Keep Your Friends Close and Enemies Closer

This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The White Lotus, “Killer Instincts,” which is now streaming on Max. 

If this were one of the previous White Lotus seasons, it would be finale week right now. We would know who the dead body was that Zion saw drifting in the pond, we would know the identity and motive of the active shooter(s), what the real story is between Rick and Jim, how the other Ratliffs will respond to Tim’s news — assuming any of them survive the trip — and all the rest. 

Instead, Mike White got HBO to agree to make eight episodes of The White Lotus instead of seven this year. And at the risk of losing my title as spokesman for the “Make TV seasons longer, dammit!” movement, more hasn’t been more with Lotus Season Three. Rather than use the extra time to go deeper into each storyline, it feels like White has just been repeating certain beats over and over, in case we didn’t quite understand that the three friends have been having the same arguments for decades, or that Victoria doesn’t care for anything about the world outside of her immediate social circle. And several other subplots, like the ones involving Belinda and Gaitok, have barely gotten going at all. 

As the penultimate chapter of this slightly extended season, “Killer Instincts” should feel like every conflict is finally coming to a full boil. And to be fair, it’s not without significant events (Rick confronts Jim, Greg offers to pay Belinda to go away) and revelations (Gaitok figures out, as some viewers already guessed, that Valentin’s buddies were the thieves who robbed the resort and beat him up). But it never feels like momentum is building towards anything big, even though we know there will be gunplay in the finale. It’s an episode with two different subplots about incestuous desire, that also features a drug-fueled orgy and a Muay Thai fight, yet it all seems to be marking time, rarely in exciting ways. 

This season is rife with talk of transformation: Piper wants to turn into the opposite of the person her mother raised her to be, Frank wishes he could be a ladyboy, Chelsea thinks she can change Rick into something other than the wall of pain she hasn’t been able to penetrate. But the only way Lotus has changed is that it’s longer, and slower. 

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Let’s take it group by group, though there’s a bit more overlap than usual this week: 

The gang at Greg’s house

A good chunk of the cast winds up at Gary/Greg’s house for a party that’s really cover for him to accomplish two things: one, offer Belinda a $100,000 bribe so she won’t report him to the Italian authorities; and two, get Chloe to talk Saxon into participating in his very specific fetish, where they will play the role of his mother and father, and he will play the role of little boy Greg watching them have sex — and, in this fantasy version, eventually getting to sleep with “mom” himself. Greg may have all of Tanya’s money, but he can’t get what he wants on this particular evening. 

Though Belinda is rightly terrified of him, she also doesn’t feel right taking money to cover up a murder, even of someone who once badly screwed her over. Zion wisely tries to convince her to take it, if only to protect herself (she could always give it to charity if she finds it so distasteful), but she doesn’t seem likely to budge. And Saxon, still wracked with disgust and self-loathing over realizing that his brother gave him a hand job on Greg’s boat, wants nothing to do with participating in another man’s incest fantasy. In the face of these rejections, Greg comes across less menacing than pathetically impotent, but we know what he did to get his hands on Tanya’s fortune, so we can’t entirely rule him out as the shooter yet. 

It’s an eventful night for Saxon, who has finally started to recognize that something is very, very wrong with his father(*). For a moment, it seems as if our resident narcissist might have the ability to care about someone other than himself — albeit only someone else within his immediate family — but in short order, it becomes clear that Saxon’s sole concern is finding out how Tim’s problem is going to affect Saxon. He knows he’s a nepo baby (and is even played by a second-generation actor), and has made peace with that, but that means he has no life outside of being Tim’s son — which is not the ideal sentiment to be expressing at a moment when his drug-addled father is already entertaining murder-suicide fantasies involving Victoria.    

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(*) Victoria remains oblivious, of course, though Parker Posey gets one of the night’s funnier lines, when Victoria becomes convinced one of the trophy girlfriends at the party is being held against her will, and assures her, “I could get you out of this.”    

Saxon does show some ability to be flexible, though seemingly more as a move than out of any genuine impulse. Fed up with Chelsea constantly belittling him, he argues that he’s at least as capable of transforming as she naively believes Rick to be. “I’m not just one thing,” he insists. “I mean, I could be something else if I wanted.” Chelsea is willing to entertain the possibility, but not in the way he wants, offering him a brief meditation lesson and a stack of self-help books that he will never, ever read. 

Piper and Lochlan

Saxon’s not the only Ratliff sibling still caught up in incest drama, though it’s a bit fuzzier in this case. Only hours after realizing the nature of his night with Chloe and Saxon, Lochlan announces to Piper that he’d like to follow her lead and also spend the next year at the meditation center. Perhaps it’s a way to put thousands of miles between himself and Saxon — and thus between any real consideration of what they did together. Perhaps it’s a way to avoid having to choose between going to Duke or UNC, and how he fears each parent might react if he picks the other’s alma mater. 

Or perhaps, having already broken one of society’s biggest taboos with his brother, Lochlan feels less guilty about exploring it with his sister? 

The other explanations seem more likely. Piper definitely seems unnerved by Lochlan’s idea, and perhaps also by his weird body language as he tells her about it. But it could just be that her transformation plan doesn’t work if anyone else from her family — even her beloved and seemingly innocent little brother — is there with her. She loves Lochlan, in a way she doesn’t seem to love anyone else in her family, but not in a way where she’d want him to glom onto her master plan to reinvent her whole life.   

Rick and Frank

Arguably, this should be the hour’s centerpiece: Rick finally comes face-to-face with the man he believes murdered his father and ruined his life. And it’s certainly tense, though that has more to do with the performances of Walton Goggins, Sam Rockwell, Scott Glenn(*), and Lek Patravadi than with White’s choice to precede each scene of this subplot with a glimpse of the Muay Thai fight several other characters are attending. The stress of pretending to be a big film director, and having to fake knowledge of Sritala’s filmography with zero briefing from Rick, sends Frank leaping off the wagon so quickly, the wagon may as well have been drenched in whiskey and set on fire. (That, or Frank himself has been drenched in whiskey far more recently than he suggested.) And after the old friends race out of the house, Frank spends the rest of the night acting like he has a whole lot of sex and drugs and booze to catch up on, as quickly as he possibly can. (Given what he told Rick about how his ladyboy phase tied into his other addictions, chances seem high that the night won’t end until he’s revisited that fantasy.) 

(*) Glenn is in his mid-eighties, but he’s spent much of his career defying his age. In his mid-seventies, he was still kicking ass onscreen as Daredevil’s martial arts mentor on Netflix, for instance. Age finally seems to have caught up to him here, but that seems more about the performance — and Jim’s use of a cane — than Glenn himself. Less than a year ago, he looked pretty hale and hearty as Vince Vaughn’s dad on Apple’s Bad Monkey.   

But the actual confrontation between Rick and Jim largely failed to live up to the hype, and to the presence of these two great actors. Mostly, it played like setup for whatever Jim tried and failed to tell Rick while Rick was too busy monologuing to let the old man get a word in edgewise. But Jim’s reaction to the name of Rick’s mother wasn’t that of a man who had murdered this woman’s husband, but that of a man who had been intimate with her. 

Rick at least throws away the gun Frank got him, so there’s one less weapon to factor into whatever mayhem is coming in the finale. 

Gaitok and Mook

Up until this point, Lalisa Manobal seemed to be in this season more for HBO’s marketing purposes than because White seemed interested in her as an actor or Mook as a character. There’s still not a ton for her to play here, but at least we finally get a clearer sense of how Mook feels about her old pal Gaitok, when she implies that the only way out of the friend zone is to punch his way out. When Gaitok admits that he doesn’t have the killer instinct, and that violence seems antithetical to his beliefs as a Buddhist, he is clearly hoping that Mook will find this endearing. Instead, she encourages him to embrace the concept, because “it’s human to fight.” And soon they’re at the big fight, and having a grand old time — at least, until Gaitok recognizes Valentin’s buddies as the jewel thieves who caused him so much trouble earlier in the week. 

That knowledge gives Gaitok a shot at professional redemption, and also at impressing the woman of his dreams, even if she doesn’t seem crazy about the man he actually is. Given how many other things he’s messed up this week, and what we know is coming, any attempt to play hero seems likely to go poorly for Gaitok — and possibly for many of the guests. 

Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie

There’s some fun stuff here, particularly once Laurie bails on her friends to see the fight with Valentin and the guys, then goes home with Aleksei. She finally gets the vacation fling Jaclyn claimed to want for her, but it of course turns out to be another bad choice. Aleksei is just using her to try to swindle her out of $10,000. Worse, his angry girlfriend shows up while they’re in bed, and Laurie has to scramble to get dressed, jump out the window (but only after she gets a look at the jewels Aleksei and Vlad stole from the hotel), and then flag down a cab to get back to the relatively sanity of the resort. 

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Like Rick confronting Jim, though, the argument among the three women underwhelms. It feels only slightly more hostile than the passive-aggressive barbs they’ve been hurling at each other throughout the season, and in the process both they and the scene ignores poor Fabian’s debut musical performance. It seems a poor payoff to that particular running gag. 

Predictions

At the moment, the only characters we know have ready access to guns are Gaitok, Aleksei, and Vlad (and presumably Valentin). Greg can almost certainly pay someone to arrive and shoot at people, and Frank could likely scrounge up a gun if he sobers up in time. The most likely explanation for the shooting involves Gaitok versus the thieves. Will White zag when we’re expecting a zig? The series has generally been excellent with its finales (I was mixed on the second season, but its last episode was great), so hopefully some big surprises, laughs, and/or emotions are in store. But maybe seven episodes would be just fine next time?