“The White Lotus” Season 3, Episode 7 is one of the HBO drama’s most uncomfortable, unnerving to date. That’s saying something for a show that has mined plenty of material out of the kind of everyday social tensions that make you want to crawl out of your skin.
There is something heavy hanging over “Killer Instincts,” a thick, unshakable dread that makes every scene feel just one small step away from toppling over the edge of a cliff. Creator Mike White has adopted such a slow-burn approach to all of this season’s threads that resolution is starting to feel just around the corner, which is what makes “Killer Instincts” such a painful hour of television. Once again, White pushed “The White Lotus” forward without delivering the cathartic explosion of drama viewers long for. The result is an agonizing yet mesmerizing experience (and one that features more than a few mentions of Jennifer Coolidge’s late, never-forgotten Tanya McQuoid).
Case in point: Rick Hatchett’s (Walton Goggins) long-awaited confrontation with his father’s purported killer, Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn). White builds to the duo’s one-on-one meeting patiently, letting viewers sit in the awkwardness of Frank’s (Sam Rockwell) attempts to maintain his directorial charade with an inquisitive Sritala (Lek Patravadi) — all with little help from Rick. When Sritala asks him what he’s directed, Frank hesitantly responds, “What haven’t I directed? You know what I mean? Mostly action films: ‘The Enforcer,’ ‘The Executor,’ ‘The Notary’… That was a trilogy.” (It really cannot be overstated how invaluable Rockwell’s presence has been in the second half of this season. He’s electrified every scene he’s in.) Eventually, Rick convinces Jim to speak with him alone.
Once he finally has his chance to kill Jim, though, their confrontation turns into a sweaty, darkly funny anti-climax. Rick reveals who he is and accuses Jim to his face of killing his father. You don’t f—king remember that?” Rick asks incredulously, pulling his gun. Instead of shooting the older man, Rick settles for just pushing him over in his chair. He and a drunk, completely off-the-wagon Frank then make their escape from Jim and Sritala’s compound. Later, when Frank asks what happened, Rick says, “I built this guy up in my mind to be this thing, and I’m sitting there and I’m looking at him and he’s just this pathetic, frail old man. I mean, I couldn’t even hit him.”
Mountains out of molehills
Throughout the episode, White repeatedly cuts back to the Muay Thai fight attended by Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong), Mook (Lalisa Manobal), Laurie (Carrie Coon), Valentin (Arnas Fedaravicius), Vlad (Yuri Kolokolnikov) and Aleksei (Julian Kostov). It is an effective, if obvious, central metaphor for an episode about the battle between one’s morals and their darkest, most destructive impulses. That theme is present in Rick’s confrontation with Jim Hollinger, as it is in Gaitok’s date with Mook, which starts on a down note when Gaitok confesses that he is never going to be the gun-wielding bodyguard Mook wants. “When they came to rob the hotel, I didn’t want to fight,” Gaitok says. “I think it’s wrong.” Disappointed, Mook admits, “I thought you were more ambitious.”
The two later go to the fight, as does Laurie, whose lingering anger over Jaclyn’s (Michelle Monaghan) one-night stand with Valentin bubbles over into a bitter argument at dinner between the two women and Kate (Leslie Bibb), who takes Jaclyn’s side. “If you’re not happy with your life, just own it. Don’t project and make mountains out of molehills,” Jaclyn says, blaming Laurie’s unfulfilling career and divorce on her. Kate echoes Jaclyn’s comments, and all Laurie can think to do in response is lash out, telling Kate that she “always fake” and calling Jaclyn “vain and selfish” before leaving to go to the night’s fight on her own. White’s observational skills as a writer are on full display in this scene, which uncomfortably illustrates how our friends know better than anyone else how to both lift us up and cut us down.
Jaclyn is all too quick to bring up Laurie’s divorce and career, two subjects she knows will put her on the defensive. Monaghan has not gotten to shine as much this season as Bibb and Coon, but she devours Jaclyn and Laurie’s argument, projecting an enraging air of superiority. Her performance offers unspoken insight into how Jaclyn views her friends — namely, as people to support and admire her, not to call her out on her mistakes or transgressions. While she accuses Laurie of constantly acting the victim, too, that is immediately what she does when Kate later tells her that she should feel at least a little bad about what she said to Laurie. “I’ll be the bad guy,” Jaclyn retorts. “I’m used to it.”
Amid all the drama between Kate, Jaclyn and Laurie, White packs in one of the biggest reveals of “The White Lotus” Season 3 so far. As Gaitok watches the fight and tries not to be bothered by Mook’s insistence that violence and self-defense are “natural” parts of life, he sees Laurie sitting with Valentin, Aleksei and Vlad. Seeing the three men together, Gaitok recognizes Vlad as one of the two men who robbed the White Lotus resort earlier in the season. It is a reveal that is later confirmed when Laurie sleeps with Aleksei and sees the jewelry store’s stolen items in his home as she’s sneaking out. (Everyone (including this writer) who predicted weeks ago that Valentin had helped his two friends rob the resort by distracting Gaitok can pat themselves on the back now.)
“Oh no, not the boat people”
In addition to the Muay Thai fight, “Killer Instincts” also makes time for Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) and Gary/Greg’s (Jon Gries) dinner party. Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) is talked into going by her son Zion (Nicholas Duvernay). “He [Greg] knows I know,” Belinda nervously laments. “Mom, he’s not gonna do anything to you, all right? Cause I’ll be there,” Zion responds, as if a sociopathic, murderous schemer like Greg would care about a little collateral damage. Victoria (Parker Posey), meanwhile, reacts with horror when Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) tells her who is hosting the party they’ve been invited to. “Oh no, not the boat people!” she exclaims, adding yet another winner to her pile of laugh-worthy lines.
Elsewhere, Lochlan makes yet another misstep when Piper comes to visit him at night in his room at the monastery. He tells her he supports her idea and Luang Por Teera’s (Suthichai Yoon) teachings. “I don’t want to make things worse,” he says, but all it takes is Piper calling him “the best” to make him do exactly that. He reveals that he wants to join Piper on her gap-year trip to the monastery and his sister, who wants to move to Thailand partly to escape her family, is not overjoyed by the proposition. She quietly slinks away — disappointed at the thought of her personal journey being trampled over by her younger brother.
Saxon, meanwhile, pulls his drugged-up father aside at Greg’s dinner party and begs for an explanation for what is going on with him. “At this point, my career is totally tied to yours. So, if something bad is happening, it’s happening to both of us,” he says. His words are not powerful enough to make Tim actually tell him the truth, but they do add him to his father’s list of potential mercy-kill victims. Things, unfortunately for him, do not get any better from there for Saxon.
Momma’s boy
During the party, Saxon is approached by Chloe, who tells him that she and Greg had a frank conversation following her threesome with the Ratliff brothers. “He finally opened up about his ex-wife. Apparently, they never had sex and, because she was so insecure, he couldn’t really tell her what he was really into, like sexually,” Chloe says, repeating a lie told to her by Greg about his marriage to Tanya. She then gives a long monologue* about how Greg wants Saxon to have sex with Chloe so that he can “catch” them doing it and Chloe can “return” to him. It is a kink that apparently stems from Greg’s childhood when he used to watch and listen to his mother and father having loud sex in their house.
“It’ll be like winning his mother back from his father,” Chloe explains, but Saxon refuses to play along. Instead, he opts for making another failed pass at Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) , who kicks him out of her suite at the end of the night and cheerfully informs him, “You can’t become soulful in 10 minutes. It takes time.”
Before Greg sits back and watches Chloe horrify Saxon from afar, he gets Belinda to speak with him in private. He begins their meeting by immediately lying about Tanya, insisting that he had nothing to do with the “tragic” fate that befell her. He also tries to explain away his escape to Thailand, telling a silent, nervous Belinda, “It was getting very complicated back home, and I just didn’t want to spend the rest of my life dealing with legal s—t and lawyers and people making assumptions.” He then makes his move, telling Belinda that Tanya “always felt guilty that she didn’t start that business with you.” He offers her $100,000 (a small sum, if you consider just how much money he actually has) to fund her spa, in exchange for her keeping quiet about his presence in Thailand. She asks to have the night to think about it, and while Greg agrees, he definitely does not seem happy about her hesitation to accept his offer.
*In its pacing, length and purpose, Chloe’s monologue feels intentionally designed to mirror and call to mind Frank’s bar confession in “Full-Moon Party.” It is not nearly as effective, though, partly because it relies entirely on second-hand information, because Greg’s secrets and many lies make it hard to believe anything Chloe says and because Le Bon, with all due respect, is simply not as effortlessly commanding as Rockwell. Its inclusion feels like one of the few missteps White has made this season.
An empty drawer
Belinda tells Zion that she does not want to take Greg’s offer because it’s “not right” and would make her feel like an accomplice to Tanya’s murder. After emphasizing how life-changing $100,000 could be for her, Zion warns, “If you don’t come to terms with him, he’s going to come after you. You know that, right? And they’re going to find your body in the Gulf of Thailand. S—t, maybe mine, too.” “Killer Instincts” does not resolve Greg’s proposition, though, nor does it end on a concrete note for Rick, who is last shown sitting happily in his hotel room while Frank falls farther off the wagon in front of him — snorting cocaine with a group of strippers. Rick, for the moment, does not seem concerned about leaving Jim and Sritala alive, despite the fact that the latter knows where he and Chelsea are staying and brings gun-wielding bodyguards with her everywhere she goes.
It doesn’t, consequently, seem like a slim possibility anymore that Jim’s bodyguards could come looking for Rick and could turn out to be the source of the shooting in “The White Lotus” Season 3’s prologue. There is also Tim, who ends “Killer Instincts” fantasizing about shooting Victoria in her sleep, then Saxon in the head and then himself. As he does, he thinks back to his meeting with Luang Por Teera (Suthichai Yoon) in “Denials,” envisioning himself, Victoria and Saxon as drops of water rising and falling back into the ocean. But when he goes to find Gaitok’s stolen gun, he realizes that the weapon is no longer where he left it. One can only imagine what he might do to try and get it back, or at least acquire some other kind of murder/suicide weapon.
And that’s where “Killer Instincts” ends, essentially with multiple lit fuses still tied to multiple explosive barrels. To White’s credit, all of those barrels (i.e., the many violent potential confrontations he has set up) seem equally likely to blow now. Next week’s episode is, in other words, shaping up to be the most unpredictable season finale of “The White Lotus” to date.
“The White Lotus” airs Sundays on HBO and Max.
The post ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 7 Recap: Greg’s Lies, a Costly Bribe and a Frail, Old Man appeared first on TheWrap.