Spoilers below.
We start the second episode of The White Lotus season three by looking in; initially from the lapping Atlantic Ocean that envelopes the shores of the resort and then to peering into the villa of Laurie, Jaclyn, and Kate, the latter of whom we meet at table where we left them at the end of episode one.
'I don't think I've seen Laurie in four years,' Jaclyn says, bemoaning how bi-annual trips aren't enough to create 'new' memories for the life-long friends. 'She seems great.'
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'She looks great, she's always had so much energy,' Kate adds. 'She's a great girl, a great friend. Sounded like the divorce got pretty gnarly.'
'She had to pay him alimony, right? Can you imagine? After he freeloaded off her for years?' Jaclyn gasps.
It doesn't take long for the knives to plunge into the back of their life-long friend, Laurie. Kate gushes about how cute Ellie [Laurie's daughter] was, and how she's 'apparently' now been kicked out of two schools. 'She's bitter. She throws furniture. You have to wonder about these people who insist on raising their kids in New York, I mean what are you thinking?,' Kate asks, shrugging.
The exchange ends in the ladies deducing that Laurie's stalled in New York; promotion-less, husband-less, marooned on an urban island with her 'bitter' daughter who 'throws furniture.'
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'No wonder she looks defeated,' Kate concludes, as Jaclyn peers at her over her glass of Sauvignon Blanc.
'I thought you said she looked great?' Jaclyn asks, referencing the trio's gushing statements at how wonderful, fabulous and great they all looked in the first episode. It could be her drinking, they decide, that's to blame for Laurie's looks. As the pair sip their wine from their high and mighty perches, like the monkeys that populate the trees that cocoon their villa, Laurie slams her hands on the window in a drunken daze. When Laurie clambers in, hair defying gravity, to retrieve her bag, Jaclyn smiles like butter wouldn't melt. 'We were just talking about you, about how long it's been since I last saw you,' Jaclyn tells Laurie. 'About how great you look.' Eyebrows raised, true opinions muzzled, Laurie leaves Kate and Jaclyn alone, only for Kate to exhale relief, saying, 'I thought it was a monkey!
'The following morning, we meet Piper doing her morning yoga, Lochlan and Saxon waking up in their shared bedroom and Timothy and Victoria, as we left them, still fast asleep in theirs. Chelsea wakes up on the chest of Rick who, despite his best efforts, can't seem to get his girlfriend to move, and Belinda wakes up to the sound of a cacophonous alarm. At breakfast, the Ratliffs continue their great White Lotus-style unfurling, where Piper decries The White Lotus as a 'Disneyland for rich bohemians from Malibu in their Lulu Lemon yoga pants.' Right on cue, Kate also graces the restaurant for breakfast clad in her very own Lulu Lemon yoga pants. It turns out Kate knows Victoria, as they have a mutual friend whose baby shower they both attended in Austin, Texas. Victoria, one gets the sense, isn't the biggest fan of their mutual friend and proceeds to make Kate increasingly uncomfortable as she cloyingly attempts to connect with the Ratliff matriarch. As she stabs at the fresh melon on her plate, Victoria justifies her aloof behaviour to her querying children. 'Who cares?' she says, eating fleshy pieces of melon with her mouth open. 'We met at a baby shower ten years ago. I don't know her.'
Breakfast, ever the chaos buffet at The White Lotus, sees Mook sidle up beside Chelsea and Rick's table to confirm Chelsea's wax and massage appointment and Rick's stress management session with Amrita. 'No, I didn't order that,' Rick corrects her, as a smile cheekily spreads across Chelsea's face. 'But I did,' she says. 'You need it.' Ignoring Rick's evident disdain for her, Chelsea proceeds to tell Rick about the friend (Charlotte) she made the night before and how 'loaded' Charlotte's boyfriend (Greg) must be, given the positioning of their house on top of the mountain. When Chelsea tells Rick that the couple invited them for dinner at their house, Rick shakes his head and parrots his favourite refrain: 'No.' 'You've got loads in common with him,' Chelsea tells Rick, slipping pieces of watermelon into her mouth in between sentences. 'You're both old. You're both bald, well you're going bald.'
Timothy's legal issues seem to further mount when each member of his family is given a schedule to pass their time — yoga for piper, a massage for Victoria — while he runs on a static machine, faster and faster, sweat dripping on his brow. When he calls his assistant to ask whether she'd heard from the former acquaintance he'd heard from the Wall Street Journal about, she says that she hasn't. But that she had heard from the Washington Post. As the Ratliffs continue to unravel, Rick attends his stress management session with Amrita, who asks where his stress levels are on a scale of one to ten. Rick, he reveals, is always at a level eight, which he alleviates with the use of cannabis. We learn that Rick's mother was a drug addict who died when he was ten, and that his father was murdered before Rick was born, and as such he hasn't known life without stress.
Audiences may be missing Tanya's eccentricities, yet one gets the sense that within Victoria's pill-dependent, oscillating emotional state, there are easter eggs of Jennifer Coolidge hidden. Calling the hotel reception to order food to their room, Victoria attempts to read the menu in Thai, which she proceeds to pronounce not only phonetically to the English-speaking member of staff, but also in a thick Southern drawl. Tensions within the family begin to slowly bubble over when Timothy marches in from the gym, frustrated with the 'time zones' between Thailand and America. The bigger picture is also becoming ever-so-slighly clearer between Rick and Chelsea, when Chelsea tells Rick he's 'shut down' and Rick replies by calling her an 'idiot.' There's very little love lost between the couple, and every time Rick is left alone, he has an apparent near-natural impulse to drop his head into his hands in despair. Piper and Lochlan, meanwhile, take time in the afternoon to swing on hammocks suspended in the ocean, before Piper's brother tells her that he knows she's a virgin, and that he and Saxon, her other brother, have been querying why somebody as 'hot' as she is would still be a virgin.
Chelsea and Chloe, free of their LBHs, take the afternoon to peruse the hotel's shop, which — before Chloe has even been able to try on dresses — is raided by a masked man, who wields a knife at the shop assistant before ransacking the store's designer jewellery section. When Mook's love interest, Gaitok, the security guard, attempts to stop the thief's car from leaving the premises, he's punched and knocked to the ground. As he recovers in the back of an ambulance, a rumbling sense of knowing begins to simmer. Perhaps the thief, or the brains behind the robbery, is known to hotel staff.
While Chelsea and Rick enjoy (or, at least in Rick's case, endures) dinner with Chloe and Greg, the Ratliffs sit similarly grinning and bearing it. Greg — who, we learn while he's at dinner with Chelsea and Rick — has re-branded himself as Gary, bristles as Rick asks him what he did before he retired. 'This and that,' Gary says, before Rick suspiciously says that 'this and that' was his line of work too. When Rick asks where Chloe and Gary met, Rick says that it was in Dubai, through a matchmaking service. He then proceeds to out himself, by saying that Chloe is French when she is, in actual fact, from Quebec. Across the restaurant from the foursome, Belinda sits down to dinner and, as she looks up from her menu, she registers Greg, who she first met when she built up a rapport with Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) in the first season. The whispered gotcha moment is the first example of the White Lotus' signature magic that Mike White single-handedly spins with his storytelling. Things are about to get interesting, very interesting indeed.
Also enjoying their own entirely dysfunctional dinner, at the Ratliff's table, Victoria, perhaps presciently, tells her children, 'You need your family. You do. Most people don't have good values, they're scammers. You're all gorgeous and you come from money, so you have to be hyper-vigilant, okay? You have to be on your guard.' Timothy, disregarding the resort's digital device policy entirely, frantically escapes the table as his phone rings yet again. He finally has got his former business associate, Kenny, on the phone, who confirms that Timothy is indeed implicated in the money laundering scheme being investigated. From the darkness, Gaitok sits in his booth surveying the scene, in which Timothy angrily growls that he will kill Kenny should he implicate him in the scandal.
We end the second episode in the same way we started it, only with Laurie and Kate this time, slowly taking jabs at their absent friend who, they've deduced, can't be happy and has had far more surgery on her face than just 'the basics' she admitted to having had. 'You know what they say about fronts,' Kate says, knowingly. 'The bigger the front, the bigger the back.' Rick, meanwhile, tells Chelsea that he's going to have to leave her alone for a night or two while he deals with 'something' in Bangkok — where Sritala's husband, who Rick seems to have gone to The White Lotus to find, is recovering from a stroke. Before the credits roll, Timothy stands up from his phone call, pulls his trousers up and follows his family back to their villa. At The White Lotus, it's just business as usual.
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Naomi May is a seasoned culture journalist and editor with over ten years’ worth of experience in shaping stories and building digital communities. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard, where she worked across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Digital Editor at ELLE Magazine and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others. Naomi is also the host of the ELLE Collective book club.
