‘The White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 6 Recap: Drunken Mistakes and Disturbing Daydreams

This week’s episode of “The White Lotus” Season 3 begins with a bang, but not really.

Picking up not long after its predecessor, Tim (Jason Isaacs) promptly shoots himself in the head. The gunshot wakes Victoria (Parker Posey), whose screams over her husband’s body attract their daughter, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), who begins to scream and cry right alongside her mother. It is a viscerally upsetting moment, and a bit of a cheat on the part of “White Lotus” creator Mike White, who reveals that it is nothing more than a fantasy from a still suicidal Tim. Realizing the havoc his suicide would wreak, he decides to live for at least one more day and stashes the gun he stole from Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) in a (very easy to find) cabinet drawer.

When he goes back to bed, Victoria assures him that Piper is going to get over her Thailand gap-year fantasy once they get back to Durham. Tim, who could not seem to care less about his daughter’s plans, tells his wife, “I’m not worried in the slightest.” Whether Victoria realizes it or not, the two have likely never been further apart than they are right now, and every exactly-the-wrong-thing-to-say remark she makes only widens the gap between them. Unfortunately, Lochlan (Sam Nivola) and Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) have literally never been closer. Following their drunken, drugged-out full-moon party with Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), Saxon wakes up naked in the same bed as his also-nude younger brother.

Saxon tries to shake off the weirdness of that moment, but he is not able to do so for long. Memories start to come back to him — much to his horror — from his and Lochy’s threesome with Chloe. At first, he thinks he masturbated to the sight of Chloe and Lochlan getting it on next to him, and that alone is enough to make him throw up in a toilet. When he is later informed by Chloe that he wasn’t getting himself off but that Lochlan was actually pulling, um, double duty, Saxon is sent into a tailspin. Schwarzenegger plays his character’s quickly escalating disgust and discomfort with the perfect mix of over-the-top yet absolutely reasonable horror.

All the while, Chelsea just gets to sit by and drop one-liners like, “God, I don’t think there’s a drug in the world that would make me get with my brother.”

Gotta be gangster around here

Speaking of troubling discoveries, Kate (Leslie Bibb) sees Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) sneaking Valentin (Arnas Fedaravicius) out the morning after their late-night tryst and doesn’t even let breakfast pass to tell Laurie (Carrie Coon). After having been pushed into pursuing Valentin by Jaclyn, Laurie is understandably irked by her friend’s narcissistic behavior. “She has not changed at all,” she says. (Coon, an actress always down to throw her whole body into a performance, starts her rant against Jaclyn while aggressively cutting and eating up a fruit plate.) When Laurie later confronts Jaclyn, her friend deflects, saying that nothing happened between her and Valentin, which seems … unlikely. Jaclyn tries to turn the tables on Laurie and Kate, acting as if the former has no reason to be upset with her. And in trying to avoid any confrontation, Kate* only leaves both Laurie and Jaclyn feeling more alone.

Things are not any warmer over on Chloe’s side of the boat. Her morning is spent worrying about what Gary/Greg (Jon Gries) will do to her for cheating on him. “Gary’s going to dump me. Or worse,” she tells Chelsea, who assures her, “There are way better options out there than Gary.” Chloe is not interested in trying to find another lucrative life with someone else, though. While she bribes the boat’s deckhands not to rat her out, Greg immediately confronts her when she returns to his mansion, calling her a liar and demanding that she tell him which of the Ratliff brothers she slept with. When Chloe, sporting one of the worst poker faces ever, refuses to do so, he tells her to invite whoever it was over for dinner. “I want to have people over tonight,” he says. “I need to deal with something and I need your help.”

Like Saxon and Chloe, Belinda’s (Natasha Rothwell) morning gets off to an awkward start when her son Zion (Nicholas Duvernay) finally arrives in Thailand only to walk in on his mom still in bed with Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul). Later, during breakfast, Zion laments his non-existent romantic life. In response, Belinda offers some advice, ripped straight out of “Scarface.” “First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the woman,” she says. “So what? You getting gangster on me now?” he jokes back, recognizing the line. “Gotta get gangster around here,” she says, referencing her growing paranoia about Greg. She declines to tell her son what she means, and his questioning is interrupted by Fabian (Christian Friedel), who invites Belinda to watch him sing at dinner later that night. (Read the room, Fabian. Read the room.)

*Bibb, for the record, gets the line of the episode. When Coon’s Laurie insists that she has to say something to Jaclyn because to not would be fake, Kate counters, “One person’s fake is another person’s, you know, good manners.”

An uncomfortable life

Piper does not have the same regrets as many of the episode’s characters, but she does have something to dread this week, as she is forced to bring her mother and father with her to meet the nearby monastery’s head monk, Luang Por Teera (Suthichai Yoon). After he agrees to meet with her parents, Tim goes in alone. When Tim expresses confusion over Piper’s desire to move to Thailand, the monk tells him, “Many young people come here from your country. I think because, maybe, spiritual malaise.” His words about the inability to escape pain and the empty pleasures of “chasing money” resonate deeply with Tim, whose impending arrest has left him questioning his future, his past decisions and the way he has spent his life. So, before he goes, Tim asks Luang Por Teera the real question that has been eating away at him ever since his near-suicide the previous night: “What do you think happens when we die?”

“When you’re born, you are like a single drop of water, flying upward, separated from the one, giant consciousness,” the monk offers. “You die, you land back into the water, become one with the ocean again. No more separated. No more suffering.” His words are intercut with close-ups of Tim’s desperate face and slow-motion images of waves rolling and splashing. It is a moment of spiritual beauty that is different from much of “The White Lotus,” which spends most of its time conjuring images of excess and wealth. It is enough to make Tim give Piper his permission to move to the monastery, as well as, perhaps, make him even more interested in killing himself and ending his own “suffering.” Victoria tells Piper she will only agree to her plan if she spends one night living like a monk in the monastery. Piper agrees, but she is also relieved when Lochlan offers to stay with her. (That turns out to be a mistake when the monastery’s meditation session causes him to remember the details of his threesome with Saxon and Chloe.)

Back at the Ratliffs’ suite, Posey gets to deliver more laugh-worthy heaters, including, “She [Piper] needs to fear poverty, Tim! Like everyone else we know. That way she’ll make good decisions.” Things take another dark turn when Victoria admits that she would not want to live anymore if their family were to lose their wealth. “Why would you say that?” Tim asks, hurt and confused. “I just don’t think, at this age, I’m meant to live an uncomfortable life,” Victoria confesses with the nonchalance of a person who does not think she will ever lose what she has. In doing so, she alters Tim’s next suicidal daydream, in which he imagines first mercy-killing her in her sleep before shooting himself in the head.

We know that the vision is fake, because Gaitok successfully manages to steal his gun back from Tim’s suite while the Ratliffs are away, but it is distressing all the same. If only because it represents a shift in Tim’s thinking. Now, he is no longer just thinking about inflicting violence upon himself, but also others.

Killer instinct

Gaitok is able to make it out of the Ratliffs’ suite just as Tim and Victoria are walking back, but the former does not notice the gatekeeper leaving and, therefore, is unaware that he no longer possesses his suicidal tool of choice. Gaitok gets it back just in time, too, as his boss takes him to the gun range after his shift for shooting practice, which Gaitok turns out to be surprisingly great at. (Or not so surprisingly if, like a few “White Lotus” fans, you think the friendly, lovestruck gatekeeper is more dangerous than he seems.) Near the end of his shooting session, Gaitok’s supervisor asks him if he has the “killer instinct” necessary to be “fierce” enough at his job. “I think so,” Gaitok says, and he is not the only “White Lotus” Season 3 character with a dangerous killer instinct. There is, of course, also Greg.

The widowed murderous husband of Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) scares Belinda by approaching her out of nowhere at the White Lotus resort and inviting her to the same dinner party at his house that night that Saxon, Tim and Victoria are all set to attend. “I think we should talk,” he says, leaving plenty of unspoken assumptions hanging in the air. While Belinda tries to deflect by telling him that her son is visiting, Greg tells her to just bring Zion along, leaving her with nothing to do but return to her suite shaking in enough fear for her son to notice. The already uncomfortable spot she has found herself in is, to put it simply, starting to get tighter and more frightening. Rick (Walton Goggins), meanwhile, finally executes his plan to meet Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn).

He does so by first convincing Sritala (Lek Patravadi) to agree to a visit at her home, and then by talking Frank (a returning, welcome Sam Rockwell) into pretending to be the director of a fake movie he has told Sritala about. While he promises a hesitant Frank that he won’t bring the gun he gave him to the meeting, Frank notices a gun-shaped item hidden in Rick’s inner suit pocket just before they get off the boat in front of Sritala and Jim’s compound. The episode ends with Sritala introducing herself and her husband, who remains just out of focus and out of frame, to Frank, all while Rick takes a few moments to stare at the man he believes robbed him of a happy life before entering his home.

He might say otherwise, but murder definitely seems to be on Rick’s mind, and he is not the only “White Lotus” character this season you can say that about now.

“The White Lotus” airs Sundays on HBO and Max.

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