“The dream is a small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul,” Carl Jung, the father of analytical psychology, once said. He also famously warned that “what we do not make conscious emerges later as fate.” This came to my mind after watching episode three’s opening scene, which once again begins with the ocean. The moody light tells us it’s a dream—Victoria’s dream, or maybe a nightmare. As she stands on the resort’s beach looking out at the sea, Lochlan says to her, “This is what it looks like before a tsunami,” echoing the ending of last week’s episode. Cradled in a fluffy white blanket the same way she cocoons herself in the gauzy haze of Lorazepam, with her beautiful North Carolina mansion looming behind her, Victoria stoically submits herself to the oncoming wall of water barreling toward her.
If that’s not foreshadowing, this isn’t The White Lotus—and well, it is. Victoria wakes up to Timothy speaking tensely about work on the phone. She doesn’t know what’s wrong with him, just that something is off. Later that morning at breakfast, Saxon characteristically reacts to the retelling of his mother’s dream with the depth of a teaspoon, telling her, literally, “It’s not that deep.” Piper says the ominous vision could be a warning, and that “every symbol has a meaning, it’s the collective unconscious.” She might still be hiding her plans to camp out at a monastery for a year from her family, but at least she’s read Jung.
Lochlan (Sam Nivola) and Victoria Ratliff (Parker Posey)
Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO
In some ways, it feels like Mike White is hitting us over the head with the symbols of this season: the monkeys, meditation sessions, the tsunamis. Lochlan develops a fixation on the latter, pulling up videos out of morbid curiosity. While watching yet another, he says, “He didn’t even run, he just stood there” as Timothy listens. It’s exactly what he’s doing with his incoming money and legal troubles. After his former business partner (and now, partner in fraud) Kenny finally called him last episode to tell him to get a lawyer, Timothy has at least done that.
Still, it feels like he’s basically burying his head in the sand with the increasingly dire situation, all because he’s too afraid to tell his family he’s fucked up. When Terry from the office keeps lighting up Saxon’s phone, Timothy takes advantage of the hotel’s digital detox policy and gives up both of their phones to prevent his son from finding out what’s going on. (He also tells Saxon that he’s proud of him. It might be a manipulation tactic, but the look of relief on Saxon’s face is the first moment of vulnerability we’ve seen from the finance bro).
Another quick note about the Ratliff parents’ accents—last week, I said it sounded like Jason Isaacs was doing an impression of Southern Charm’s Thomas Ravenel, and the actor confirmed it’s true. “It came out on the internet that Mike [White] had asked us to watch Southern Charm, a great reality show, and somebody in it, people from Southern Charm went, ‘He’s clearly doing Thomas Ravenel,’” he told GMA3. “And Thomas, I am doing you, mostly, but not for two vowels, which are completely English.”
In light of the confirmation that the WL cast watched Southern Charm, Victoria sounds even more like the Bravo show’s matriarch, Patricia Altschul. Still, Victoria’s slurring is straight up thanks to the pills, which she finally successfully pushes upon Timothy. Despite his wife’s claims that they’re non-habit forming (seriously, call me when they invent non-addictive benzos), he almost immediately starts popping them like candy.
With no phones or iPads to use, Saxon turns his dumb but evil eye on Lochlan, forcing him to chug protein shakes and generally hazing him into being a mini-me. “Don’t you want the big dogs to respect you?” Saxon asks Loch. “You wanna be neurotic your whole life and die a fucking virgin?” Lochlan, naturally, does not want this, and so agrees to his Patrick Bateman of a brother’s plan to get him laid in Thailand. At that moment, Chloe and Chelsea walk by—and while Chelsea only has eyes for Rick, Chloe is far more willing to entertain Saxon’s advances.
Speaking of Rick, he’s still spiraling. At breakfast, he impulsively approaches Sritala, and, posing as a sleazy Hollywood type, proposes that she meet with his director friend about a part in a “high profile” project. Flattered, Sritala tentatively agrees—and how convenient for Rick that this will all take place in Bangkok, where his target, Jim, is still recovering! He doesn’t even bother giving Chelsea a fake explanation for his sudden need to leave the resort (“Scorpio, so secretive,” she says amiably). Still, she reminds Rick that she’s his “life partner” and “soulmate,” a fact that doesn’t seem to convince him. “Maybe you can meet a guy richer than me, and you can sponge off him,” he tells her. Ouch.
Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and Rick (Walton Goggins)
Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO
Rick attends another wellness session with Amrita, though it’s definitely “not his thing.” Trying to peel back the layers of Rick’s bitter onion, Amrita says, “underneath anger, there’s always a sadness, something we’re grieving.” Rick admits that he’s done “a lot of bad things,” and “made a lot of mistakes.” Still trapped in his identity prison (and breaking out in a sweat), he also shares his deep, roiling resentment over the murder of his father, “a good man” whom he never got to meet. “I can’t get my life back,” Rick says. “Maybe I can still get some satisfaction.” If we’re playing White’s Enneagram game, he sure sounds like a Seven.
Chelsea takes advantage of Rick’s absence to hang by the pool with Chloe, who tells her about Greg (aka Gary)’s ex-wife, whom we know was Tanya. “She was a real mental patient,” Chloe says. “Like, killed herself bad.” Greg told Chloe that Tanya was “so depressed, she couldn’t take it anymore,” and walked out into the ocean one day “and never came back.” All they found, she says, was a part of her leg. Tanya, of course, did in fact die in the ocean, but Greg is leaving out a few key details, like his murder-for-hire plot to steal her fortune. This situation really drives home the old maxim that it’s a major red flag when a man describes his exes as “crazy.”
It’s also a word Rick has repeatedly used about Chelsea, but the next scene proves that he’s the one with issues. Agitated from his wellness session, Rick goes into town with Chelsea trailing behind to pick up some weed, and the two stumble upon a “snake show” where a high-as-hell Rick decides to set all the snakes free from their glass enclosures—including a poisonous cobra that bites Chelsea on the leg. She’s rushed to the hospital and lives to see another day at the resort, but as she notes later at dinner, this is her second near-death experience in as many days. “Snakes are evil. Read the Bible,” Chelsea scolds Rick, who says he felt bad for (and perhaps identified with) the caged creatures—that’s why he set them free. “Even evil things shouldn’t be treated like shit,” he retorts. “It’s only gonna make them more evil.”
If we remember that someone is going to die a week after these events take place, and we take White at his words that all symbols have meanings, I’m increasingly concerned by Chelsea’s constant brushes with snakes and death. She even tells Rick at dinner that night, “You’re not gonna get rid of me that easy. If you kill me, I’ll follow you into the next life, and the next life, and the next.”
We also can’t forget about our Real Housewives of Thailand, who are having a relatively muted episode doing Reiki with Valentin and making passive-aggressive digs at one another. Resident Texan Kate shares her skepticism about any “goofy, spooky or witchy” alternative healing techniques, while Jaclyn says those are the very reasons she’s drawn to them. Christianity—and most religions—are made for men, Jaclyn says. “Father sacrifices son, son’s a man, son dies on the cross—the heroes are all men, and the women just cry on the sidelines.” She adds, “It’s all so male, the epic battle for good and evil. Doesn’t speak to me.” This doesn’t sit well with Kate, who in sharing her positive experiences with going to church, accidentally reveals herself to be a Trump voter. Later, Kate and her bob overhear Jaclyn and Laurie maligning her newfound, “self-defeating” conservatism—after multiple shit-talking sessions, it’s finally her turn to be on the outside of the trio.
This episode mostly served as a setup for next week, when the Songkran Festival and Full Moon Party will surely shake things up on the island. The Ratliffs plan to attend Chloe’s party on Greg’s yacht, which Rick and Chelsea will also be at—and Greg’s already caught Chloe making eyes at Saxon at least once. There’s also trouble and intrigue brewing among the hotel’s staff. After failing to stop last week’s armed robbery, Gaitok boldly offers to be one of Sritala’s personal bodyguards, leading the intimidating men already doing that job to try and scare him off, calling him a pussy. I wish he’d stop chasing waterfalls to impress Mook and stick to the safe security guard jobs he’s used to. Belinda, meanwhile, can’t stop accidentally catching Greg’s eye as she tries to figure out where she knows him from. When she asks him if he ever dated a woman named Tanya McQuoid, he rebuffs her, but the stage is set for further confrontation between the two. Stay away, Belinda! Danger!
