Season 3, Episode 4: ‘Hide or Seek’
There is something about the experience of being on a luxury vacation that can get into the vacationers’ heads. Mike White understands this. Through three seasons of “The White Lotus,” he has focused on the nagging dissatisfaction of the privileged — especially when they are supposed to be at leisure. Are they really enjoying themselves? Are they getting the escape from the everyday they needed? Most important: Are they getting their money’s worth?
White seems to love characters who are earnestly searching for something, who could be on the precipice of a real change in their lives if they could just get past their doubts, their fears, their patterns of behavior, the general sense that they are being cheated. White clearly empathizes with these people. He also manages to make them hilarious.
With that in mind, I want to start again this week with the gal pals, who have been this season’s most reliable source of pure, pitiless comedy. In this episode, the ladies finally move out of their hermetic bubble of giggles and gossip and start trying to engage more with their surroundings. The experiment does not go well.
Jaclyn, as always, drives the action. Frustrated that her husband is not responding to her texts, she decides to do a little misbehaving. The resort is too staid, too serious. She asks Valentin to suggest someplace she and her friends can go that has “more of a vibe.”
Valentin directs them to what seems to be a more party-friendly hotel. The music is loud, and the drinks are large and colorful. But when Jaclyn gets roped into a conversation with two very un-“posh” Australian widows who recognize her from TV, she senses something is off. They appear to be at “a bargain hotel for retirees.” They return to Valentin, feeling insulted.
Valentin next recommends a fun club that will open in the evening for the local community’s full moon celebration. But when the ladies try to kill time by shopping in the marketplace, they are chased by hordes of children armed with water pistols. Jaclyn, Kate and Laurie take refuge in a convenience store. The children lurk outside, like ravenous zombies.
So … chased around paradise by the very old and the very young. Not the best day for the gal pals.
The night should be better. Valentin’s recommended club is, indeed, pretty bumpin’, giving the ladies a chance to be, per Jaclyn, “young and hot and fun.” As the night falls, Valentin meets the trio there with two of his Russian buddies, Aleksei (Julian Kostov) and Vlad (Yuri Kolokolnikov).
I have a theory about Aleksei and Vlad. I think it is possible that they — with Valentin’s help — robbed the resort’s jewelry store back in Episode 2. I have two pieces of evidence.
First: We saw Valentin pass through the gate immediately before the S.U.V. containing the two crooks roared by, unchecked. Second: The armed assailant who smashed up the jewelry cases helped himself to a snake choker, and Aleksei has a snake tattoo (which he promises goes “all the way down”). Perhaps a clue?
Even if I’m wrong, the robbery subplot remains a major part of this season, and it could be what gets us eventually to the gunshots and the corpse we saw in the season premiere’s flash-forward. For now, what matters about the robbery is that it leads to a meeting between the gatekeeper, Gaitok, and his bosses, in which he gets chastised for being too “friendly” and is given a pistol. Take note! At least one other gun — beyond the one the robber wielded — is now in play at the White Lotus.
So far this season, each episode has covered more or less one day for the vacationers, ending with them heading for bed. This episode is an exception since it ends shortly after sundown, with multiple White Lotus guests still off the property and searching for some full moon fun.
For most of the main characters, the day is spent on the yacht belonging to the man we know as Greg, now calling himself Gary. His girlfriend, Chloe, has invited Chelsea and the Ratliff family to go sailing with a boatload of Gary’s rich friends (labeled “bald geriatric potbellied pigs” by Saxon) and their suspiciously young and pretty female partners.
Rick previously registered his opinion with Chelsea that these women are likely prostitutes. But he agrees to come aboard anyway after being reassured that he will be back in time for his flight to Bangkok, where he plans to meet up with a friend and to confront this White Lotus’s co-owner, Jim Hollinger.
In this episode, Rick confirms something “White Lotus” viewers probably assumed: Hollinger murdered his father. According to the story Rick’s mom told him, his dad was “a do-gooder” who came to Thailand on a humanitarian mission and tried to stop a crooked American from stealing the locals’ land. Rick tells Chelsea he just needs to look this thieving, murdering jerk in the eye, for closure.
But do we believe that? We still don’t know who Rick really is, or even how he can afford to book accommodations at a White Lotus. My assumption is that he is — or was — a well-paid criminal. But he has nothing in common with the shady bozos on Gary’s boat, whose own crimes seem to involve hiding money from various governments.
This is one of the recurring themes of this series, the idea that anyone with a lot of money has either broken the law or regularly hangs out with those who have. Victoria certainly senses this. Later, back at the resort, she calls the yacht party “a convention for con men and tax cheats” and wonders aloud whether anyone on the boat was a killer. Those kinds of people are “very real,” she warns Piper, echoing the comment she made a couple of episodes ago about the world being full of “scammers” — and making me wonder just what kind of secrets Victoria might have in her past.
Victoria also tells Piper that she is “lucky to have a father who’s an actual boy scout” — which is darkly funny given that we have spent four episodes now watching this supposedly righteous man fall apart privately over a sleazy business deal. Tim Ratliff, whose grandfather was the governor of North Carolina and who boasts about clean living, is now regularly raiding Victoria’s Lorazepam supply and perhaps contemplating suicide. In fact, when he sees Gaitok’s new pistol sitting unprotected at the gate station, Tim steals it, in a sequence that puts a knot of dread in the viewer’s stomach.
Why is Tim so certain his life is over? That’s because after he gets off the yacht, he retrieves his phone from Pam and discovers that his iffy business partner Kenny Nguyen is cooperating with the feds.
Tim talks to his lawyer about moving money around in order to avoid being convicted of fraud and seeing his career destroyed. The lawyer lets Tim know that he has completely misapprehended the situation. Saving his business? That ship has sailed. Holding onto his fortune? His assets are frozen. The question now is how much jail time he will serve — unless he is willing to do something truly radical and un-Tim-like.
And who knows? Maybe he will. Tim’s whole life has been rooted in propriety, but this trip seems to be changing him. At the start of this episode, loopy on Lorazepam, Tim sits so casually in his robe that he exposes his genitalia to his family. Later, chatting with Gary on the yacht, he asks about an old saying he heard once: that visitors to Thailand are either looking for something or hiding from something.
In a haunted tone, familiar to fans of Mike White’s work, Tim tells Gary: “I’m just on vacation with my family. But you never know.”
Concierge Service
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Dr. Amrita continues to reach out to Rick, insisting she can teach him to let go of that anger always bubbling inside him. Rick is moved by her concern, but it does not stop him from boarding a plane to Bangkok — or from snapping at the thoughtless hippie whose backpack bumps him at the airport.
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On the yacht, Piper informs Lochlan that when they get back to the resort, she plans to tell their parents at dinner about her plan to live with the monks in Thailand. She wants Lochlan — her closest sibling — to back her up. But perhaps because he is hurt by the thought of her disappearing from his life, Lochlan skips the dinner altogether and stays on the boat with Saxon to party with models and show off his amateur magician skills. The youngest Ratliff remains something of an enigma.
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It is a relatively quiet week for Belinda, though we do see her on a computer, searching urgently for information about what happened to Tanya in Season 2 — and about who this “Gary” really is. More ominously: At the end of this episode, we see Gary/Greg on his own computer, looking up Belinda.
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