‘White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 4 Recap: Hide or Seek

Sawadee Ka, and welcome back to another week in Mike White’s version of beautiful hell. The plot has been moving slowly this season, even for vacation, but episode four does build toward some more substantial plot points. If last week’s focus was on spirituality, this week’s is all about death. As those unconscious neuroses we talked about get brought to the surface, so do our characters’ fears, especially those of mortality. Let’s dive in.

Of our three housewives who hate each other, Jaclyn is starting to spin out the most. Her husband, the hot, young, fellow actor she allegedly can’t keep her hands off of, isn’t picking up her calls, and at breakfast, she’s doing that thing you do when you manically try to hype up the energy so that you don’t have to face your problems. (Works every time!) When Valentin stops by the table to suggest another day of massages and yoga, she demands instead that he take them somewhere fun, “with a vibe”—but when the ladies arrive at the new hotel pool he’s sent them to, it’s Jaclyn’s worst nightmare: a “bargain hotel for retirees,” she says with disdain. When White’s camera lingers on the pool’s aging guests, guts, flabby arms, and leathery tans, it’s meant to be grotesque, and I suppose from the viewpoint of Jaclyn—an actress whose job it is to look good, she notes—it is.

Furious, she storms up to Valentin back at the hotel and demands he take them somewhere better. Even though it’s not in his job description, he promises to make it right and rides with the girls into a crowded part of town, where he drops them off to shop while he fetches his friends to join the party. They notice the townspeople—mostly children—are all carrying water guns, which he reassures them is just part of the Songkran Festival aka the Thai New Year. When Kate condescendingly pats a little girl on the head, though, they become the targets of a gang of water-gun-toting children who totally humble our housewives by spraying them until they’re sopping wet and hiding behind the shelves of a store.

Finally, they end up at a swank oceanside club, where Jaclyn is fully down to rally. “What happens in Thailand, stays in Thailand,” she declares, though something tells me that’s not quite true. Anyway, all she meant is that, “We’re not dead yet. We can still be young, and hot, and fun.” Valentin and his Russian bros, Alexi and Vlad, have all arrived at the club for the very purpose of making the ladies feel as such. Alexi, for instance, shows off a snake tattoo that starts on his bicep and “goes all the way down.” The gigantic Vlad, wearing a patterned bucket hat and a black t-shirt with giant, gold sequin angel wings plastered to the front, assures them, “We know how to make fun.”

Speaking of Songkran, it’s also the night of the Full Moon Party, which means the Ratliffs, Chelsea, and Rick are all aboard Chloe and Greg’s yacht. (Is it the same one Tanya died on after shooting three evil gays dead? If so, dark.)

Rick and Chelsea are having their own morbid conversation—though it’s something of a breakthrough for the couple when Rick finally opens up. While Chelsea is still that terrified something awful is going to happen to her, given that “bad things happen in threes,” and she’s already experienced two with the snake bite and the robbery (“death is coming for me,” on some “Final Destination shit,” she warns), Rick is still hung up on Jim Hollinger—who, he confesses, is the man who killed his father. “I never knew my father,” Rick tells Chelsea. “He was a do-gooder. He came to Thailand to help people. He was trying to help these locals keep a shitty American from stealing their land. My father was here trying to do the right thing, and one day he disappeared, and they never found him.” He knows that Jim is responsible, he says, because his mother—who died of an overdose when Rick was ten, if you’ll recall—told him. Jim now owns both the White Lotus hotel and “half of fucking Thailand.” And Rick is dead set on heading to Bangkok to find him.

“Is this a bit, you killed my father, prepare to die, kind of?” Chelsea asks Rick. It’s a fair question. Rick doesn’t have a satisfactory answer for her but says that he just needs to look Jim in the eyes and tell him how he “ruined [Rick’s] fucking life from day one.” Chelsea knows Rick won’t just talk to Jim but do something worse, and has an uneasy feeling about the situation. But despite her protests, Rick goes to Bangkok, as we see him at the airport later—he also phones a friend, saying he needs an ominous “favor.”

Timothy Ratliff, meanwhile, is staring down the barrel of his own mortality—both literally and metaphorically, as his whole way of life is now threatened by his bad deal with Kenny Nguyen. Now fully addicted to his wife’s pills (that didn’t take long), he’s drinking his problems away at the yacht party to the point of maudlin incapacitation. Despite putting on a brave face for his family, the cracks are starting to show (earlier, while totally distracted, he accidentally flashed them all in the show’s second male full-frontal moment). On the boat, he cradles Piper’s face in his hands, sentimentally realizing how important his family is to him.

There’s a surreal moment in which Timothy and Greg interact at the bar; Timothy tells Greg (who is going by “Gary,” don’t forget) that he’s heard “anyone who moves to Thailand is either looking for something or hiding from something.” Greg, who we know is, in fact, in hiding, insists that he just wanted to escape “the rat race” by moving to his Thai mansion on the hill. Timothy forlornly says he’s “just on vacation with my family,” still adding a foreboding “but you never know.”

We do know that Piper is hiding a secret of her own, which she plans to reveal at dinner with her family. But she can hardly get to the point—that the thesis this entire trip is based on doesn’t exist and that she’s planning to stay at the monastery—because Timothy keeps leaving the table. He gets his phone back from Pam and learns of his fate: Kenny Nguyen didn’t kill himself like he said he was going to, but instead fully cooperated with the feds. This is bad for Timothy, who is still flitting between the denial and bargaining stages of grief. “If I plead guilty [for embezzlement and fraud]...I can never work in finance again,” he tells his lawyer, who bluntly informs him: “Tim, that’s the least of your problems.” His assets have probably already been frozen, he might lose his house (making Victoria’s dream last episode all the more prescient), and he’s facing at least a few months in federal prison. “I would rather fucking die,” Timothy says. “What am I supposed to tell my family? We’re fucking poor, and I’m going to fucking prison?”

He’s not wrong for thinking that wouldn’t exactly go well. At the dinner table, Victoria unknowingly twists the knife, calling Chloe and Greg’s yacht party a “convention for con men and tax cheats” and telling Piper she doesn’t know how lucky she is to “have a father who’s an actual Boy Scout.”

The yacht party is still going, by the way—though at this point, only Lochlan, Saxon, Chelsea, and Chloe remain (I am loving Charlotte Le Bon as Chloe, by the way). There are a few young women too (ones Saxon already pointed out as prey on his creepy hunt to get Lochland laid) and now that their bald, LBH bankrollers have left the scene (some of whom “might be actual killers,” according to Victoria), everyone’s fair game.

Where’s Greg, you ask? Oh, he’s just back at his mansion, cyberstalking Belinda on Instagram (where we get confirmation that the handsome Zion from episode one is indeed her son). Earlier in the episode, Belinda finally Googled Tanya and found out that not only is she dead, but that Greg is wanted for questioning in her very suspicious death. Hiding, indeed.

Gaitok, meanwhile, is once again distracted from his post as he accompanies a dressed-up Mook to the hotel restaurant where she’s joining Sritala’s musical performance. This gives a distraught Timothy just enough time to steal the gun Gaitok was given after the robbery; as much as the too-tender Gaitok probably shouldn’t be trusted with a gun, neither should the surely suicidal Timothy. It’s a recipe for disaster we’ll have to wade into next week. For now, the tide is merely out—but especially with the full moon rising, a tsunami is definitely coming.