There’s something in the water. Or someone. That’s the sensation the opening shot of this episode of The White Lotus gives us: We’re bobbing up and down on the ocean, dipping beneath the waves and then rising up again, gazing at the dark shore through the eyes of…no one, as it turns out. There’s no one out there spying on the hotel and its patrons — no one except creator-writer-director Mike White and his camera. Somehow, that’s even creepier. 

In lingering shots like this one, or the long interstitials between scenes showing us the flora and fauna and statues that surround the action, White creates the sense that there’s some animating spirit behind the camera, an unknown intelligence observing the events as they unfold for reasons we cannot understand. What’s more, these lovely, eerie shots routinely whisk us away from the world of these rich, egotistical assholes, instead showing us a world where their dreams and schemes mean nothing. It’s a mesmerizing effect, one the show has utilized in the past but never nearly this well.

The White Lotus feels like a more serious show now than it has in the past, too. Or I dunno, maybe it feels exactly the same and I’m projecting because I like this season more than the others so far. But from where I’m sitting it now comes across like a drama with the occasional funny moment, rather than a comedy that gets serious every once in a while. It seems like a minor distinction, but it makes all the difference in the world for the characters: In a comedy their primary function is to deliver a punchline every 30 seconds or so, with other considerations secondary. In this season, I really feel like I’m watching people’s lives unfold, weird as those lives may be.

Take Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie, the trio of beautiful fortysomething besties reunited after however many years. In many ways they’re the most overtly comedic grouping, handing out backhanded compliments like Halloween candy and radiating smiley phoniness like miniature suns who’s somehow learned to tell you you look in-CRED-ible, sweetie. They do at least seem genuine when they encourage Laurie to have sex with their hunky Russian health mentor, Valentin (Arnas Fedaravičius).

But I think there’s something sincerely sad in how they cut each other down, pairing by pairing, based on whoever’s unlucky enough not to be in the room with them at the time. One minute, Kate is greedily gossiping with Jaclyn about Laurie’s messy divorce and failure to make partner at her job; the next, she’s telling Laurie that the narcissistic Jaclyn’s cosmetic procedures make it look like she sandblasted her face. Not to be corny, but they’re each trapped in a careerist, materialistic, diet-and-booze-and-botox cage of their own creation. 

The problem facing the Ratliff kids is that their cage was created by their parents. Their mother, Victoria, pops pills by the handful and seems deliberately hostile to any human interaction outside her family. (Kate, who realizes they’d spent a weekend together at a baby shower, tries and spectacularly fails to befriend her.) Their father, Tim, is involved in an as yet unspecified white-collar crime that has his co-conspirator ready to kill himself rather than go to prison for. (This episode was filmed before the Trump/Musk administration declared white collar crimes legal.) So the children fend for themselves emotionally, with Saxton’s grotesque, leering, occasionally incestuous horniness egged on by their mother and starting to infect younger brother Lochlan too. It leaves Piper, who gets leered at enough by strangers not to want to have to deal with it from her brothers, with little recourse but to kvetch about the cheesiness of the accommodations. 

As for Rick and Chelsea, he’s mostly concerned with following the hotel’s co-owner Sritala — whose musical performance the fortysomething trio fawn over after dinner — to Bangkok, where she plans to meet her husband. It’s all very international-assassin if you ask me. In the meantime he’s got Chelsea to keep him busy, which she does in part by getting held up in a daring smash-and-grab robbery of the hotel’s boutique. The hug he gives her after the fact is maybe the only time he shows her sincere affection rather than condescension and contempt , at least when her clothes are on. (Boy, their sexual chemistry is nuts!) Rick does, however, seem to recognize something of a kindred spirit in Gary, the murderous boyfriend of Chelsea’s new sex-worker buddy Chloe. Both men are in the “this and that” trade — a very popular trade in Thailand, according to Greg. 

This leaves us with the employees. Gaitok the security guard has a rough day. His lighthearted but still heartfelt confession of his feelings for his coworker Mook — hard to blame him for that, as she seems very nice and is being played by Lisa from Blackpink — gets gently rebuffed over lunch. Later, the burglars pistol whip him to make their escape. At least this last bit earns him some sympathy from Mook, and some admiration too. The guy really is brave, and that’s an appealing quality.

So too is having a body that looks carved out of wood and the healing hands of Aragorn son of Arathorn. Fortunately for Belinda, visiting the hotel for three months of relaxation and training, her advisor Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul) has both. When he approaches her for a massage wearing only boxer briefs and asks if she’d like him “on my back or on my stomach,” she replies “on my stomach” before quickly correcting herself. Well, “correcting” herself — that was a Freudian slip if ever I’ve heard one. 

So yeah, The White Lotus is funny when it wants to be. But it’s like a cloud hangs over this whole show. Maybe it’s best observed in the scene where Rick attends a therapy session with Amrita (Shalini Peiris), whom we first saw in the flash-forward that began the season. Again, there’s something genuinely sad about Rick here, a man whose resting stress level is eight out of ten, a man unable to think of a time before he felt this stress because his mother was a junkie who overdosed when he was ten and his father was murdered before he was born. 

When Amrita assures him that meditation can help him break free of the identity he’s formed for himself based on these events, Rick — via Walton Goggins, one of the most persuasive small-screen actors of the century — tells her “I never had an identity.” She stares at him as he continues: “I don’t need to detach. I’m already nothing.” She replies that even being nothing can be an illusion you tell yourself. Then he says one of the goddamnedest things about trauma and abuse I’ve ever heard. “If nobody puts gas in the tank, the tank is empty. That’s not an illusion. The car won’t start. And nothing comes from nothing, right?”

That little speech packs a real wallop. That opening shot from the water does too. Kate turning on Jaclyn after badmouthing Laurie with her. Saxton slowly warping the rest of the family around his boundless, amoral arousal. The sudden intrusion of reality in the form of a masked gunman into what Piper describes as a Disney World for Malibu bohemians in Lululemon yoga pants. Watching Rick and Chelsea’s antagonism dissolve away as he puts his mouth on her nipple. The digital blue sheen to the night that only seems to accompany Tim as he barks into his cellphone. Jaclyn’s almost Lynchian retreat into the deep focus of her hotel room, resplendent in a Valentino minidress that even now her friends are probably mocking. This thing has real artistic life, and it’s made this long-time White Lotus skeptic a believer.

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.