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Another HBO Sunday night, another episode-stealing Walton Goggins White Lotus scene. But this time, in the fifth installment of the show’s Thailand-set third season, it wasn’t Goggins’ depressive Rick making viewers’ jaws drop. It was Rick’s old buddy Frank—played, in a surprise guest appearance, by Sam Rockwell—with whom he reunites in Bangkok. Since they last saw one another, Frank has undergone a true sea change. Once a big partier, the expat is now 10 months sober. And he’s found his higher power in the form of Buddhism. As he recounts to Rick, while Rick looks at Frank the way many of us looked at Rick when he freed the snakes a couple episodes back, this transformation began with a sexual odyssey of surreal proportions.
Frank’s monologue is the centerpiece of an episode that is, in its basic structure, unique for Lotus. For more than two seasons, the show’s episodes have generally begun when characters awakened in the morning and ended when they went to bed at night. But this one inverts that timeframe, opening midway through the evening that closed Episode 4 and—like the Full Moon Party on the island of Koh Phangan that is its partial backdrop—raging till the brink of dawn. It’s the perfect context for a wild hour of TV that journeys into the dark heart of desire, examining the things characters want and crave and demand through the lens of Buddhist non-attachment.
Frank lives up to his name
Rick doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who pays social calls, and indeed his reunion with Frank comes with an agenda. When they meet up at the Bangkok hotel bar, Frank hands over a leather bag containing a gun that Rick has presumably requested because he wants to shoot the hotel owner who killed his saintly father. (Now that troubled Southern patriarch Tim has Gaitok’s gun, there are two desperate middle-aged white guys running around with firearms.)
But when Frank starts talking, you can see why Lotus auteur Mike White bothered to recruit Rockwell for this relatively minor role. (It probably also didn’t hurt that Rockwell’s longtime partner, Leslie Bibb, was part of this season’s main cast.) Like so many dissolute American guys, losers back home or otherwise, Frank explains, he came to Thailand for the women. Before long, he recalls, "I was out of control. I became insatiable. And, you know, after about a thousand nights like that, you start to lose it. I started to wonder: Where am I going with this? Why do I feel the need to f-ck all these women? What is desire? The form of this cute Asian girl, why does it have such a grip on me? ‘Cause she’s the opposite of me? Is she gonna complete me in some way? I realized I could f-ck a million women, I’d still never be satisfied."
So far, so typical of a Western man-child’s debaucherous, libido-driven sojourn to the East. But the monologue continues, veering into the kind of territory that illustrates what White means when he says he’s got “minor edgelord” tendencies: “Maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls.” By now, Rick’s eyes are wide and his mouth is hanging open. “Really?” he says. Yes, it turns out Frank couldn’t be more serious. Soon, he says, he was dressing up in ladies’ lingerie and bottoming for white guys much like himself in an attempt to feel what the women he hooked up with felt during their trysts. “Then I got addicted to that,” he explains. Sometimes he would hire a local woman to watch. “I’d think: I am her. And I’m watching me.”
This is a tangled web of desire and identity, to say the least. It would be a mistake to interpret Frank’s anecdote as some kind of coming-out story; how he chooses to label his gender or sexuality is of minimal importance. What he’s talking about are the slipperiness of identity and the mysteries of attraction. It isn’t always clear whether we want to possess other people (if only for a night) or to become them, whether they’re our opposites or our doubles. (It feels relevant that doppelgängers and multiples are everywhere this season, from Rick and his girlfriend Chelsea’s May-December mirror, Greg/Gary and Chloe, to the three blonde girlfriends to the many guests who resemble characters from seasons past.) He’s getting at a fundamental confusion—one perhaps inherent in Western culture—between what we desire and who we are.
Frank makes an explicit connection between his uncanny sex spree and his Buddhist breakthrough. Exhausted from his endless pursuit of pleasure, he has replaced it by learning about “spirit versus form, detaching from self, getting off the neverending carousel of lust and suffering.” (Alas, he’s no bodhisattva yet. “I still miss that pussy,” he confesses.) It seems likely that these concepts have flown right over the head of the determinedly unenlightened, palpably suffering Rick, who is so attached to his self that he can’t get out of his own head. As Frank speaks, Rick is aching to satisfy his desire for revenge in what Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) correctly identifies as a ridiculous, Princess Bride-style plot to kill the man who killed his father.
About that neverending carousel of lust and suffering…
It isn’t just Rick who could stand to embrace some of the ideas Frank introduces. From the Full Moon Party to Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) & Co.’s wild night on the town to the few characters who stuck around at the resort, the episode was defined by desire and its discontents.
In a vignette that could have come straight out of Lotus’ love-and-sex-themed second season, Valentin (Arnas Fedaravičius) takes Jaclyn, Kate (Bibb), and Lori (Carrie Coon) out with two of his most muscular Russian friends. It’s long been obvious that what Lori—the only single girl of the three—wants is Valentin. Throughout the night, she makes herself the center of attention, dancing like a madwoman, taking her top off in the pool, and, though it probably does her no favors in seducing such macho men, bragging about her lawyerly chops. At one point, it seems possible that she’ll hook up with more than one of the guys. But, to the apparent frustration of Jaclyn, who has been pushing her and Valentin together all week, Lori lets them leave without making a move. Cut to the wee hours of the morning, when Lori is snoring in bed. (The shot of her scratching her butt is just brutal.) Valentin’s back, and the woman he’s here to see is Jaclyn. “Let’s f-ck,” she breathes into his ear, in case there’s any confusion about whose idea this was.
If Jaclyn, the benefactor behind this lavish girls’ trip, is also turning out to be its villain, it’s because she has proven to be ruthless in satisfying her desires. This puts her in alignment with the loathsome Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), who has made it his mission to get his timid little brother, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), laid. On the yacht to the Full Moon Party with Chelsea and Charlotte Le Bon’s Chloe, now temporarily out from under the brooding eye of Gary/Greg (Jon Gries), Saxon bellows his philosophy of life. “Confidence, Loch. That’s how you get people to do what you want. Because most people don’t know what they want,” he opines. “They just wanna be used… They’re just waiting for someone to come tell them what to do.” Never mind that he seems to have gleaned his philosophy of life from a Eurythmics song. What’s salient is that he’s articulating essentially the opposite of the ideals to which Frank aspires. For Saxon, who we are is defined by what we want—and the harder we exert our will, the more we win at life.
He’s been talking this way all season. More illuminating—and alarming—are Loch’s responses to his brother. Whether he’s parroting his sister, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), or arrived at the idea independently, he counters Saxon’s hyperacquisitive mentality with what is more or less the definition of karma: “What if this life is just a test, like, to see if we can become better people?” Later, he playfully but probably not jokingly tells his brother, “One day, I’m gonna take you down.” This desire to conquer Saxon manifests in the most perverse of ways, in the now-rather-intoxicated boys’ final scene of the episode, where Chloe and Chelsea goad them into kissing each other. They oblige with a quick peck on the mouth. But then Loch goes back in with tongue, leaving Saxon noticeably reeling. Given all the ominous energy on display this season between the Ratliff kids, and particularly Saxon’s creepiness towards his siblings, Loch seems to be responding to a psychosexual power imbalance that dates back to childhood.
Incredibly, this wasn’t even the darkest Ratliff storyline of the episode. Back at the resort, Piper finally comes clean to her parents—and reveals that she’s not perfect, either. The thesis she’s supposed to be researching never existed; the real reason she dragged the family to Thailand is because she wanted to check out the meditation center where she hopes to study for at least a year after college. This, of course, sets off Victoria (Parker Posey), who won’t hear of her daughter converting to a “Chinese” religion or moving to “Taiwan” (does she literally not know where she is?). It also proves that Piper is just as desire-driven as anyone else in her scandal-stricken, pill-popping family. “I need to figure out what makes me happy,” she insists.
Piper’s father, Tim (Jason Isaacs), can’t muster much concern about her revelation because, again, he’s taken Gaitok’s (Tayme Thapthimthong) weapon and, as we learn in the final scene of the episode, is planning to use it to kill himself. But just as he’s aimed it at his head and is about to pull the trigger, Victoria wanders out with a laughably clueless assessment of a predicament she knows nothing about.“There’s no reason to be stressed, Tim,” she reassures her husband, who's quickly hidden the weapon. “You’ve already succeeded in every way.” As she drifts away, he does laugh, bitterly. Then he prays: “Please, God, please. Tell me what to do.” What would Saxon say if he could see the father he idolizes pleading for the one thing Saxon most associates with weakness?
Happily, not every manifestation of desire in the episode leaves a bad taste. The hour also includes a dollop of hard-earned pleasure in the form of Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) and Pornchai’s (Dom Hetrakul) bedside kiss. Unaccustomed to expressing her own wants, Belinda is adorably awkward in inviting him to sleep in her bed (who says “Whatever’s clever”?). A contrast to the other storylines that leaves room for ambivalence regarding the pursuit of earthly desire, the scene finally gives this chronically mistreated character something she yearns for—and, in turn, satisfies the most purehearted wishes of viewers who’ve been rooting for her for years.
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