The highest compliment I can pay this season of The White Lotus is this: When Tim Ratliff opened this episode by blowing his brains out, I bought it. When his wife Victoria discovered his body and began screaming in grief and agony, I bought it. When Piper, their daughter, raced in to see what was the matter only to be devastated in turn, I bought it. I fully believed that what was once a sort of low-effort wealth comedy had become a tragedy.
What’s more, I believed that writer-director Mike White was perfectly capable of pulling the trigger, so to speak — not just in general, not just in the finale, but right now, at the start of Episode 6, with three full hours of TV ahead of us before the closing credits roll on the season. I was fully on board with the idea that not only was White capable of taking away a main character and making it really hurt — the previous deaths on the show came at the end of what amounted to gross-out comedy sequences — but that he’d do so abruptly and unexpectedly enough for it to come as a genuine shock. I didn’t see it coming, but I didn’t see Sam Rockwell’s monologue or Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s amazing new theme music coming either.
Now, it turns out that this is only a morbid fantasy in Tim’s head as he thinks through the ramifications of killing himself and letting his beloved family find him like that. But the tsunami dream from earlier in the season was just that, a dream, and its discomfiting power has lingered all season long. The physical stakes in this week’s opening scene turn out to be illusory, but the emotional stakes are real, and high.
But you probably just wanna talk about the incest, don’t you. You’re incorrigible.
After much nudging and teasing and hinting around, this episode finally goes there. It reveals that not only did Saxton Ratliff and his kid brother Lochlan make out at Chloe and Chelsea’s behest during their all-night rager, but also that Saxton was in bed with Lochlan, watching as he lost his virginity to Chloe and receiving a handjob from his baby brother while he was in the act.
Both brothers were so fucked up when it happened that the memories are hazy, if they’re even there at all. Saxon remembers jerking off in bed with Lochlan and Chloe right away, and he’s horrified, though relieved to hear that Lochlan remembers basically nothing. Saxon certainly isn’t going to fill him in!
But during a typically antagonistic conversation with Saxon later that morning, Chloe reveals the extent of his and Lochie’s liaison. Chelsea, meanwhile, cruelly but at least somewhat accurately calls him soulless, which is why she couldn’t cheat on her “soulmate” Rick to hook up with the guy. And oh, by the way, Chloe’s sinister boyfriend Gary/Greg is either into it enough to invite both brothers to his dinner party that night, or luring them to their deaths. (Considering another invitation he extends elsewhere in the episode, the latter may be more likely.) Yeah, not a good day for Saxon, all around.
For a bit, anyway, it seems like Lochlan dodges the Saxon/Chloe/Chelsea clusterfuck. He travels with Piper and their parents to the Buddhist meditation center where she’d like to spend a year training, so that her folks can make sure it’s not a cult or whatever. It’s clear Victoria’s plan is to shitcan the idea no matter what, which she proceeds to start trying to do by taking a tour of the grounds on her own. This leaves Tim, bombed out of his skull on lorazepam, to talk to the head of the order, a bookish and bespectacled fellow played by Suthichai Yoon, about…
…well, that’s where it gets tricky. He laments that he doesn’t understand Piper’s choice, and the monk replies that many young Americans come here fleeing their homeland’s “spiritual malaise.” In the United States, everyone is cut off from both nature and each other, leaving only the self behind; this devolves into a state of affairs where everyone is left frantically running from pain to seek pleasure, only to discover more pain. “You cannot outrun pain,” he tells Tim, who needs to hear it.
I’m not sure he needs to hear the next bit. Before he leaves, Tim asks what happens when we die, and his unlikely instructor tells him it’s like returning to a vast ocean of consciousness after a spending a lifetime separated from it like a single water droplet flung up into the air. “Death is a happy return,” he says, “like coming home.” Again, not sure Tim’s in the right frame of mind to be hearing this right now!
But the man’s words win Tim over, most likely because of all the Ratliffs, he alone knows their relentless pursuit of pleasure, via money and the “creature comforts” as he puts it, is about to come to a catastrophic end the moment they all pick their phones back up. Victoria doesn’t want to hear it. “She needs to fear poverty, Tim, like everyone else we know,” she states outright. “That way she’ll make good decisions.” Yikes.
Tim replies that it’s better to toughen the kids up, you know, because what if they lost everything? “If we did, honestly, I don’t know if I’d wanna live,” Victoria responds to Tim’s horror. “At this age, I don’t think I’m mean to live an uncomfortable life. I just don’t have it in me. I don’t think I ever did.” You cannot outrun pain, Victoria!
Just ask the reunion trio. Kate spots Valentin leaving Jaclyn’s rooms the morning after their big night out, and rats her out to Laurie as soon as she can. Though Kate insists she thought Laurie would just find it funny, her friend quietly loses her shit instead. Clearly, this is not the first time Jaclyn has done the whole “Oh, you two would be great together!” thing to Laurie while secretly going after the guy herself, if Laurie’s constant invocation of the idea that no one changes and that they’re still the people they were in 10th grade is anything to go by. They’ve been trying to outrun that particular pain for 30 years to no avail!
Belinda can’t stay ahead of her own past either. In one case, it really isn’t so bad: It’s awkward that her newly arrived son, Zion, catches her still in bed with her hunky colleague Pornchai, but the kid’s more happy for her than anything else. What’s really worrying her is the continued presence of Greg. Yes, he’s a reminder of how her grand plans with his late wife Tanya went belly-up, which is part of what makes her so trepidatious when Pornchai suggests they finally make good on her dream and open up a spa together. But mostly it’s because she’s afraid he’s gonna kill her.
By now Belinda’s security concerns have been completely blown off by hotel manager Fabian. He’s more worried about making his musical debut at the restaurant later that night; “Break a leg! Break ‘em both!” Belinda wishes him, and I leave what she really means up to you to interpret. So she’s now alone against the wicked widower, who descends from the hilltop to invite her to his dinner party. Could that be the gunfire from the flash forward in the premiere erupts, as Greg takes out all his problems in one fell swoop?
Speaking of guns, Rick lies to his pal Frank and brings his piece to their rendezvous with Sritala Hollinger, the White Lotus’s co-owner, and her husband, Jim. Maybe Rick isn’t sure if he’s there to confront the man about how he ruined Rick’s life by killing his father, or if he’s there simply to kill him over it. Judging from the dazed expression on his face as he gets his first good look at Jim in the flesh (Jim stays off camera for this, but we get an eyeful of Rick getting an eyeful), I think he’s still working it out. At any rate it’s unclear how long his and Frank’s ruse that they’re Hollywood big shots who’ve come to recruit Sritala for the role of a lifetime can hold up.
About the only character who seems — seems — to outrun the pain this week is Gaitok. The genial security guard has his first big date with his beautiful and kind coworker Mook at day’s end, and it honestly seems she’s even more excited about it than he is. First, however, he has to reclaim his gun from Tim’s room before a) the Ratliffs return from their various outings, and b) his boss (Yothin Udomsanit) takes him to the gun range for target practice at the end of his shift. In a marvelously staged scene, he frantically searches the family’s rooms, creating a real race-against-time sensation — only to gaze at the chest of two dozen or so tiny drawers Tim stashed the gun in and guess the right one right away. It’s such a cathartic moment it feels like you found the damn gun.
And it turns out Gaitok is a crack shot. He fires killshot after killshot into his paper target, impressing his boss, though the man still wonders if Gaitok has the “killer instinct.” Fresh off his multiple bullseyes, Gaitok asserts that yes, he does. Even knowing what little we know about what’s coming, I’m not convinced he’s better off that way.
There’s one key element I didn’t mention that’s as crucial in this episode as any one performance: Composer Cristobel Tapia de Veer’s incredible score. It’s like a living, breathing presence in this thing — at times just a low bass rumble, at times a music-box twinkle, at times a stings-on-the-strings horror-movie soundtrack, and during one memorable stretch virtually an extended edition of the opening theme itself. It’s as vital to this episode as Aimee Lou Wood smilingly dressing down Patrick Schwarzenegger when Saxon approaches Chelsea at the pool, or Jason Isaacs stumbling bass-ackwards into enlightenment through guilt and Ativan as Tim, or Patravadi Mejudhon portraying Sritala as a woman allowing obvious con men to prey on her ego, or Tayme Thapthimthong portraying Gaitok as so nice it’s actually nervewracking. Even with this episode’s allusions to “monkey mind” and the “ocean of consciousness” paying off two of Mike White’s photographic obsessions this season, the music is still the stylistic element that plays the biggest role this week in creating an atmosphere of mystery, magic, and dread. When you say a show succeeds on every level, this is the kind of thing you mean.
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.