Later on we’ll see a fantasized family annihilation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of viewers feel the dinner-table argument between Laurie, Jaclyn, and Kate is the episode’s real bloodbath. Laurie tells Jaclyn she can’t be trusted, and hints that she maybe made a play for Kate’s perfect husband Dave back in the day. Jaclyn says all of Laurie’s unhappiness is her own fault, due to her own decisions: She could have hooked up with Valentin the night before, just as she could have gotten a different job or married a different guy, but she didn’t. She’s the one constant in all this misfortune. 

Kate takes Jaclyn’s side, in brutal fashion. “The source of your disappointment changes,” she tells her quote-unquote friend, “but the constant is you’re always disappointed.” That’s when Laurie storms off, calling Jaclyn vain and selfish, telling Kate her perfect life is an obvious lie. Afterwards, a judgey Kate drives unfaithful-wife Jaclyn away fuming as well. The White Lotus has done this kind of emotional wetwork before, but never with such ruthlessness or effectiveness. Every blow lands.

I reviewed this week’s The White Lotus for Decider.

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.

It’s wonderful, is what it is. Much of it is bathed in red and green light, as is the ladies’ night back on the mainland. As such, it fits right into one of my favorite microgenres: the New Lurid. These are stories that use saturated colors (especially red), explicit sexuality, outbursts of disturbing violence, and an unhealthy fixation on propagating the tangled family line, all as a way of satirizing and excoriating the wealthy. Think of it as Saltburn-core. The brazenly sexual vibe, the vivid colors, the incest, and — in a separate storyline that’s intercut with the rest as if providing commentary — Victoria Ratliff’s wildly bigoted and reactionary response to Piper’s desire to throw away her heritage to seriously study Buddhism — nearly all the ingredients are in place.

But there’s a gun that doesn’t go off, and it’s, well, the guns that don’t go off. Rick’s friend gives him a gun at Rick’s request, but Rick is too busy being dumbfounded by his pal’s tale of erotic transfiguration to do much with it just yet. Tim refuses to return his stolen gun, but is prevented from using it on himself — while wearing a Duke t-shirt, one of the most mean-spirited and hilarious gags in this show’s history — by Victoria, who unwittingly interrupts him just as he’s mustered the strength to pull the trigger. Of course we know bullets will fly by the end of the season, but so far they’re still chambered.

My admiration for this show, on the other hand, is ricocheting all over the room. What a fuckin’ feast this episode is: sleazy, scary, riveting, written in a way that takes real risks in exposing the filmmaker’s understanding of what desire is and what it can do, with that masterful monologue as the centerpiece and incest as a closer.

I reviwed this week’s episode of The White Lotus for Decider.