The highest compliment I can pay this season of The White Lotus is this: When Tim Ratliff opened this episode by blowing his brains out, I bought it. When his wife Victoria discovered his body and began screaming in grief and agony, I bought it. When Piper, their daughter, raced in to see what was the matter only to be devastated in turn, I bought it. I fully believed that what was once a sort of low-effort wealth comedy had become a tragedy.
What’s more, I believed that writer-director Mike White was perfectly capable of pulling the trigger, so to speak — not just in general, not just in the finale, but right now, at the start of Episode 6, with three full hours of TV ahead of us before the closing credits roll on the season. I was fully on board with the idea that not only was White capable of taking away a main character and making it really hurt — the previous deaths on the show came at the end of what amounted to gross-out comedy sequences — but that he’d do so abruptly and unexpectedly enough for it to come as a genuine shock. I didn’t see it coming, but I didn’t see Sam Rockwell’s monologue or Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s amazing new theme music coming either.
Now, it turns out that this is only a morbid fantasy in Tim’s head as he thinks through the ramifications of killing himself and letting his beloved family find him like that. But the tsunami dream from earlier in the season was just that, a dream, and its discomfiting power has lingered all season long. The physical stakes in this week’s opening scene turn out to be illusory, but the emotional stakes are real, and high.
But you probably just wanna talk about the incest, don’t you. You’re incorrigible.
I reviewed this week’s terrific episode of The White Lotus for Decider.
Tags: decider, the white lotus, TV, TV reviews