any vengeance this episode. Instead, Rick convinces Chelsea to leave the White Lotus with him and attend a nearby snake fight. Tripping out on some bad weed and some bone-rattling anxiety, Rick finds himself identifying with the venue’s caged cobras. In the middle of the fight, he sneaks away to let them out… only for one of them to bite *Chelsea in the leg. She’s rushed off to the hospital, and Rick is left to follow behind in a taxi. “I think the weed I was smoking was laced,” he later offers as an explanation for his behavior to Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) during dinner with her, Chelsea and Gary/Greg (Jon Gries).
*In last week’s episode, Chelsea is looking at a cobra bracelet just before the jewelry store she’s in is robbed. The girl clearly has a type.
Do I Know You?
Speaking of Chloe, the former tells Chelsea while sitting poolside in the episode’s first half that Greg “has an ex-wife, but he never talks about her. All I know is that she was a real mental patient.” When Chelsea asks just how crazy Greg’s “ex-wife” (i.e., Jennifer Coolidge’s murdered Tanya McQuoid) was, Chloe responds, “Like killed herself bad. One day, she was so depressed she couldn’t take it anymore. She just walked out into the ocean and kept going, and never came back. All they found was, like, a part of her leg.” Fans of “The White Lotus” know, of course, that none of that is true. It isn’t long before Greg’s lazily constructed charade is threatened, either.
On the contrary, while eating dinner with her assigned wellness expert Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul), Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) starts to talk about her Season 1 experiences with Tanya. Her doing so prompts her to not only remember why recognized Greg in “”Special Treatments” last week, but also approach him while he is eating with Chloe, Chelsea and Rick. “Do I know you?” she asks Gries’ unsuspecting schemer. “I work at the White Lotus in Maui, and I’m pretty sure I met you there.” Greg evades all of Belinda’s questions, insisting that his name is Gary and even reacting with confusion when she asks if he dated a woman named Tanya McQuoid. “Well, he must have a doppelganger then, because I swear you look just like this man I met in Maui,” Belinda says, unconvinced.
When Belinda returns to her table, she can’t shake the feeling that she’s right. Moments later, White beautifully executes a series of silent shots of Belinda and Greg trying to act like they’re not looking at each other. He follows those up with two shots of Chloe and Saxon flirting with each other from across the patio and another of Greg ominously staring at Chloe, having seen the whole interaction. Gries has had very little to do so far in “The White Lotus” Season 3, but he fills his final moments of this week’s episodes with unspoken discomfort and menace. Belinda, whether she realizes it or not, seems to have just lit a fuse of some kind — one that seems destined to blow.
Are You a Republican?
Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Kate (Leslie Bibb) spend much of the episode continuing to pressure Laurie (Carrie Coon) into sleeping with Russian health mentor Valentin (Arnas Fedaravicius). Then, over dinner, Jaclyn and Laurie react with barely contained horror to Kate’s silent confession that she voted for Trump. “Are you a Republican?” Laurie asks, flabbergasted. “No! I’m an Independent,” Kate sidesteps. Bibb creates an entire meal out of the long look Kate gives when she’s asked outright if she voted for Trump, and she does even more with the look of sick unease she adopts when Kate wakes up and realizes that Jaclyn and Laurie are now gossiping about her in the middle of the night.
Tim misses dinner altogether. Stressed out of his mind by his situation and unable to read any updates from his lawyer, he follows Victoria’s advice and takes one of her sleeping pills. He sleeps through dinner but wakes up to the same feeling of doom from before. Desperate to escape it again, he ends his night by taking another one of Victoria’s pills — this time without telling her — and ignores his wife when she asks him in bed if “something” is going on. Earlier in the episode, Lochlan shows Tim a video of a man getting washed away by a tsunami. “He didn’t even run. He just stood there,” his son tells him. The metaphor is obvious, but Tim continues to stand right in it anyway.
Belinda, meanwhile, shares a brief, charmingly flirtatious moment with Pornchai when she returns to her room at the end of the night. The afterglow of his fumbled goodnight wish to her quickly fades, however, when she gets the sense that she’s being watched… by either someone or something. Normally, such paranoia would be a bad thing. “White Lotus” viewers know all too well, though, that there’s no such thing as being too paranoid when Greg is around. Sometimes, you just know when something’s wrong.
“The White Lotus” airs Sundays on HBO and Max.
