Spare a thought, won’t you, for Fabian. All season long, the mild-mannered middle-manager has been fretting and fawning over the possibility of singing during one of The White Lotus hotel’s nightly staff performances. As he excitedly tells Laurie, Jaclyn, and Kate near the start of this week’s episode, tonight’s the night. Yet no sooner does he begin singing a song of his own composition, a paean to his native Deutschland in his native Deutsch, than the action refocuses on the increasingly unhappy reunion trio, who have a spectacular falling out that immediately eclipses Fabian’s star. None of the other guests or employees we’ve followed are even around at dinner to see it. The poor man got what exactly what he wanted, but in the end it’s nothing like he wanted.
This, my friends, is a running theme. To take one low-stakes example, consider Piper Ratliff. She spends the day and night at the nearby Buddhist meditation center per her mother Victoria’s wishes, as a test to see if it’s really for her. To her initial delight, her supportive kid brother Lochlan tags along. But when he tells her he intends to stay with her for the next year and study at the center just like her, for much the same reasons, she seems deeply sketched out by it. Is she detecting weird vibes from Lochlan (understandable)? Or is her spiritual journey only special if she’s the only family member special enough to pursue it? An atmosphere of menace pervades our final shots of her in this episode, as if some bad thing on the horizon is disturbing her without her even knowing what it is.
In Bangkok, Rick and his friend “Steve,” aka Frank, keep up their ruse of being Hollywood shotcallers so Rick can come face to face with his quarry, former multi-hyphenate performer Sritala’s rich American husband Jim. What follows is television at its most grizzled: Walton Goggins’s Rick slowly reveals his true identity and purpose to Scott Glenn’s Jim, a faceoff between two real hardasses. Or so it seems. In the end, Rick realizes that whatever Jim used to be, he’s now just a frail and frightened old man.
Rather than shooting him or even hitting him, Rick just dumps the guy on his ass and makes a run for it with Frank, who’s fallen off the wagon from the stress of maintaining his ridiculous ruse of being a director. (“Mostly action films. The Enforcer. The Executor. The Notary. That was a trilogy.”) Frank goes on a full “One Night in Bangkok” rager (no for real, he literally shouts “We’re in Bangkok, man! Let’s fuckin’ go! One night!”), but Rick mostly sits there, smiling beatifically. What if, instead of finding vengeance, he found enlightenment?
Gaitok also fulfills his quest, to take an eager and ebullient Mook out on their first date. But both over dinner and at the fights later that night, she encourages him to ditch his Buddhism-derived pacifism if he wants to get anywhere in his job as a security professional. Her disappointment to discover he’s an unambitious wimp is barely even left implied. It’s an ugly side to a character who’s only ever seemed sweet and charming before, both to us in the audience and seemingly to Gaitok himself. Rather than write this off as writer-director Mike White trafficking in female-temptress tropes as old as Eve, I took it as an example of how there are surface-level nice people all around us who are, deep down, creeps. (And they vote! See also Kate!)
Gaitok may have a chance to play the hero without firing a shot, however. While at the Muay Thai event with Mook, he spots his coworker Valentin and hotel guest Laurie, along with Valentin’s hometown buddies Alexei and Vlad. That’s when he puts it together: the threesome worked in tandem to rob the hotel gift shop. While Valentin distracted Gaitok with small talk, Alexei and Vlad rode in for their smash and grab. He recalls one of the thieves being tall and bald, just like Vlad, meaning Alexei was the masked man who brained him.
So now, it’s entirely possible for Gaitok to just go to his boss, Pee Lek, with this information tomorrow and let the authorities take it from there, solving the case and earning him major brownie points without, perhaps, having to prove he has “killer instinct.” Like, are you not gonna promote Sherlock Holmes because he never shoots the criminals in the face?
Unfortunately, this mean’s Laurie’s long hoped-for tryst with Alexei is a bad idea in several respects. She may have sussed out the robbery angle herself when she sees he’s got a huge stash of touristy jewelry in his back room. She winds up in that back room, fleeing the apartment while frantically putting her clothes back on, because Alexei’s enraged girlfriend shows up and starts attacking her even as she dangles from the window in an escape attempt that comes moments too late. And oh, Alexei only slept with her so he could try and guilt $10K out of her, allegedly to help his poor sick mother emigrate. The sex seemed to be good, so at least there’s that, but, well, is that all there is?
This seems to be Laurie’s recurring problem. Later on we’ll see a fantasized family annihilation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of viewers feel the dinner-table argument between Laurie, Jaclyn, and Kate is the episode’s real bloodbath. Laurie tells Jaclyn she can’t be trusted, and hints that she maybe made a play for Kate’s perfect husband Dave back in the day. Jaclyn says all of Laurie’s unhappiness is her own fault, due to her own decisions: She could have hooked up with Valentin the night before, just as she could have gotten a different job or married a different guy, but she didn’t. She’s the one constant in all this misfortune.
Kate takes Jaclyn’s side, in brutal fashion. “The source of your disappointment changes,” she tells her quote-unquote friend, “but the constant is you’re always disappointed.” That’s when Laurie storms off, calling Jaclyn vain and selfish, telling Kate her perfect life is an obvious lie. Afterwards, a judgey Kate drives unfaithful-wife Jaclyn away fuming as well. The White Lotus has done this kind of emotional wetwork before, but never with such ruthlessness or effectiveness. Every blow lands.
Up at his palatial hillside estate, “Gary,” the Thanos of the White Lotus Cinematic Universe, receives two of the three guests of honor he was hoping to attract to his lair that night. Belinda shows up with her son Zion to hear Gary out, and guts her way through a sit-down on a lanai somewhere, during which he effectively offers her a hundred thousand dollars to keep quiet about his location.
The cover story is that Tanya always talked about how guilty she felt that she didn’t start that spa with Belinda as she’d promised (this seems legit), that she would have wanted Belinda to have the money (quite possibly), and that she’d have wanted “Gary”/Greg to live the rest of his life in peace (no way, brother — he hired The Gays Who Tried to Kill Her!). Belinda asks for a night to think it over, hightails it out of there, and tells her son she plans to reject the offer. To Zion, though, his mother taking the money and living her dream is preferable to the alternative, which is Greg silencing her by other means.
Elsewhere at the party, Chloe is disappointed to see that Lochlan couldn’t make it, but Saxon’s arrival means Gary may get what he’s really after. In another delightfully frank monologue about taboo sexuality, Chloe tells Chelsea and Saxon that her boyfriend finally opened up to her about his desires. Haunted from a young age by watching and listening to his parents have sex through their open bedroom door, he became fixated on the idea that his girlfriends were cheating on him, until eventually he realized he wanted them to, so he could catch them and reclaim them, completing the Oedpial loop in his head. (He could never say this to Tanya, Chloe says, because hey never had sex and weren’t open about such things. Okay, sure.)
The idea, of course, is for Saxon to fuck Chloe while Gary watches, and then at some point for Chloe to switch to Gary. “It’ll be like he’s winning his mother back from his father,” Chloe says. “Yeah, like a little boy’s dream!” an approving Chelsea hilariously coos. Already horrified by his own very literal incest, Saxon has no interest in helping Chloe help Gary explore either the emotional or roleplaying varieties. Chelsea winds up accompanying him home and offers to tutor him in her own hopeful blend of spirituality (“Teach me your ways,” he tells her, only half kidding), but she cuts off the lesson when he comes onto her. He’s left alone with some books she literally tosses at him and his feelings, none of which are healthy at the moment.
There’s a reason for that. At the party, Saxon finally confronts his father, Tim, about…whatever the hell it is that’s had him so preoccupied all vacation long. Tim swears up and down that nothing’s wrong, that everything’s fine, that work is a-okay, but not before Saxon confesses to him that his life is completely empty except for work, and his entire work life is tied to his father. “I don’t have any interests, I don’t have any hobbies, okay? If I’m not a success, then I’m nothing, and I can’t handle being nothing.” No wonder the nothingness of meditation is a hard sell for him later on.
While Saxon wrestles with his wasted life and Victoria prays for Jesus to save her daughter from the Buddhists, Tim appears to make a horrifying decision. Recalling how both Victoria and Saxon told him their lives are nothing without material success, he pictures first killing his wife, then his son, then himself. With these images in his head, he goes for his gun. Fortunately for all involved, Gaitok took it back, and we’re left with a shot of Tim wondering, I suppose, how to find the means by which he intends to slaughter his family. For the Ratliffs, having gotten everything they ever wanted makes the prospect of losing it unbearable.
Director White and composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer add some showy new twists to their usual obsessions in this episode. In addition to shots of water, foliage, animals, and statues, this episode uses brief glimpses of the Muay Thai fighters and its onlookers — an added layer of aestheticized violence in an episode where Piper and Lochlan’s instructor reminds his students that “Every one of us has the capacity to kill.” It’s not just nature that’s red in tooth and claw, in other words.
On a lighter note, de Veer goes very old school, like 1987-1990 sampling culture, and cuts sexual “ohh”s and “ahhh”s into the music when Chloe pitches Saxon on Gary/Greg’s voyeur/cuckold/mommy-complex thing. Just as the violence has seeped into the imagery, the horniness has oozed into the sound. Even in its penultimate episode, this season of The White Lotus is still finding new ways to be fun and uncomfortable in equal measure. That’s a good sign for the finale, though maybe not for the characters.
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.
The post ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3 Episode 7 Recap: One Night in Bangkok appeared first on Decider.
