For the past few episodes, Mike White has been hinting that the metaphorical tide is pulling out on our White Lotus vacationers, indicating a tsunami is on the way. With episode five’s Full Moon Party in full swing, those gravitational pulls are reaching a peak. Finally, some action.
Let’s start with the Real Housewives of Thailand. What this season has lacked in plot has been filled with incredible dialogue, especially between these three women. While White owes a huge debt to Bravo, it’s still really something to see Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan, and Leslie Bibb give a masterclass in passive-aggressive frenemyship. We catch up with the blondes at the club with Valentin, whose goofy friends Vlad (played by a hilarious Yuri Kolokolnikov) and Alexi are helping them let their hair down and feel sexy with plenty of compliments, banter, and shots.
They head for the dance floor, and while Laurie (Coon) is the only technically available single, Jaclyn (Monaghan) is getting high off the attention of both the men and a clique of younger women eyeing them from the periphery of the dance floor. When they stumble back to their table for another round of drinks, it becomes clear why: the girls have called up Alexi’s girlfriend, who chews him out in Russian for dancing with other women. Again, messy Jaclyn is living for the drama—and the implication that she could steal a younger girl’s man if she wanted.
Michelle Monaghan as Jaclyn
Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO
Back at the resort, Piper is breaking the news to her parents that she lied about her thesis and plans to stay in Thailand for a year to become a better Buddhist. Parker Posey’s Victoria says all manner of bigoted, ignorant things you would expect from her: “You’re not a Buddhist; you’re from China!” she cries out. It might be funny if it weren’t so realistic. The darker humor is in the contrast with patriarch Timothy, who is hiding an actual secret—while Victoria hysterically frets that her daughter is going to ruin her life by spending a year in Thailand, Timothy has news that is truly going to upend the Ratliff’s comfortable reality as they know it, forever. It makes sense then, that Timothy keeps dodging poor Gaitok, who is looking for his gun; Mook performing a traditional Thai dance throughout this sequence is a reminder of all Gaitok stands to lose, too. We can only assume what Timothy’s planning to do with that gun, but it’s not looking great for a man who has no escape hatch.
There’s treachery brewing for Belinda, too. Greg has not only recognized her, but has been asking the clueless Fabian for details about her. When Belinda takes a risk and lays out the situation for her manager—that Greg is a dangerous man wanted for questioning in the suspicious death of his wife, Tanya, and that they should alert the authorities—Fabian dismisses her concerns, leaving her out to dry (or die!). “Some people here have colorful pasts,” Fabian infuriatingly says. “I didn’t sense Gary had any ill intentions. I think you’ll survive.” Basically: get back to work. Later, Belinda tells Pornchai about her concerns. Hopefully he’ll have her back.
Greg/Gary’s own girlfriend, Chloe, absolutely shares Belinda’s concerns. She and new bestie Chelsea have stayed back on the yacht with the Ratfliff boys while their sugar daddies go off to do mysterious “business”—Greg is back at his mansion, presumably being creepy and cyberstalking Belinda, and Rick is in Bangkok, feeling depressed and stalking Jim Hollinger, the man who (he believes) killed his father. This leaves our party girls free for the night, and sleazy Saxon is more than ready to swoop in. Chloe is thrilled to finally get some proper male attention: “I like innocent, young guys,” she tells Chelsea. “When they see you naked, they shake, and their little hearts start beating inside their chests.” Chloe notes ominously, however, that if caught cheating, Greg might kill her. “I honestly think he’s capable of it.” If only she knew how right she is!
Chelsea is nowhere near in the clear, either—remember her Final Destination prediction? She says that she can’t cheat on Rick because she genuinely loves him and is a romantic (she also refers to Rick as “her child,” and seriously, we need to get this girl a copy of Codependent No More). The pragmatic Chloe is disgusted by this line of thought, and warns Chelsea, “When I was modeling, all the girls who were romantic ended up broke and brokenhearted. Or worse.”
What’s worse, you might ask? We haven’t gotten there yet. In the meantime, it’s time to party, and though Lochlan has been performing magic tricks to impress the girls on the boat all day, it’s Saxon who is successfully casting a red-pilled spell on his impressionable little brother.
“Confidence, Loch. That’s how you get people to do what you want,” Saxon tells him. “Most people don’t know what they want. They just want to be used. They’re just sitting there, waiting for someone to come along and tell them what to do.” Lochlan counters, “But what if this life is just a test to see if we can become better people?” It’s a question that Saxon answers with a scoff.
Aimee Lou Wood as Chelsea
Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO
Saxon ends up getting peer pressured by Loch and the girls into taking a pill despite his “drug-free” declarations. He should’ve listened to his instincts; on the shore at the Full Moon Party, where Chloe and Chelsea put on cute shirts custom-made for the episode by the artist Scooter LaForge, Saxon finds himself in a drugged-out haze, one he doesn’t seem to be enjoying.
Back on the boat, things get weirder. The four start playing a version of spin the bottle, and Chloe tells Saxon and Lochlan to kiss. At first, the brothers peck, but then Lochlan grabs Saxon and really, fully kisses him. Saxon is in shock and too far gone to really comprehend what’s happening. Lochlan, though, smiles mischievously. It’s clear this moment will have bigger implications to come.
Those implications are hinted at by Rick’s friend, a fellow sketchy older man he’s met up with in Bangkok, played by Sam Rockwell (who happens to be Leslie Bibb’s husband in real life). The two meet in the lobby of a swanky hotel, where the friend (whose name we don’t know) passes Rick a duffle bag, presumably with a gun inside. We learn that they share some sort of dodgy past, and Rick’s friend no longer drinks. He says staying sober isn’t the hard part; it’s being celibate that’s the real challenge. He goes on to share a monologue about his very specific fetish for sleeping with young Thai women that eventually spiraled into being topped by white men who look like him while those young women, usually paid, looked on. Rick looks a bit dumbfounded—he thought he and his friend were meeting up to party like old times, not have a therapy session.
But the concept of Buddhism and sublimating one’s ego is once again pushed on a resistant Rick. “We all have our Achilles heel, man,” the friend says. “Where does it come from? Why are some of us attracted to the opposite form and some of us the same? Sex is a poetic act. It’s a metaphor, a metaphor for what? Are we our forms? Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside, too? Or on the inside, could I be an Asian girl?”
It’s a question for which Rick, understandably, has no response. “I guess I was trying to fuck my way to the answer,” his friend concludes before the two part ways for the night. “Then I got into Buddhism, which is about spirit versus form, detaching from self, getting off the never-ending carousel of lust and suffering.”
The rest of our White Lotus crew is nowhere near getting off that carousel. The three blondes have taken the party back to their villa, where they’re all drinking and dancing in the pool in varying states of undress (Bibb’s character is the only one hovering on the sidelines, gently suggesting they all go to bed). Laurie whips her top off, and at the end of the night, as the men leave, Jaclyn teases her that she should’ve slept with one of them. Laurie’s feeling herself as she dances back to her room and passes out drunk and alone—but sneaky minx Jaclyn calls up Valentin for herself, and the two hook up.
Angelic Piper might be the closest to achieving some form of enlightenment—or at least, she’s trying to make the case to her parents that it’s worth pursuing. Victoria assumes Timothy is just as upset as she is over the revelation that their daughter wants out of their picture-perfect life, or, “the bullshit,” as Piper calls it at dinner. “You can do everything right, but still at any moment, something can come along and upend everything,” Victoria laments before going to bed.
Jason Isaacs as Timothy Ratliff
Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO
While she sleeps, Timothy pulls out Gaitok’s gun, and quietly writes a suicide note in the dark of the hotel room. He puts the gun to his head, seriously considering pulling the trigger, when Victoria interrupts him. “You haven’t been acting like yourself, Tim,” she says, finally paying close attention to her family. “What’s going on?”
For a moment, Timothy breaks down, telling his wife what he’s clearly wanted to say for decades, if not his entire life. “Do you have any idea, the expectations on me?” he asks. “From day one. I haven’t known a single day without all this shit on me.”
Tragically, given the circumstances we know of, Victoria comforts Timothy by telling him that he has no reason to be stressed because he’s “already succeeded in every way.” When she goes back to bed, in true desperation, Timothy prays to god for help.
