In one of the early scenes of this week’s “The White Lotus,” meditation expert Amrita (Shalini Peiris) offers Rick (Walton Goggins) some sincere advice.
“I hope you will hear me when I say you are not stuck,” she tells him. “You can let go of your story. You can escape the karmic cycle.” The feeling of being trapped is present throughout all of “The White Lotus” Season 3 Episode 4, as is the desire for escape. The seeds of it are planted in the episode’s opening scene, in which Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) tries to convince her younger husband Harrison to return her calls. “I’ll tell you more when you call me back, so call me back,” she says.
That same morning, Jaclyn gets snippy with Kate (Leslie Bibb) when the latter chides her for using her phone at the resort. “Harrison’s gone a little AWOL. I think he’s on set but I keep sending texts,” she explains, stuck in a cycle of paranoia and fear. Her partner’s silence brings out Jaclyn’s worst insecurities — prompting her to demand that Valentin (Arnas Fedaravicius) help her, Kate and Laurie (Carrie Coon) leave the resort and embark on a night out on the town. “What happens in Thailand, stays in Thailand,” Jaclyn says later on. When Kate asks what that means, her friend says, “It means we’re not dead yet, all right? We can still be young and hot and fun!”
Her first escape attempt ends badly when she realizes, much to her vain horror, that Valentin’s recommendation is a seaside resort filled with older men and women. “Why would he send us here?” Jaclyn asks, unnerved by what his suggestion might say about how old he views her. When he subsequently leads them elsewhere, Jaclyn, Kate and Laurie find themselves on the run from Thai children liberally wielding water guns only to end up trapped in a convenience store. (There’s that word again: trapped.)
Means of escape
Jaclyn’s urge to distract herself and escape her cycle of paranoia leads her, Laurie and Kate to a club with Valentin and his Russian friends, Aleksei (Julian Kostov) and Vlad (Yuri Kolokolnikov). We’ll have to wait to see what happens with Aleksei and Vlad, but the two seem like likely candidates for the masked men who robbed the White Lotus in “Special Treatments.” (That’s especially the case if, like myself, you agree that Valentin’s distraction of Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) in that episode was intentional, rather than accidental.) Jaclyn isn’t the only character in “The White Lotus” with thoughts of escape on her mind this week, though.
Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) discloses to Lochlan (Sam Nivola) that she plans to move to Thailand after she graduates and live in the meditation center she visited in last week’s episode. Lochlan can only muster up a babyish, “What about me?,” in response. Meanwhile, their father, Tim (Jason Isaacs), remains hellbent on escaping his reality by any means necessary. When he wakes up, he sneaks a few more of his wife Victoria’s (Parker Posey) anxiety meds — clouding his mind so heavily that he doesn’t even realize at one point that he’s flashing his kids until Piper and Lochy start screaming. While he dutifully tags along with his family on Saxon’s insistence to Gary/Greg’s (Jon Gries) boat, he ends up pocketing the entire bottle of Victoria’s Lorazepam pills.
Tim spends the rest of the boat trip quietly spiraling. His small talk with another partygoer takes a dark turn when he thanks God his parents are dead — the unspoken part being that he’s grateful they won’t see his reputation destroyed. A small moment of bonding between him and Piper is interrupted by Victoria complaining about the theft of her pills. No matter what he does, he can’t duck reality. He briefly toys with staying in Thailand forever during a chat with Greg. “I just heard someone say that anyone who moves to Thailand is either looking for something or hiding from something,” Tim muses. Greg falsely insists that neither reason is why he’s there. When the recurring “White Lotus” figure then asks Tim, “Are you hiding or are you seeking?,” the Ratliff patriarch says, “I’m just on vacation with my family,” before soberly adding, “But you never know.”
The truth comes out
Tim’s situation goes from bad to worse when, after demanding his phone back from Pam (Morgana O’Reilly), he has a frank, disheartening phone call with his lawyer, who tells him, “I think the best we can do is plead guilty and cut a deal.” Faced with financial ruin and several months spent in a federal prison, Tim vows that he would “rather f—king die” than accept the fate he’s being sold. He’s presented with an opportunity to follow through on that promise when he looks through Gaitok’s nearby gate booth and sees the guard’s new handgun sitting on his desk. When Gaitok returns moments later to discover the gun gone, viewers’ worst fears* are confirmed. In an episode preoccupied with different methods of “escape,” Tim seems to be actively considering the darkest and most violent kind.
He isn’t alone in thinking dangerous thoughts, either. After being guilted into joining her on Greg’s boat, Rick (Walton Goggins) finally confesses to Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) why they came to Thailand in the first place. His explanation isn’t surprising. It turns out that Rick did, indeed, come searching for the White Lotus’ Thailand resort co-owner, Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn), whom he blames for his father’s murder. Rick explains that his old man was a “do-gooder” who came to Thailand to help the locals “keep a shady American from stealing their land” and one day just “disappeared.” He says that his mother told him on her deathbed that Hollinger was responsible for his father’s demise. “Oh my God. Is this a bit, ‘You killed my father, prepare to die,’ kind of?” Chelsea asks.
Rick doesn’t confirm one way or the other what he plans to do. “This guy ruined my f—king life from day one! He doesn’t have to answer to me?” he asks. He ignores Chelsea’s pleas to stay with her, and he expresses no interest in interrogating whether or not everything he’s heard about his father is really true. It doesn’t matter at this point. He’s been telling himself this story about his doomed-from-the-start life too long to imagine any other truth. Despite Amrita’s words of comfort, he remains incapable of letting go of his “story,” which is why he ends up boarding a plane to Bangkok and leaving Chelsea alone to return to Greg’s boat for Chloe’s (Charlotte Le Bon) full moon party. He’s a man seeking relief, escape, but he seems trapped on the same, likely dead-end path.
*By having Tim steal Gaitok’s gun, “White Lotus” creator Mike White has invited even more speculation about the offscreen shooting that opens Season 3. Another firearm has entered the fray, which is to say that another potential source of chaos and violence has emerged.
Wanted for questioning
Belinda’s trip to Thailand was meant to be a kind of vacation. In this week’s “White Lotus,” though, she starts to suspect that she has unexpectedly wound up in a legitimately dangerous situation. Unable to shake the feeling that she’s seen Greg before, the spa manager decides to look into Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge). When she does, she discovers that Tanya was found dead and that her husband, Greg, is wanted in Italy for questioning. When she searches Greg’s name, she is shocked and appalled to discover an image of the same man from the previous night’s dinner looking back at her. Her emotions are summed up perfectly in her one word response to Greg’s photo: “Motherf—ker.”
When she sees Greg again in the White Lotus’ lobby later that night, she doesn’t try to hide her knowledge of his true identity. A look of knowing passes between the two, paving the way for one of the episode’s final moments. Sitting alone in the dark in his mansion, Greg cyberstalks Belinda’s Instagram page and looks with particular interest at photos of her and her son, Zion (Nicholas Duvernay). It’s a chilling scene that confirms that Belinda is very much on Greg’s radar now.
Earlier in the episode, she has a phone call with Zion, who tells her he’s just about to board his plane to Thailand. Frankly, he can’t get here soon enough. Whether she realizes it or not, his mom could use the support. After all, you may not always be able to escape your “story,” but that doesn’t mean you can’t look for help.
“The White Lotus” airs Sundays on HBO and Max.
The post ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 4 Recap: Water Fights, Belinda’s Hunch and a Stolen Gun appeared first on TheWrap.