The White Lotus Season 3, Episode 6 Recap: The Hangover

Last week, we closed out another full day at the White Lotus with many of our characters making impulsive decisions under the glowing light of the full moon. This week, we’re picking up where we left off: in the less forgiving light of early dawn. While the episode is officially titled “Denials,” it could just as easily be named “The Hangovers.”

Timothy Ratliff is, once again, standing in his old Duke t-shirt, holding Gaitok’s gun to his head. This time, he lets his whole suicidal ideation play out, a dark thought experiment that ends with his horrified wife and daughter screaming and crying as they find his dead body lying in a pool of his own blood. A family man through and through, he decides he can’t do that to them and stashes the gun in a bureau of about a dozen drawers.

Over at the girls’ villa, early riser Kate sees Valentin slinking away from Jaclyn’s room, doing the walk of shame back to his shift as a wellness mentor. At breakfast, Kate spills this piping tea to Laurie, who doesn’t take it as well as Kate hoped. Instead of laughing it off, Laurie is fully pissed that Jaclyn, once again, put herself first and took the hot guy for herself—something that’s clearly happened before, based on Laurie’s reaction. “It’s sad, she’s an aging actress,” Laurie says about her dear friend Jaclyn. “She literally lives on male attention. It’s one thing when you’re 25, but now you’re 45, and guess what, it’s pathetic.”

To drive the point home, back in her room, Jaclyn is thrilled to finally get a call from her M.I.A. husband, who says he was on set and his phone died (sure) and that he’s so horny for his wife. Later, by the pool, Laurie calls out Jaclyn (who’s half-reading a copy of Barbra Streisand’s memoir) for trying to set her up with Valentin only to take her for himself. “Nobody ever changes. We’re still the same people we were in the tenth grade,” Laurie says. An incensed Jaclyn storms off, complaining to Kate that, as a famous actress, she hoped her close girlfriends wouldn’t gossip about her the way everyone else does. These women are the very definition of “with friends like these…”

But let’s get to who really has some regrets this morning: our boys on the boat. In a callback to the beginning of the season, when Lochlan gazed at his older brother’s nude body, this time, Saxon wakes up on Chloe and Greg’s yacht with Lochlan passed out next to him, bare butt in full view. As he stumbles away, Saxon realizes that not only did he and his little brother kiss a little too deeply during a game of spin the bottle, but they also went way past first base during a threesome. Through hazy flashbacks, we see Lochlan having sex with Chloe while simultaneously giving Saxon a hand job. Saxon, upon remembering this detail, promptly vomits. Lochlan says he has no memory whatsoever of the night, and Saxon, who can barely look at his little brother, tells him they “both blacked out.”

Later, by the pool, Chloe and Chelsea confirm to Saxon that he and Lochlan did indeed hook up. They promise not to bring it up again if the boys agree to attend a dinner party that night. They’ve been invited by the increasingly terrifying Greg, who (correctly) accuses Chloe of sleeping with the brothers. “I need to deal with something, and I need your help,” he tells Chloe. (That’s not ominous at all!) She can’t tell if he’s turned on by the image of her sleeping with someone else or if he wants to kill over it. Either way, as she tells Chelsea, she’s not ready to go back out into the awful world of dating/escorting, and is willing to do whatever it takes to stay in Greg’s good graces.

In Bangkok, Rick finally answers Chelsea’s repeated calls. Although she worries aloud that “bad things happen in threes” (and she’s already been bitten by a snake and robbed at gunpoint), Rick assures her he’ll be back at the White Lotus the next day and that nothing bad is happening. Later, though, he once again meets up with his friend Frank—played by guest star Sam Rockwell, who last episode gave the season’s best uninterrupted, three-minute queer theory monologue about the psychology behind his desire to be a young Asian girl. Now that that’s behind them, the men can focus on their main task: confronting (and maybe killing) Jim Hollinger. Rick promises to leave his gun behind and says he just wants to talk. “I need for him to know how bad he fucked me up,” he tells a skeptical Frank. Despite his reservations, the two go to Sritala’s home, posing as Hollywood bigwigs.

As Saxon continues to process the fact that he hooked up with his little brother, Lochlan is also confronted with how far they went when the memories come rushing back during a meditation session at Piper’s monastery. He’s there because Piper has agreed to her mother’s demand that she spend at least one night with the monks before committing to a year, and sweet, pliable Lochlan says he’ll stay with his sister. The Lorazepam-popping Timothy meets with the monastery’s head monk to talk about Piper’s plan to stay there, and the two have an interesting conversation. First, the monk tells Timothy that he sees many young people from America, just like Piper, who are seeking deeper meaning after growing up in a pleasure-seeking environment conducive to “spiritual malaise.” He attributes this longing to “lost connection with nature, with the family…with the spirit. What is left? The self. Identity. You cannot outrun pain,” he warns Timothy.

The eldest Ratliff then takes the opportunity to ask the monk where he thinks we go when we die, which makes sense given that he’s been thinking a lot about dying lately. The monk explains that death is “a happy return, like coming home” as each individual melts back into the collective consciousness of the universe like drops of water falling into the ocean. “No more separation. No more suffering,” he says, which comforts the suicidal Timothy.

Later, Timothy tells Victoria that he doesn’t think Thailand is such a bad idea for Piper after all. They want their kids to be resilient and tough, don’t they? In case one day, they lose everything? But Victoria’s response is Timothy’s worst-case scenario. If he had any doubt whether his wife would stand by him if and when they lose their fortune and status, he no longer can after she says: “We’re not going to lose everything. And if we did, honestly, I don’t know if I’d want to live. I just don’t think at this age, I’m meant to live an uncomfortable life. I don’t have the will. I just don’t have it in me. I don’t think I ever did.” Diabolically, she says all this while holding an essential oil up to her nose, whispering, “I love my scents,” as Timothy disassociates and looks like he’s about to cry.

Later, his suicide plan turns into a murder-suicide fantasy, where he pictures himself killing Victoria and then himself. To be fair, it’s a mercy killing since she admits she’d have no desire to live under their new circumstances. He’s interrupted by Saxon, who invites his parents along with him to Chloe and Greg’s scary dinner party. The Ratliffs could certainly use a distraction.

There are a few more loose ends, all of which seem to lead back to the shooting we know is just a few days away now. Zion walks in on his mother, Belinda, in bed with Pornchai. A true mensch, Pornchai later tells Belinda he’d like to open a spa with her in Thailand since Tanya ruined her dreams by bailing on their plans back in Maui. As Belinda fills her son in on what’s been going on at the resort over breakfast, general manager Fabian comes over and invites them to his performance—still totally ignoring her valid concerns about the man who might want her dead. Later, she runs into Greg in one of the biggest jump scares of the season, and he invites her and Zion to the dinner party. When she (logically! rationally!) declines his invitation, Greg insists that he and Belinda find another time to talk (no!).

Gaitok sneaks into the Ratliffs’s suite while they’re at the monastery and inexplicably finds his gun in the bureau of drawers on the first try. He also tells Mook he has a gun now. I’m starting to wonder if she has something to do with the earlier robbery, given her connection with Sritala’s sketchy bodyguards (they’re currently away in Bangkok, as we saw during the Rick scenes). Later, Gaitok takes the gun to practice at the range, where his coworker warns him that he’s nice, maybe too nice, and needs to be prepared to use the gun on the job. “Do you have a killer instinct?” he asks Gaitok. The answer, at least thus far, seems to be no.

Lastly, there’s a Muay Thai fight happening, one that Valentin keeps urging the three blondes to attend since his friend will be competing. Although Laurie initially said no, now, she wants the girls to join her. At that moment, they’re both too angry with her to consider it, but we’ll see what the night holds next week.