The White Lotus S3 E5 review: a slow grind... but is it incest?
Things are kicking into gear, but they’re taking an agonisingly slow time getting there
Review at a glance
Well, they did it. Kind of. Anybody thinking that Mike White wouldn’t have the courage to make the Ratliff family dynamics any weirder has been proved spectacularly wrong this episode.
Then again, this is the White Lotus we’re talking about – and if we know anything about this show, it’s that it takes joy in being transgressive. And so: we as viewers are treated to a brief snapshot of Saxon and Lochlan locking lips in the closing seconds of the episode, as part of a drinking game, while Chelsea and Chloe look on.
It’s so brief, in fact, that you’d be forgiven for missing it entirely, which seems a rather disappointing way to end the weeks of speculation that have dogged the show since it started airing.
Sky/ HBO
Whew! So… what else happened? Well, plenty of drinking. This was a party episode: the American not-quite-friends are on a lairy night out with Valentin and his two Russian buddies, which gradually gets weirder and ever-more sexual (and includes weird chat from one of the blokes about having bottles smashed on his head as a child). In terms of satire, these insecure rich women feel the most delightfully stereotyped of the entire cast – watching their toxic dynamic never gets old.
In the meantime, Saxon, Lochlan, Chloe and Chelsea are living it up large on Greg’s yacht. Chloe has designs on Lochlan, and doesn’t seem to mind about the fact she’s cheating on her ageing boyfriend either.
“Gary might kill me,” she tells Chelsea, in one of the episode’s more on-the-nose bits of dialogue. “I honestly think he's capable of it.” No duh.
As the quartet party the night away in Koh Samui, Rick heads to Bangkok to find his long-lost nemesis (as a refresher: the husband of the White Lotus hotel’s manager may or may not have had something to do with the disappearance of his father 50-odd years ago. Keep up).
What does this achieve? No, honestly – what? All we get are a few scenes of Rick looking sad in a hotel, and a queasy chat between him and his friend - who happens to be Sam Rockwell - about the pleasures of sex with Thai women. And Thai men, when he plays the Thai woman. It’s complicated.
HBO/ Sky
Also, the saga of the gun continues. Gaitok’s frantic attempts to find it predictably come to nothing (that would be boring, after all), but of course, we know who has it: Jason Isaacs’ Tim, who, we find out, is planning to use it to take his own life after he’s faced with the prospect of losing everything to the FBI.
He’s only stopped, seconds beforehand, by his wife – but let’s be honest, he’s a ticking time bomb. And that’s before we mention Piper telling her parents that she wants to go on a meditation retreat to ‘find herself’, which predictably horrifies Victoria.
“Organised religion and deviant sex can go hand in hand!” Parker Posey trills at one point, in an increasingly forced-sounded Mississippi accent. Five episodes in, and we still know just about as little about her as we did at the start of the series, but she sure does get some good one-liners.
One of the only bright spots in the episode is Belinda finally getting some action in the form of a passionate kiss with her handsome masseuse. Hooray! But with Greg hot on her trail, her honeymoon might not last long. Things are kicking into gear, but they’re taking an agonisingly slow time getting there. Cue some hungover fireworks next episode, please.
The White Lotus Season 3 is streaming on Sky Atlantic and NOW