How naive to have thought that, after sibling incest and a monologue about a man wanting to have sex with himself and/or turn into an Asian woman, we’d already seen the wildest of sex stories on this season of The White Lotus.
Sunday night’s Episode 7, however, somehow ups the ante on the series’ very special genre of “scenes that make your jaw drop further and further until it plunges through the floor and hits your downstairs neighbor in the forehead.”
The sure-to-be-buzzed amount moment this week comes when Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) relays a sex fantasy her of rich, menacing boyfriend Gary/Greg (Jon Gries) that involves being cuckolded as well as a fetish rooted in childhood trauma that is—you guessed it—vaguely incest-y.
If you remember, Gary/Greg, who may have murdered his ex-wife Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) and may be planning to murder poor sweet spa worker Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), knows that Chloe hooked up with Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) during the yacht orgy. (In fact, Chloe hooked up with both brothers, who also hooked up with each other. You do you, White Lotus.) That’s not great news for Saxon, who fears for Gary/Greg may be out to get him now, after this.
Chloe and Gary throw a huge party, and invite the Ratliff family, Belinda and her son, and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). At the party, she tells Saxon and Chloe that Gary/Greg wants Saxon to stay late…for sex reasons.
It turns out that, when Gary was a kid, his parents would leave their door open while they had loud sex, and Gary would stand and “just watch his dad go to town on his mom.” Cue a “holy s--t” from the series’ queen of shocked reaction faces, Chelsea.
“It would make Gary feel this mixture of disgust and jealousy, but at the same time, excitement,” Chloe says. When he got older and started dating, he would have paranoid delusions that his girlfriends were cheating on him with his best friends.
“One day he realized, he kind of hoped they were having sex behind his back, so he could find them doing it, just like he’d find his parents doing it in the middle of the night,” she says. “So it’s kind of like his worst nightmare was actually his erotic fantasy.”
It takes Saxon far too long to realize that this isn’t just storytime, it’s a proposition: Gary wants to walk in on Saxon and Chloe having sex and watch, after which Chloe would go back to Gary because “it would be like winning his mother back from his father.”
It’s yet another insane monologue highlighting the singular way The White Lotus puts psychological and sexual trauma, kinks and yearning, and trust and candor out into the world, to see how people are going to react to it. I suspect many viewers will react similarly to Saxon, who says, “That is demented.” It’s certainly provocative.
Saxon’s journey this week is remarkably one towards garnering some empathy from the audience. He seems to reckon with the way other people see him. He asks Chelsea why she’s so mean to him, and swears he has the capacity to be more than the frat-boy d----ebag that everyone writes him off as. It leads to a tender moment between them, when Chelsea teaches him to meditate and he grabs her hands. She freaks out and shoos him away, seemingly scared at the realization that she could have just cheated on Rick (Walton Goggins) with him.
Rick, meanwhile, is continuing his charade with Frank (Sam Rockwell), posing as Hollywood filmmakers in order to get into hotel owner Sritala’s (Patravadi Mejudhon) house and confront her husband, who had killed Rick’s father when he was just a kid.
Watching Frank flail, making up stories about his filmmaking career and Sritala’s work, are some of the biggest LOL scenes of the year. His review of one concert performance—“It’s like MC Hammer. Peter Pan. It’s got a little, uh Pippin?”—will be instantly memed. Those comedic moments are made even more effective by the tonal contrast to the terrifying scenes of Rick threatening the husband.
Rick pulls a gun on the husband, but ultimately doesn’t go through with pulling the trigger, only capable of knocking the frail old man out of his chair and running away. Back in Bangkok, Rick and Frank go on a bender—but it’s Frank who’s doing drugs, interacting with sex workers, and partying hard. Rick, for the first time, seems serene amidst the chaos and debauchery.
As a whole, it’s a pretty unsettling episode of The White Lotus. At Chloe and Gary’s party, Gary comes clean to Belinda. He knows that she knows he is Greg, and that she suspects him of murdering Tanya. He swears he had nothing to do with it and fled the country purely to escape the legal hassle. He also says Tanya told him about the business deal she offered Belinda, and always felt bad for reneging on it.
He offers Belinda $100,000, which he says Tanya would have wanted her to have, in exchange for keeping quiet about knowing his real identity and location in Thailand. Belinda says she needs to sleep on it, as she is the only rational person on this TV show and doesn’t quite love the idea of being an accessory to the coverup of a murder.
Greg’s not pleased with that answer, which only signals more danger for Belinda. I cannot take this stress for Belinda, as my depleting bottle of Tums, which have become a permanent accessory to my White Lotus episode screenings, can attest.
Speaking of upsetting things, Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) and Mook (Lalisa Manobal) are finally on their date—Yay! OMG! Adorable!—and it immediately doesn’t go well: Boo! WTF! Devastation!
Gaitok tells her that he’s not going to get a promotion to a bodyguard, because he’s come to the realization that he’s not a fighter. When the robbers came, he wasn’t scared; it seemed wrong to fight them because Buddha condemns violence. “I never want to hurt people,” he says. “I will never feel good about that.”
A normal person would have the same reaction I did on my couch: bellowed an involuntary “aww!!!” and proposed marriage to Gaitok on the spot. Instead, Mook is put off, telling him that he needs to be strong and scoffing that she must have been mistaken when she thought he was ambitious. She’s shaming him! He looks so sad and rejected! Screw you, Mook! How dare you!
They go to the Muay Thai fight, where she continues to passive aggressively bully him. (Mook!!!) It turns out to be quite the eventful location. Gaitok spots Laurie (Carrie Coon) in the stands with Valentin (Arnas Federavicius) and his Russian friends. Seeing the friends next to Valentin, it clicks: They were the robbers, and Valentin was working with them to distract Gaitok at the gate. Big twist!
Laurie comes to what may be a similar realization. She’s at the fight without her two friends, Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Kate (Leslie Bibb). Would you believe they had a falling out? Who could have seen that coming? She ends up sleeping with the hotter Russian friend, but is chased out of the apartment by his very angry girlfriend. On her way out, she spots the jewelry that had been stolen from the hotel gift shop in the Russian’s closet. Yikes!
The episode began with a foreboding speech from the guru Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola) are studying with: “Remember this: Every one of us has the capacity to kill.
Is Gaitok, who is now trained in how to use his gun, humiliated by his crush, and aware of who is responsible for the robbery, capable? Rick, who resisted his opportunity to avenge his father and murder, wasn’t capable. And what about Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), whose spiraling over his legal woes continues as he fantasizes of a murder-suicide with his family to put them out of their misery.
We still don’t know who is the killer and who is the dead body floating in the water. But we do know that Lochlan is now being creepy with his sister, who he says he wants to stay with in Thailand. If more incest happens, there’s going to be more than a few viewers begging to also be put out of their misery. Personally, I’m enjoying the spicy discourse. I say, bring it on.
