It makes a hard man humble.
Spare a thought, won’t you, for Fabian. All season long, the mild-mannered middle-manager has been fretting and fawning over the possibility of singing during one of The White Lotus hotel’s nightly staff performances. As he excitedly tells Laurie, Jaclyn, and Kate near the start of this week’s episode, tonight’s the night. Yet no sooner does he begin singing a song of his own composition, a paean to his native Deutschland in his native Deutsch, than the action refocuses on the increasingly unhappy reunion trio, who have a spectacular falling out that immediately eclipses Fabian’s star. None of the other guests or employees we’ve followed are even around at dinner to see it. The poor man got what exactly what he wanted, but in the end it’s nothing like he wanted.
This, my friends, is a running theme. To take one low-stakes example, consider Piper Ratliff. She spends the day and night at the nearby Buddhist meditation center per her mother Victoria’s wishes, as a test to see if it’s really for her. To her initial delight, her supportive kid brother Lochlan tags along. But when he tells her he intends to stay with her for the next year and study at the center just like her, for much the same reasons, she seems deeply sketched out by it. Is she detecting weird vibes from Lochlan (understandable)? Or is her spiritual journey only special if she’s the only family member special enough to pursue it? An atmosphere of menace pervades our final shots of her in this episode, as if some bad thing on the horizon is disturbing her without her even knowing what it is.
In Bangkok, Rick and his friend “Steve,” aka Frank, keep up their ruse of being Hollywood shotcallers so Rick can come face to face with his quarry, former multi-hyphenate performer Sritala’s rich American husband Jim. What follows is television at its most grizzled: Walton Goggins’s Rick slowly reveals his true identity and purpose to Scott Glenn’s Jim, a faceoff between two real hardasses. Or so it seems. In the end, Rick realizes that whatever Jim used to be, he’s now just a frail and frightened old man.
Rather than shooting him or even hitting him, Rick just dumps the guy on his ass and makes a run for it with Frank, who’s fallen off the wagon from the stress of maintaining his ridiculous ruse of being a director. (“Mostly action films. The Enforcer. The Executor. The Notary. That was a trilogy.”) Frank goes on a full “One Night in Bangkok” rager (no for real, he literally shouts “We’re in Bangkok, man! Let’s fuckin’ go! One night!”), but Rick mostly sits there, smiling beatifically. What if, instead of finding vengeance, he found enlightenment?
Gaitok also fulfills his quest, to take an eager and ebullient Mook out on their first date. But both over dinner and at the fights later that night, she encourages him to ditch his Buddhism-derived pacifism if he wants to get anywhere in his job as a security professional. Her disappointment to discover he’s an unambitious wimp is barely even left implied. It’s an ugly side to a character who’s only ever seemed sweet and charming before, both to us in the audience and seemingly to Gaitok himself. Rather than write this off as writer-director Mike White trafficking in female-temptress tropes as old as Eve, I took it as an example of how there are surface-level nice people all around us who are, deep down, creeps. (And they vote! See also Kate!)
Gaitok may have a chance to play the hero without firing a shot, however. While at the Muay Thai event with Mook, he spots his coworker Valentin and hotel guest Laurie, along with Valentin’s hometown buddies Alexei and Vlad. That’s when he puts it together: the threesome worked in tandem to rob the hotel gift shop. While Valentin distracted Gaitok with small talk, Alexei and Vlad rode in for their smash and grab. He recalls one of the thieves being tall and bald, just like Vlad, meaning Alexei was the masked man who brained him.
