This post contains spoilers for the new episode of The White Lotus, “Full Moon Party,” which is now streaming on Max.
The first half of White Lotus Season Three was fairly methodical, and at times even restrained, in establishing the new characters and setting up their conflicts with one another. Yes, there was isolated weirdness like the incest vibes between the Ratliff siblings, or Rick’s failed attempt to orchestrate a snake jailbreak. But on the whole, this season has been lighter on the crazy than at this respective stage of the first two seasons.
We can’t quite say that after “Full Moon Party.” Picking up only an hour or two after the events of last week’s episode, it puts most of the characters into more heightened, debauched, or intense situations, as ideas that have been simmering all season get closer to a boil.
As usual, we’re breaking it all down by groups of characters, though this week the groupings are different, including the surprising addition of a new character, played by an Oscar-winning guest star whose involvement in the season was kept secret by HBO until now. In fact, let’s start there, with…
Rick and Frank
Meet Rick’s old pal Frank, played by Sam Rockwell, who is married to Leslie Bibb, who plays Kate. Presumably, the couple turned the shoot into a family trip to Thailand(*), and if you’re Mike White and you have Sam Rockwell hanging around nearby, aren’t you going to try to use him?
(*) A few years ago, something similar happened with the Hulu miniseries Candy, where Justin Timberlake and Jason Ritter wound up playing small roles because they were at the Texas location to spend time with their wives, Jessica Biel and Melanie Lynskey, who were in the lead roles.
On the one hand, Rockwell’s big scene seems exactly like that: like White had unexpected, if perhaps limited, access to a great actor, and decided to just give him a showpiece monologue because he could. Frank is obviously a part of whatever revenge scheme Rick is planning for Sritala’s husband Jim. In the moment, though, he is here to deliver a long, continually surprising monologue about how his decadent lifestyle eventually led him to first become obsessed with Thai ladyboys, and then obsessed with the idea of becoming one — or, at least, being treated like one periodically. It’s not wholly unconnected from what’s happened earlier in the season — Saxon already cracked his own ladyboy jokes — but it nonetheless feels as if the speech should be preceded by White coming on set to address the audience with, “Ladies and gentlemen… Mr. Sam Rockwell!”
On the other hand, the speech is not only the highlight of the episode, but perhaps of the entire season to date. Sometimes, you just want to sit back and let a talent like Rockwell cook, especially if he’s given such strange and specific material to deliver.
Who knows, maybe Frank’s exploration of gender and sexuality, and his struggles with celibacy in the wake of those, will somehow come into play once Frank gets to meet the man who either murdered his father or is his father.
Chelsea, Chloe, and the Ratliff brothers
Having sent Victoria, Tim, and Piper back to dry land, Saxon and Lochlan keep hanging around with Chelsea and Chloe, convinced they will prove irresistible to the women if they ply them with enough drink. Saxon keeps trying to indoctrinate his kid brother into the disgusting, self-serving philosophy he’s built his own life around — most people “just want to be used,” for instance — but for the moment, Lochlan seems more thoughtful than Saxon wants him to be. When Lochlan wonders whether life is a test to see if we can become better people, Saxon is flummoxed by an idea that flies in the face of everything he believes about himself, and, thus, about the entire universe.
This subplot is a bit lighter on incident than the others, though Saxon does let the women — in part because he finds Chelsea “so fucking rude to me it turns me on” — talk him into taking a pill of unknown origin, and we see them all feeling the effects as the evening goes on.
Fabio Lovino/HBO
The other Ratliffs, plus Gaitok
With Saxon and his loud, disgusting opinions temporarily out of the picture, Piper seizes on the relative quiet to finally tell her parents about her plan to live in the nearby meditation center for at least the next year. Tim is too distracted by his impending doom to even notice, but Victoria is predictably horrified. The family matriarch is also ill-equipped to make any arguments that might sway her daughter, especially since she keeps misidentifying what country they’re in (China one moment, Taiwan the next). Victoria thinks she has a home-run argument when she tries to warn Piper that this place will teach her different values, still not understanding that Piper despises the values Victoria fixates on.
And, of course, Victoria keeps going on about how much more morally superior their family is to everyone else, even as her husband is plotting to commit suicide with a stolen gun so he won’t have to live through the disgrace of going to prison and losing his entire fortune for a crime he didn’t even need to commit. (Remember, it was only $10 million!) Gaitok, meanwhile, tries in vain to retrieve the pistol, but he can’t openly confront Tim about it, in part because his own ineptitude is the only reason this wreck of a human being has the thing.
The episode at least concludes with Tim — clad, of course, in Duke merch — trying and failing to work up the nerve to pull the trigger, which gives Gaitok at least another day in which he might undo this mistake.
Belinda
What a roller coaster of an episode for our friend from Hawaii. Belinda spends the episode’s first half realizing that Greg may now be a threat to her, but finds a confused and ultimately unsympathetic ear in resort manager Fabian. Even after she has gotten some of the broad details of this strange case through to him, he has ultimately been conditioned to protect the privacy of the rich people who spend money at the resort, even if one of them might be endangering a member of the staff. “Some people here have colorful pasts; it’s really not wise to stir anything up,” he tells her, before blithely adding, “I think you survive.” Pornchai, fortunately, not only believes Belinda’s story, but expresses genuine concern for her, which — after he chases the noisy lizard out of her room — evolves into mutual lust. Minutes earlier, Belinda was complaining that, just when she thought her life was getting on track again, “Plot twist! Out of the blue!” Hooking up with Pornchai seems like much more the kind of plot twist she was hoping for from this trip.
That said, we are more than halfway into the season, and it feels like Natasha Rothwell has gotten substantially less to do than Jennifer Coolidge did when she was Season Two’s legacy character. As much as White’s sympathies are clearly with the staff over the guests, his dramatic instincts are proving to be the inverse. Mook is barely a character, Gaitok is an incompetent whose primary function is to make things happen in the guest storylines, Fabian isn’t much more than occasional comic relief.
Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate
The three old friends spend the evening hanging out with another trio of lifelong pals when Valentin invites his guys Vlad and Alexi(*) to help him show the women a fun time. Is it a success? That depends on who you ask.
(*) If you’re one of the people who wondered if Valentin was deliberately distracting Gaitok so the jewel thieves could get onto the resort property, then Vlad and Alexi could very easily be those two masked men.
As the most conservative member of the trio, in every sense of the term, Kate spends most of the night uncomfortable being around these loud, aggressive, flirtatious bros; when the party shifts back to their villa and everyone else is stripping down to get into the pool, Kate instead puts on a full pajama set and tries to sit as far from the action as possible.
It is one of many events from this long and eventful night, across all our different groups of characters, that will have to be reckoned with when the sun comes up in our next episode.
Laurie, meanwhile, attempts to take the night as an opportunity to finally cut loose of all the angst from her life back home. She drinks. She flirts. She dances up a storm. (As anyone who watched The Leftovers or The Nest knows, Carrie Coon is among our most expressive actors who dance in a non-musical-theater context. The way Laurie throws her whole body into each move says a lot about how repressed and miserable she feels most of the time, and how desperately she needs to let loose.) When the guys start stripping naked, she responds in kind by taking off her top, to the delight of Jaclyn and the dismay of Kate. But she also can’t stop herself at times from venting about her job, her divorce, her kid, and all the other things she hates, and that make her BFFs feel pity towards her. She never quite kills the vibe, but there are moments where she seems on the verge of doing it.
Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter. Jaclyn was always going to sleep with Valentin, and vice versa. Nothing Laurie could have done, and no lies Jaclyn could have told herself or the others about wanting to help her friend have a vacation fling, was going to change that. Jaclyn is incredibly competitive — just look at how eagerly she throws herself into her own dancing when she spots other women at the club recognizing her (Michelle Monaghan: also an excellent screen dancer for a non-dancer!) — and no matter what lip service she paid to wanting to help Laurie, Valentin was the trophy of this trip, and she was destined to bag him.
It is one of many events from this long and eventful night, across all our different groups of characters, that will have to be reckoned with when the sun comes up in our next episode.
