“The White Lotus” Episode 6: It’s a Family Affair
After the last episode in season 3 of Mike White‘s The White Lotus, when Sam Rockwell parachuted into the storyline and delivered one of television’s most unexpected monologues in perhaps the medium’s history (a stretch? if so, not by much), episode 6 had a lot of narrative momentum. White’s cosseted guests this year, whether their troubles are of a dangerously anguished variety (looking at you, Walton Goggins’ Rick) or one of a brutal (but earned) reckoning with the law (possibly Rick again, but definitely Jason Isaacs’ Tim), are nearing the point in the season when the other shoe—or gun–must drop.
This seems to be the case, too, for Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger), the swaggering simpleton whose entire sum of wisdom gained in a quarter century of life is that people yearn to be told what to do. This is coming from a spoiled rich kid who works for his daddy, a rich kid who still remains unaware of how much trouble daddy’s in, how badly that will work out for Saxon himself, and just how little he actually knows about the world at large. He discovers, to his literal disgust, a little bit more about what he’s capable of in episode 6, and it sends him scrambling to the toilet for a proper wretch.
Episode 5, “Full Moon Party,” found the Ratliff brothers staying on Greg/Gary’s (Jon Gries) boat after they dropped the rest of the guests, including Greg/Gary and the Ratliff partners, plus sister Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), off at the resort. Saxon and Lochlan (Sam Nivola) stay onboard with Chelsea (Aime Lou Wood) and Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) to rage, which includes taking drugs, going to the Full Moon Party, and, eventually, having a threesome with Chloe. Not that either brother remains much—they both claim to have blacked out—but there are threads of memory they both start piecing together in episode 6, and they’re unsettling. After dismissing Chelsea’s reminder that the brothers made out as just goofing around, Chloe arrives poolside to remind Saxon that they did a lot more than that together. Cue Saxon hustling for the toilet.
“There’s some sensationalism, but then there’s also the stuff behind the wall of the character and what he’s dealing with in the conflict of what just happened,” Schwarzenegger told The Hollywood Reporter about Saxon and Lohclan’s menage a trois. “What is that going to do to who he thinks he is? His thoughts on, what is it like to be a man? What is a man? What makes all these different things that he thought he stood for in the episode and the days before?”
“Mike [White, creator] does a great job with my character with that scene, but also in past seasons of always bringing something that is really fun and outrageous and sparks a conversation that gets people talking, but also has to do a lot with the pilgrimage of the characters’ story and where he’s going,” Schwarzenegger continued. “And here, especially with the relationship Saxon has with his little brother. There’s always more than what just meets the eye of the shock value on the screen.”
“We really trusted Mike,” Nivola told THR, “because there’s always a very shocking, crazy, intense moment in every season. It’s never just for the sake of being shocking; it always serves the story. And that [incest] scene is really the inciting incident for where our relationship goes next. It’s a great storytelling tactic. Going into this, we really trusted Mike because he’s a fucking badass and a genius.”
While her brothers were approaching their own spiritual reckoning, Piper was searching for one a lot less salacious and a whole lot more guided and wholesome, courtesy of the Buddhist monastery she hopes to join. So Piper, her parents Tim and Victoria (Parker Posey), along with a hungover Lochlan, head into town for a trip to the monastery so her parents can vet whether or not the place is actually a “cult,” as Victoria has worried. To Victoria’s surprise, Tim is on board with the monastery, and the leading monk being fully above aboard after he has a sit-down with the monk and gets a quick spiritual cleanse.
Victoria is still not sold, however, and she comes up with a bargain she feels fairly safe she’s going to win; Piper can return to the monastery for a year if she can handle staying there that night and getting a taste of what it will really be like to sleep there. Lochlan, still not completely under the sway of his morally adrift older brother, says he’ll stay with her, too.
“Mike kept telling me, ‘She’s the most normal, the grounded one.’ He really didn’t want her to be a brat,” Hook tells THR. “We had already gone down that road in season one. So we wanted to keep her vulnerable. And she’s also harboring this secret about why she’s really in Thailand. So there were a lot of different instructions for Piper, and a lot for me to juggle.”
As for the trio of traveling girlfriends, Laurie (Carrie Coon) has just about had it with Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) once she learns Jaclyn hooked up with Valentin (Arnas Fedaravicius) from Kate (Leslie Bibb). The three gossiping friends are turning on each other, bit by bit, even though they’re still trying to maintain the facade that they’re just as tight as they’ve always been and that their dynamic is fun rather than a retread of all things that annoyed them about each other back in high school. Laurie’s outright disdain for Jaclyn at this point—accusing her of dangling Valentin in front of her only to have planned, all along, to take him for herself, leads to fights with both Jaclyn and Kate. Laurie appears to be reaching the “IDGAF” point with this friendship, and with only two episodes left, she might just burn the shaky edifice of their bond right to the ground. That is, unless one of them ends up being a victim of the gunshots we know are coming.
Belinda’s (Natasha Rothwell) son Zion (Nicholas Duvernay) has finally arrived, just in time to catch his mom in bed with Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul). Zion is a good sport about it, heck, he’s even happy for his mom, but we know what Zion and the rest of the White Lotus staff and guests are about to go through, so his arrival is also the beginning of the endgame. And while it seems unlikely that Mike White would set his murderous narrative sights on Belinda as the victim this season, her run-in with Greg/Gary, who invites her to his house for a dinner party, reminds us that she’s definitely in danger.
The episode, titled “Denials,” ends with our sad-eyed Rick and his old buddy Frank (Rockwell) headed to the fateful meeting with the man Rick believes killed his father, the White Lotus, Thailand owner Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn), with Frank posing as a big shot Hollywood director. Whether or not Rick goes through with actually killing the man (he promised Frank he wouldn’t even bring the gun), or finds out new information about what happened to his dad, or, as one of the hottest bits of speculation has it, finds out that Jim Hollinger is his dad, is one of season 3’s most important questions.
The pieces are falling into place. The reckoning is nigh. And sweet Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) has retrieved the missing gun from the Ratliff residence and is learning how to shoot. What could possibly go wrong?
Featured image: Patrick Schwarzenegger. Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO
