The White Lotus Season 3, Episode 7 Recap: Monkey Off Your Back

Folks, we are nearing the end of our third trip to the White Lotus. It’s been a whirlwind, if a somewhat ploddingly paced one. But this penultimate episode, with its focus on the theme of violence, inches each of our characters closer toward their final destinations.

We know violence is the theme because the monk at Piper’s monastery—whom Timothy somewhat endearingly keeps referring to as “the real deal”—tells us. As she and Lochlan sit cross-legged with the other pupils, the monk says, “Remember this. Every one of us has the capacity to kill. Buddhist scripture condemns violence in every form. Violence, aggression, anger stem from same source: fear. The only good-faith response is to sit with your feelings. Violence does spiritual harm to victim and to perpetrator. Buddhists believe always nonviolence.”

This point is driven home by Gaitok and Mook, who finally head out on their first date. He tells Mook that he’s not going to be promoted or become one of Sritala’s bodyguards, because as his coworker told him, he has no “killer instinct.” When the visibly disappointed Mook presses him to prove everyone wrong, Gaitok admits that when the hotel was robbed, it’s not that he was too scared to fight back, it’s that he didn’t want to, because as a Buddhist, he believes in nonviolence too. “I thought you were more ambitious and wanted a better job,” Mook says. Ouch.

This episode is formative for Rick’s relationship with violence, too. He and Frank (of the queer theory monologue) snake their way into Sritala and Jim’s beautiful home in Bangkok. Though they have a rough-draft plan to pose as Hollywood bigwigs looking to court Sritala for their next project, it quickly becomes clear they barely prepared at all, as Frank (pretending to be Big-Time Director Steve) fumbles through the answers to some very basic questions. He must really owe Rick a favor, because in his desperation to get through this high-stakes, awkward dance, he breaks his ten-month sobriety to loosen up a bit.

As Frank continues to flatter Sritala—a tactic that, against all odds, is totally working—Rick lures Jim into his own den. He presses the man, who is not in good health, to tell him how he amassed his real estate fortune, and Jim alludes to the shady business dealings Rick believed got his father killed. Finally, he pulls out his gun, and Jim is understandably speechless. It’s Rick’s big you killed my father, prepare to die moment, and he does get to at last tell Jim how he feels. He reminds Jim that he had his father killed over a land deal, but it’s an anticlimactic moment: Jim doesn’t remember. “You ruined my fucking life,” he says. “You may not remember him, but you’re sure as fuck gonna remember me.” In the end, towering over Jim, Rick can’t pull the trigger. He pushes him over in his chair, and he and Frank run out of the house and into the busy streets of Bangkok, where they proceed to go on a bender with a handful of strippers.

“I built this guy up in my mind to be this thing. And I’m sitting there looking at this pathetic, frail old man,” Rick tells Frank. He admits that the experience gave him closure. “That’s a huge monkey off your back,” Frank says.

Back at the monastery, Piper sneaks into Lochlan’s room to ask him what he thinks so far. To her surprise, her little brother says he loves the monastery and wants to spend a gap year with her there, too. He likes that the monk “is all about how to be the best person you can be, and how to go through life without making shit worse for people. I don’t want to give into my dark shit. I don’t want to make things worse,” he says, adding that he “really doesn’t feel like going home.” It’s a tragic summation of how he’s alienated Saxon by trying to please him, and now, he’s doing the same thing with Piper, who is weirded out by the conversation and awkwardly leaves.

Speaking of Saxon, he’s still working through his hangover (and processing his incestuous brother hookup) by bringing his parents to Greg and Chloe’s dinner party. Parker Posey does some of her best comedic work in this episode; her uttering of, “Oh not, not the boat people,” when she realizes where they’re heading should be studied. Timothy is still in a daze, and Saxon is sharp enough—the only one, it seems—to notice that his dad isn’t all there. He pulls him aside to ask what’s really going on, telling him that as Timothy Ratliff’s son, their careers are inextricably tied together. “If something bad is happening [at work], it’s happening to both of us.”

Still, cowardly, Timothy can’t bring himself to tell his son the truth. Then Saxon really breaks it down: “Dad, I don’t have anything else but this,” he says. “I don’t have any interests, I don’t have any hobbies. If I’m not a success, then I’m nothing, and I can’t handle being nothing. I’ve put my whole life into this basket. Into your basket, Dad.” Heartbreaking stuff, and it echoes Chelsea’s harsh but true comments from last episode that Saxon is a “soulless person.”

He’s still shooting his shot with her, by the way, and even gets her to try teaching him how to meditate back in his room. It comes after Chloe asks him to be the third in a cuckold roleplaying game where Greg walks in on them together, and Saxon refuses, saying he’s not that kind of person. As he attempts to “connect spiritually” with Chelsea, who just moments earlier emphasized how much she loves and “wants to heal” Rick, Saxon can’t help but make a move, which she rebuffs. He’s teetering on the edge of growth and self-awareness, but isn’t quite there yet.

At the party, Greg also has a very important conversation with Belinda, who’s been convinced by Zion to hear him out. Basically, he offers to buy her silence with $100,000, as long as she agrees not to say anything about who he really is and his relationship with Tanya. Belinda says she needs to think about it, but later tells Zion that taking the money would not only be immoral but make her an accomplice to murder. Zion—true Gen Z that he is—tells her she’s crazy not to take the life-changing sum, and that if she doesn’t, Greg could harm her.

“If you don’t come to terms with him, he’s gonna come after you,” Zion says. “They’re gonna find your body in the Gulf of Thailand, maybe mine too.” To which an exasperated Belinda replies, “Can I get one fucking break in this fucking lifetime?”

Back at the hotel restaurant, where general manager Fabian is singing a treacly tune, the friendship trio of our three blondes is breaking down further. Jaclyn and Laurie are still angry with each other, and Kate’s stuck in the middle (but low-key is siding with Jaclyn). Laurie tells Jaclyn that her sleeping with Valentin “just makes me not trust you,” and Jaclyn goes scorched earth on Laurie’s life choices. “You could’ve hooked up with Valentin and you chose not to,” she says. “You chose to work at that company your whole career, and you chose to marry Brian.” Now the truth/claws are coming out. “If you always choose the short stick, is it bad luck? Are you always life’s victim? Or are you doing it to yourself?”

Kate piles on, telling Laurie that her “pattern” is that “the source of your disappointment changes, but the constant is you’re always disappointed.” Laurie shoots back that Kate is “always fake and fronting like [her] life is perfect,” and Jaclyn is “vain and selfish.”

She storms off to the Muay Thai fight alone, and neither Kate nor Jaclyn looks happy with how things just went down. Her friends’ words must’ve gotten under her skin, because at the fight, Laurie starts flirting heavily with Aleksai and ends up having sex with him. She should’ve followed her instincts, though, because immediately after the act, he starts hitting her up for money, telling her a sob story about his poor, sick mother back in Russia, and asking her to wire (or Venmo, or PayPal) her $10,000. Laurie nearly gives in to the scam when Aleksai’s jealous (for good reason!) girlfriend from the nightclub episode shows up screaming. As Laurie tries to hide in the closet before jumping out a window, she passes by the jewelry stolen during the robbery, including the snake necklace Chelsea was admiring.

Speaking of the robbery, Gaitok and Mook follow up their dinner date with their own visit to the Muay Thai fight. As the men bareknuckle brawl and knock each other out, Mook tells Gaitok, “See, it’s natural. It’s part of life. It’s human to fight.” Gaitok spots his coworker, Valentin, with Aleksai and Vlad across the room, and makes the connection that they’re the ones who robbed the hotel—and that Valentin was in on it, by distracting Gaitok from his post.

In their room after the party, Victoria clasps her hands together like a schoolgirl and prays “for Piper to be miserable in that temple tonight,” adding, “Maybe Jesus will save her from those Buddhists. Timothy takes a few more Lorazepams and goes back to the gun drawer, with his wife’s meme-able quote about “not being meant to live an uncomfortable life” playing in his head. In his fantasy, he’s gone from suicide, to murder-suicide, to family annihilator, as he now pictures shooting Saxon too, haunted by his saying, “If I’m not a success then I’m nothing, and I can’t handle being nothing.” When he gets to the drawer, it’s empty, since Gaitok already retrieved the gun (thank god).

Stay tuned for next week’s finale, when we find out who dies (Michelle Monaghan confirmed that the fan theory of a monkey stealing the gun is not true, so we can at least rule that one out). There’s a lot left to unpack among these characters with just one hour left, but if anyone can tie up these loose ends with a satisfying bow, it’s Mike White.