The Blood Moon rises once again. Please be careful, The White Lotus!
Sailing into the night with the massive full moon looming ominously above the horizon is one of the eerier moments in a thoroughly discomfiting episode of Mike White’s poison pen letter to the wealthy, wielded more deftly this season than ever before. Everywhere you look or listen, there’s a sense that something terrible is going to happen. Of course, we already know that it will, which makes the sense of dread White is able to cultivate here all the more impressive. Our appointment with death is already set, and we’re just anxiously waiting out the minutes.
Credit for the atmosphere of unease must largely go to the season’s trio of middle-aged American men, and not simply because they’re middle-aged American men and therefore inherently uneasy-making.
Tops among them is Jason Isaacs as a visibly decompensating Tim Ratliff. I’ve long enjoyed the work of Steve Zahn and Michael Imperioli, the comparable characters from Season 1 and Season 2 respectively, but Isaacs brings a whole different energy as the spiraling financier, who’s now resorting to stealing his wife’s Ativan by the fistful to cope with his soon-to-be-exposed white-collar (?) crimes.
Watching him slowly sink — and I do mean sink, as he seems to be slumped lower in the frame each time we see him — into his bottle of lorazepam and glasses of whisky during an ill-advised family excursion on “Gary”’s yacht, you see a guy who doesn’t seem like he’ll ever be getting back up. Indeed, when he finally talks to someone back home and learns his case his hopeless, he steals a gun left unattended in the hotel security office. (More on that in a bit.) “Hopefully you won’t need that again!” poor cheerful attendant Pam says to him when he returns his phone. “I won’t,” he assures her, and we know damn well what that means in this case.
Middle-aged scary guy #2 is Rick, who actually comes across less frightening here than he ever has, though no less cursed. When his girlfriend Chelsea finally demands he open up to her about what’s making him so miserable or she’ll leave him, he does the surprising thing and actually tells her. The hotel’s owner murdered his father, a “do-gooder” who was helping the locals fight against the very land grab that made the White Lotus possible. (Shades one of the Season 1 Hawaii storylines.) Rick means to confront the man, who’d been convalescing from a stroke at the hotel until his unexpected trip to Bangkok. Now risk is headed there too, and no amount of pleading from Chelsea can stop him.
Chelsea is legit stunned by all this. Stunned, and worried about Rick, seemingly both for his safety and his soul. “Is this a bit ‘You killed my father, prepare to die,’ kind of?” she asks him. With apparent sincerity, Rick sighs, “I don’t know.” His uncertainty would seem to indicate he’s not exactly the international assassin I’d pegged him for. If he’s genuinely unsure whether he’ll kill the man who murdered his father and preemptively ruined his life, he probably isn’t doing contract hits. In one of the episode’s most touching moments, Amrita, the in-house therapist, assures Rick he can break the cycle that has him trapped; she doesn’t know the half of it, but that’s what make the directness of her argument hit Rick so hard. Like Chelsea, Amrita simply believes he’s a good person capable of being happy, and treats him accordingly.
But Rick does go to Bangkok, leaving Chelsea to party the night away with her pal Chloe, the Ratliff Brothers, and assorted other party people on the big yacht. Gary/Greg, however, retreats back to his frankly obscene house on the cliffs, where he looks up info on Belinda and her son. Belinda has been doing the same in reverse, and now knows that Greg is a suspect in the death of his mega-rich wife, Tanya.
It’s hard to describe Greg as a presence, both on the screen and in this season of the show. In the first outing, he was just some schmo who lucked into the fuck of a lifetime with Tanya, his rich wife-to-be. In the second, his most memorable moment is as a face in an incriminating photograph, linking him to the (gay) men responsible for Tanya’s accidentally successful assassination. We now know he arranged it, that he’s wanted for questioning, and that he’s in hiding — but even so, there’s a deep sadness to this character whenever you look at him. Not that you feel sad for him, but that you can see the sadness in him. Whether because he feels guilty over Tanya’s death or because he’s grieving the death Quentin (Tom Hollander), the friend or lover he tasked with taking care of it, he seems haunted, not triumphant. Actor Jon Gries makes the character look and sound like a husk of a person, a nowhere man. He feels like someone an entity from Twin Peaks‘ Black Lodge would possess.
Back to that gun from earlier: It belongs, or belonged, to Gaitok’s boss, who’s tasked him with learning how to use it after he failed to thwart the break-in the other day. But Gaitok is too busy being infatuated with Mook, who has accepted his offer of a date, to pay attention to the weapon, and leaves it unlocked when he walks her back to the hotel. Tim, who’s snuck outside to learn the latest news, has just finished screaming at his lawyer over the phone that he’d rather die than go to prison. The gun represents his chance to exercise that preference.
But he might have a reprieve from self-destruction on the way. His daughter, Piper, has spent the episode preparing to tell her parents she plans to move to Thailand to join that meditation center, and that her whole spiel about interviewing a monk for her thesis was a cover story. (She’d asked Lochlan to back her up when she breaks the news, but Lochlan chooses to stick with Saxon and the whole getting-you-laid plan on the party boat — which the younger bro’s impressive sleight-of-hand party tricks are assisting, believe it or not.)
Piper expects her parents to flip out, but during a conversation with Gary/Greg, her father has already vaguely considered simply staying in Thailand to remain ahead of the law. If he can pitch it as some big family-togetherness thing…well, they’re still gonna find out he’s a crook, but at least he won’t be an incarcerated crook. (Note: This episode was written before President Musk and Vice President Trump declared all white-collar crime legal as long as you vote Republican.)
There’s one group you may notice has been absent from the narrative. Back on dry land — well, mostly dry, as we’ll see in a moment — Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie spend the day trying and failing to have fun. When they ask their hunky health whatchamacallit Valentin if he can recommend them a more swingin’ hotel, he sends them to a discount place for seniors. When they head into town together, they get soaked with water pistols wielded by children and locals celebrating the full moon festival. Honestly, there are a lot worse things to look at than a soaking-wet Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan, and Leslie Bibb running down the street, but Jason Isaacs also flashes his dick in this episode, if that’s more your speed.
By the end of the episode, an increasingly irritable Jaclyn, who’s been unable to reach her younger and very obviously unfaithful actor husband back home, is in full “What happens in Thailand stays in Thailand” mode. When Valentin meets back up with the trio with a couple of tackily dressed buddies in tow, the flirtation begins right away, but it’s clumsy and forced, slightly frantic even. It’s not the kind of energy that yields a night you’ll remember fondly, I’ll put it that way.
I don’t want to give the impression that this isn’t a funny show, because it very much is. (Much funnier than the seasons that felt more like a comedy, imo.) Tim does a big comical take to the camera at one point that’s only slightly more subtle than the one Paul Rudd does in Wet Hot American Summer. Belinda and Greg have a slow-motion staredown that clearly has unpleasant implications for Belinda, but which still amounts to a couple of people at a luxury resort reenacting the Avon Barksdale/Lt. Daniels bit from The Wire. Parker Posey and her anesthetized accent are a scream. So is Aimee-Lou Wood, who along with Belinda is basically the only person you actually want to see have a good time at this place. There’s a zoom-in on the Ratliffs walking like the Reservoir Dogs for crying out loud.
But it’s been a while since I’ve watched a show this suffused with an all-encompassing, omnipresent sense that Something Bad is going on. It reminds me of Mad Men Season 5, an experiment in just how freaked out a show about rich people completely insulated from lasting consequences by money can make you feel on an episode-by-episode basis. And now the boat’s sailing off, and Rick’s on his way to Bangkok, and the trio are out partying, and the pink moon gonna get ye all.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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