‘The White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 6 Deep Dive and Theories: Can Saxon Reach Spiritual Enlightenment?

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hello welcome back to the Prestige TV Podcast Feed.

I'm Joanna Robinson.

I'm Rob Mahoney.

And we are only podcasting for like three hours total this week, thereabouts, Rob.

Together anyway.

Yeah, together.

And this is one of those shows that we're podcasting this week. It is White Lotus.
And we're here to talk to you about all that went down in episode six, Denials. A lot went down.
A lot went up. A lot went back down again.
It was rhythmic. We also, of course, wrapping up Severance on this feed we've got an episode a mailbag q a episode as well as an interview with the showrunner dan erickson and then rob and i will be checking back in uh to the pit um a lot of if you haven't if you weren't already watching the pit hopefully the word of mouth around episode 12 got you into it.
Because episode 12 was extraordinary television. And we'll be covering 12 and 13 this week on a little double dip as we like to do with The Pit.
And then maybe weekly going forward. I'm not arguing with it.
Adolescence is another thing, of course, that we covered on this feed also uh bill simmons ever heard of him sean fennessey and i covered the first couple episodes of the studio which we're dropping in the feed this week so there's a lot going on on the prestige feed what a bustling time for television and for this feed um white lotus i've heard of it big picture reaction to this episode rob mahoney very eventful i enjoyed it uh if enjoyed is quite the right word i will say like anyone who was worried about the pacing of this show what you have now said is that you just wanted us to get to the incest faster so it is finally here we have arrived all of the fallout uh is falling out in real time i'm i'm loving where we are and the absolute shit show that's happening basically across the board can i uh float a phrase by you that was um offered by one of our listeners adam on twitter okay in response to the episode that Mal and Bill and I recorded that dropped yesterday. Please do.
He said, I'm really disappointed that the term, quote, brotherly tug was not incorporated into the Prestige TV podcast. Rob? A real missed opportunity.
I had circled trying to make a tugboat joke during this podcast at somewhere. But, you know, now that it's out there, now that the tug puns are just front and center, I feel cheap coming back to it.
So let's just say all of your tug puns are welcome. If you want to email us at monkeyshootout at gmail.com or prestigetv at spotify.com with whatever tug-related humor you found in this episode, I would be open to it, Joe.
I don't know about you always always ready for a tug joke thanks so much rob you can't stop emailing us about visual references and severance though we have already recorded that pod too late we've already opened we've opened that barrel of monkeys and they will never go back in okay i kind of want to start with a prompt that actually the official podcast started with this week that i thought was kind of brilliant here we are we've got two episodes left after this episode

six who is in the most trouble yeah post episode six rob mahoney i think it's guy talk

he's getting too he's getting so many wins right now like everything is really coming up guy talk

Thank you. i think it's guy talk he's getting too he's getting so many wins right now like everything is really coming up guy talk mook is excited for their date he got the gun back he pulled the drawer first try first pick immediately finds the gun everything is working out he gets that out of that room not a second to spare once he gets to the range turns out guy talk is a crack shot a natural with the pistol all these things going right for any character on white lotus starts to make me a little bit nervous and i i don't i don't say that in a way where i think it's guy talk floating in the water but i do think maybe he gets in a shootout with a bunch of monkeys and bad things start happening i'm wondering if it's like is it the russians like the russians who we think robbed the boutique and guy talk who is going to like recognize them at the fights or something like that that's that's a possibility we've always been wondering about who's in the most trouble i know i just asked that i'm gonna offer up the flip side as my personal answer which is like who do i think is most primed to get the most out of this experience that is explicitly not the prompt who do you think is in the most trouble um let's see i think piper is in the most danger of having her her worldview rocked by her inability to spend the night at a monastery.
Also by whatever I fear is going to happen with her and her brother now in this room. Oh, are you worried about Lockie at the meditation center? I just think structurally speaking, this whole season has been setting up this like picking sides thing for Lockie in which he's kind of torn between his two siblings and seems a little bit unclear about what he wants in life sexually and otherwise i'm just terrified that like look guys you are in a monastery you need to behave yourselves hands to yourselves uh so to would you like to go back to the beginning of the season when saxon is like people with uh with genitals not wear their rooms together.
As I said, he had a point. He had a point.
You know? I want to circle back to Saxon because he's actually like the figure I'm kind of most captivated by in this very moment. Never thought I'd say that.
Cool, cool, cool. Who do I think? You know, Belinda's in danger.
I mean, Belinda's in a tough spot. I'll say a tough spot spot kind of writing and otherwise like her threads are not the most propulsive like she's got this constant thing with greg going on that's just been stagnant for a long time i'm i don't really know what this season of white lotus is trying to do with the greg belinda continuity belinda's in trouble But also I would I would say it's it would be extremely grim for like Belinda's in trouble, but also I would say it would be extremely grim for Belinda's story arc to get screwed over by Tanya in season one and murdered by Greg Gary in season three.
That is just unrelentingly grim. But what do you think about this second offer from Ponchai to make all of her professional dreams come true it's dangerous look it's a certain morning after tact that i have not heard before like what what if i just manifested everything that you want in life immediately listen if he wanted to he would rob if he wanted to he would and um does.
Yes. I am quite worried about this.
Our listener Shannon says, as soon as he spoke those words, I immediately suspected he might be the one to die because God forbid we let Belinda be happy. And I don't think Greg Gary is going to try to kill her.
Also, Will wrote in, a couple people wrote in saying they don't think Greg Gary is going to try to kill belinda they think that he's going to try to bribe her yeah into silence uh is that your read as well on what's going on i mean it's clear that he needs the cover of this social event for one of those two things it's either like rock solid alibis so that if he or someone else does kill belinda or try to kill belinda that he won't be found culpable for it. But also,

what other pretense would there be for her to possibly talk to him? And I think his pitch overall of like, I know we've had one conversation and it was you tacitly accusing me of murder,

but do you want to come to my house for a dinner party was maybe like not the most founded.

Like, I just don't understand quite what the appeal is for Belinda at that point.

Yeah. I don't know what's going to is for Belinda at that point.
Yeah.

I don't know what's going to get her to go to that party.

It couldn't be me.

But...

Unless Zion really wants to go?

I guess, but here's what I would say.

I can see a very White Lotus ending being...

A very White Lotus ending is moral compromise, right?

Okay.

So if Belinda, who we consider to be this sort of very forthright...

Thank you. A very White Lotus ending is moral compromise, right? Okay.
So if Belinda, who we consider to be this sort of very forthright, moral compass kind of character, if she ends the season taking hush money and opening up her spa with Ponchai and like that's where it ends for her. I don't mind that.
I think that could be an interesting way to resolve some of the threads within that character, but I don't know. Because I remember when we started the season and Greg Gary shows up, Mallory's like, does that mean Portia, who was the assistant character in season two, didn't say anything, didn't go to the airport and say like, all this stuff was happening with my boss and I have suspicions? Yeah given that great gary is wanted for questioning it's still possible that portia said something but i would say it's more white lotus for portia to not say something yeah for people to say that's none of my business and it doesn't uh help my bottom line so i'm not going to stick my neck out for you we also know from the talented mr ripley that the italian authorities on these matters it's possible to run circles around them you know it's it's it's not impossible the documentary the talented mr i just take it as fact all versions novel series movie otherwise all all points of fact okay who is best poised for enlightenment? I have three candidates.

Okay.

Top three.

It's none of the fancy cougars, I regret to tell you.

They're not really on the cusp of a breakthrough, I wouldn't say.

It is Rick, who we've been talking about all season.

It is Tim, who is a slightly more recent development.

And it is coming out of left field saxon look at that white men there's hope for you to be found on hbo sunday night who do you think of the three of them who do you think is most likely to go home with an expanded worldview expanded mind i think tim would be my pick at this point in time and it has been a little bit more of a recent momentum but first of all shout out to everyone who flagged for us right out of the gate that tim was given quote family annihilator vibes i know we were like what do you talk we were like we don't even really know this phrase we don't respond to it and lo and behold lo and behold he is just visualizing murdering himself and then himself in Victoria, presumably. And based on the what's coming up next episode preview, we see if this stuff bothers you, just jump ahead if you don't want to know.
But we see a vision of him in a blood splattered shirt that I'm just going to interpret as yet another vision that he's had of him killing one of the kids or all of the kids and not him actually murdering anybody in episode seven some real bait for the uh the the close trailer watchers truly all of these tim ratliff visions okay but yeah the idea of identity as a prison would hit a certain way with a guy facing literal jail time and he seems to have his moments in terms of contemplating his existence, in terms of being told maybe for the first time that death is in a way a kind of like homecoming and is a release from some of the stresses of this mortal coil. If he takes those lessons incorrectly, he ends up murdering his family.
If he takes them in the faith they are presented, then maybe he finds a kind of enlightenment. So who's to say where he ends up, Joe? This is the moment on the podcast where I play a couple of clips from you.
But as far as I know, we're still not doing clips on these Ringer pods. So I have two TV speeches that I would like to read to you.
This is and is not related to our TV monologues question from last week. And we got a lot of emails from people about ones that we missed.
Do you have any great regrets in terms of ones that we did not hit i would say the umbrella would be the wire for sure just just a huge colossal oversight on our part with from us a very monologuey show like there's maybe eight or nine different exceptional candidates you can make a top 10 from the wire alone yeah no i uh i've been collecting

all of yeah you guys sent a ton of emails about this i've been collecting all of them um so thank

you for that um but this comes per your conversation about tim the tim the scene between tim

and this monk uh was maybe my favorite white lotus scene ever question mark i really loved it

Thank you. And this monk was maybe my favorite White Lotus scene ever? Question mark? I really loved it.
This is from The Good Place, the finale of The Good Place. There we go.
From my guy Chidi. He's talking about the end of your life.
And he says, picture a wave in the ocean. You can see it, measure it, its height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through.
And it's there and you can see it and you know what it is. It's a wave.
And then it crashes in the shore and it's gone. But the water is still there.
The wave was just a different way for the water to be for a little while. You know, it's the conception of death for buddhists the wave returns to the ocean where it came from and where it's supposed to be um and so chidi's speech their speech it's short to eleanor about the end of your life in the good places one of those tv moments where i was like this has actually radically changed the way that I think about the end of life.
And TV can have that power, you know, and it's just Chidi, again, as he cites here, talking about Buddhist ideology, but Buddhist ideology that I had not been exposed to. And so to hear this monk then talk about being a drop of water, sort of returning back into the ocean and the visuals that we get with that.
And then this speech from Midnight Mass, this is going to be a little long. Bear with me.
It's one of the best pieces of writing I've ever heard in my entire life. This is from a character as they're dying.
And she says, I am the energy firing the neurons and I'm returning just by remembering I'm returning home. And it's like a drop of water falling back into the ocean of which it's always been a part.

All things apart.

You, me and my little girl and my mother and my father and everyone who's ever been.

Every planet, every animal, every atom, every start, every galaxy, all of it.

More galaxies in the universe than grains of sand on the beach. And that's what we're talking about

when we say God, the cosmos and its infinite dreams. We are the cosmos dreaming of itself.

It's simply a dream that I think is my life every time. But I'll forget this.
I always do. I always

forget my dreams. But now in the split second, in the moment I remember, the instant I remember,

I don forget this. I always do.
I always forget my dreams. But now in the split second, in the moment I remember, the instant I remember, I comprehend everything at once.
There is no time. There is no death.
Life is a dream. It's a wish made again and again and again and again and again and on into eternity.
And I am all of it. I am everything.
I am all. I am that I am.
Midnight Mass. Go watch it.
Great show. So this idea that's been kicking around a lot of different TV writers' heads of this Buddhist idea of we are a drop of water back into the ocean.
We are a wave crashing on the shore, whatever the case may be and the way in which it is used uh especially in those two examples of characters on the brink of death uh death chosen death whatever um as a comfort as a sort of uplift this is a way to think about death and this way that you, the viewer, can watch the death of a beloved character and not feel devastated by it, but instead feel hopeful about what that means for, you know, this sort of peaceful future for these various characters, especially in the case of Midnight Mass, characters who have experienced a lot of like torment and grief. What do you want to say about this concept as it's executed in the show here? I think I would just reiterate that, like in those contexts, I think having that sort of scale and that understanding of you are a very small place in a very large universe and an infinite timeline that stretches in all possible directions.
That can be such a comforting thought for so many different people

and seeing yourself as, you know, as the monk lays out this sort of like lost connection

that so many people, specifically young people have with nature and within they're chasing after

these pleasures and they're running from pain and they're losing sight of what is actually

happening here. This broader ecosystem that you are tapped into and you're a part of whether you

Thank you. And they're chasing after these pleasures and they're running from pain.
And they're losing sight of what is actually happening here, this broader ecosystem that you are tapped into and you're a part of, whether you like it or not. But for people like Tim and people like Victoria, the what are they going to think and say at the club crowd? Yeah.
Their identity is anchored in such a different and ultimately like less material place, right? It's like, it's so subjective. It is going to like be breezed around by the wind.
And so the idea of that character specifically having to confront the vastness of existence and his ultimately very, very small place in it,

I think can both simultaneously be the relief from the expectations that he's talked about

previously as far as like from the day he was born, you know, he was the grandson of a governor.

He was the son of a great businessman. He gets to kind of wash away some of that in being a droplet for maybe the first time in his conception.
Yeah. But that's a really jarring thought and one that completely rewires your sense of identity.
And so you get this ultimately like much more tethered place within the universe itself and a broader understanding of what your very ultimate, like, very small trials have to do with anything else, which is not much. But in doing so, you have to admit that everything that you're going through is small and that you yourself are a droplet.
And I don't know if Tim's ready for that yet. I don't know if Victoria's ready for that.
She certainly doesn't seem to be. But I look forward to their journey with it.
I think it's interesting because we got this email from our listener, Emily, who, you know, sort of like premised her point of view and the fact that she's white American, her parents are white American, but she was born Buddhist because they converted before she was born. So she was raised Buddhist, by Buddhist parents.
But talking about the way in which these Buddhist ideologies about being but a drop of water in a larger ocean run so counter to the American, white American, capitalist American idea of the individual. Yes.
The importance of the individual. So what she wrote in her email, she said, the monk's comment in the most recent episode of White Lotus got me thinking about some of the dangers that can come with learning about emptiness in translation while being part of American culture.
The monk in the episode is explaining that everything is interdependent and there is no independent self, but it can easily be misconstrued to seem that one's existence doesn't matter in a way that can lead to suicidal ideation. I think the show was leading us to think about it in that direction from Timothy Ratliff's perspective.
When I was a kid, somebody in my parents' sangha, Buddhist community, died by suicide. And from what I understand, it was related to when they were studying about emptiness.
It can be a destabilizing concept to learn about, especially for someone who is otherwise fully immersed in hyper-individualist American culture where the importance of self comes above all else. So thinking about Tim Ratliff,

as we meet him,

as we walk into this space

where he's like surveying it

and feeling like king shit,

just like I've done everything right in this world

and here's my beautiful family

and here's this expensive villa that we can afford because I'm the fucking best. And Pam, I have no time for your ideas about what spiritual activities I might pursue.
I just want to go to the gym and be on my phone. And that's what I want from this trip.
And so he hasn't really been to the gym lately. I got to say he had like one hard treadmill run.
Yeah showers a lot of showers look his heart rate's been up one way or the other so i understand a lot of pacing yes you know he's putting in he's putting his steps you're right you're right he's getting the steps in yeah um so so is it too late for a tim ratl Maybe. But what about your friend and mine, Saxon? Because.
I think he would embrace some nothingness right now. Nordstrom brings you the season's most wanted brands.
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One of our listeners pointed out, and this is like a really great reminder, Jack pointed out that like in the story of the Buddha, who was called Siddhartha before he became the Buddha like he was a prince an indulged pampered prince who after a life of but more specifically a very intensive night of debauchery. debauchery.
Please email me monkeyshootoutgmail.com if I'm getting this all wrong, but I don't think so. Anyway, but maybe.
Goes and sits under a tree until he understands enlightenment and lives an aesthetic lifestyle and all this sort of stuff like that. So I'm not saying that Saxon is going to go meditate under a tree and learn the whole errors of his ways, but is there a way in which we leave this trip? We come here with Piper being the one who's just like, I've got it all together.
I'm reading books about identity. I'm going to go to a monastery, blah, blah.
And we're like, Saxon's the biggest piece of shit we've ever met in our entire life. He's disgusting.
And then on the boat home, it's Saxon sort of reading the book and trying to figure out something out about his life. And Piper, who's like, well, monastery life is not for me.
Do you know what I mean? Is that interesting to you in a sort of journey that White Lotus might explore? It's absolutely interesting to me. I think it's sort of an extension of, if we want to kind of put the incest aside for a moment, some of the dynamic flipping that's happening between him and Lockie, right? This whole idea of everything that he is teaching Lockie is about approaching life as a predator, right? Approaching life knowing that other people want to be used.
But what if it turns out that Saxon has a part of him that because of his own direction list is yearning to be used i think there's a read on basically every conversation he has with chelsea where he is desperate for her to use him and then offended when she will not that kind of contributes to this idea like he even referred to himself in episode five as a blank page which is not the flex that you think it is necessarily if you're saxon but i think speaks to this idea that he is he is soulless in the way that she prescribes there is an emptiness to him that is yearning to be filled and maybe only now having gone through quite a trip with his brother quite a quite a tugboat voyage is he finally ready to come out on the other side ready to read a book or ready to consider himself in a context other than being you know daddy's boy at the office that moment where she says you're soulless i think it's just such an opportunity and maybe i'm just like hoping for too much from like a shitty dude like saxon but like he seemed genuinely to be able to receive that and the way she said it too yeah was not unkindly but just sort of matter of fact you're soulless i mean it's a it's a little unkindly well sure i don't know how that doesn't come off somewhat unkindly but she says it so like kind of just matter of factly oh totally and it's so clear to chelsea yeah who saxon is and how little he has to offer her yeah and so is is there is there growth

opportunities here for saxon other than the the mad sick gains that he can get uh crushing that protein powder you know i don't know i think that part's going well though like he's pounding he's pounding the protein shakes everyone hates the sound of the blender but he will not be deterred um all right let's talk about the ladies shall we laurie kate jacqueline absolute fallout uh from the night before with love and respect to a number of our listeners who wrote in wanting to make sure that i clocked which books uh jacqueline and laurie areside. Rest assured.
Rob Mahoney is really the better, more diligent freeze framer among the two of us. But if it's a book cover, I am.
A character cracks a book. I'm ready.
Joe is your gal. This is your zone.
Jacqueline's reading Barbara Streisand's biography, which is just perfect for her and um by the way great read uh if uh and a great listen to great audiobook experience but her book came out the same month my book came out and i remember like um oh so your rivals you and barb barb has me handily beat don't even worry about the egok queen she She's unbothered. But she, my co-author was reading, was like reading her book and he was just like, would come to the, like as we're on book tour, he's like, okay, this is the latest thing I learned from Barbara Stratzen.
This is the crazy shit she was up to. So great read.
Laurie's reading Modern Lovers by Emma Straub. And uh and what i love about this so modern lovers it was just like a rom-com sort of vacation read makes sense to me a little less calm than rom um but it's um it's about a group of former bandmates from the 1980s uh and their children living in brooklyn and it's about sort of like what they were like when they were younger and they were bandmates and how they're living now as adults.
And, you know, did everyone who was in love with everyone then wind up with the right people now? How are their children? How are they all relating to each other? The years of history and how it can burden your adult relationship or support and inform your adult relationship and the past and the present coming back and forth. So that is like a very perfect, as Lori's like, whoever chains really, or like, it's always fucking been like this with Jacqueline.
She always does this. Here she is doing it to me again.
Those 10th grade wounds are still really coming out. And I get it.
There's some things like that you never forget. And I think this is what's sort of baked into this lifelong friendship, so to speak, of whatever relationship these ladies have to each other.
You never forget those things. It's always in the back of your head and it's sort of informing and rolling into the next thing, but it's never totally washed away.

This is interesting to me, Rob, because I know that you're you're friends with like you're still friends with the people you grew up with. Right.
Yes. Those are like the people that you are close friends with.
I do not keep. Those people are out.
I don't I'm and that's that's like a different uh psychological issue but like I I have like

just a very few people who have who have like known me that long so for you like but you also strike me as like a very like low drama person in general so like is this something that feels ever dramatic to you or is it something that just feels like incredibly comforting to be around people who've known you for that long?

You know what I mean?

I think for many people, the drama fizzles out, right?

It's like, that's the part, the very visceral,

like how you felt when you were 15 years old,

that part gets muted and muted and muted over time.

But then when you see the echoes,

supposedly from people who have grown and changed,

and these are, you know, 30 years from those events,

I think that's where it starts like really sticking out in people's brains, right? That's where like neurons start firing off of like, is this person as evolved as I thought they were? Is our relationship as evolved as I thought it was? Is this under the bridge at all? Or are these waters just continuing to rage? And this is just what it's going to be for the rest of our lives. So I think it's the circular nature of those things when it happens that makes it so acutely notable and painful and i think that like laurie laurie is not someone who has ever struck us as like particularly sedate or under control given the uh the the maybe but assisted the soblank guzzling that we've been witnessing from day one that being said i i like what you're saying about this sort of like visceral like memory of of you know previous wrongs from jacklyn have just innervated like just just she is off out of control uh in a way that i love to see you know she cares about the valentine stuff but but she doesn't really care about the Valentines.
And that's where it's like, Lori is kind of telling the truth when she says, I am just curious, but also she's speaking from a place of like, what she's really mad about is that guy from when they were 15. Like that's what actually is bothering her.
And you can never change that guy and what happened. You can only hope that you have some closures for it.
And clearly from these three women, these are not women who practice a lot of closure, who actually circle up and do the work and talk things through. They're all at such different frequencies in terms of their conflict resolution.
You can imagine that they've never actually worked through any of their stuff. And I think also, yes, absolutely.
And also for Lori, I feel for her so much because it's not just whatever happened with Valentin or whatever is reminding her of 10th grade. It's also like she was really feeling herself the night before.
I know. And she was just really like, I'm doing it.
I look great on this dance floor. I look great with my top off in this pool.
everyone thinks i'm great um i've gone through the shitty divorce my child likes to throw things uh you know or whatever it is she's a hitter you know um and uh but but i still got it and then to feel foolish to feel made a fool of that like perhaps was everyone just laughing at me behind my back and plotting this other thing the whole time i really feel for her kate okay this is uh i know you haven't had a chance to listen to the conversation that mal and bill and i have but like we had a slight disagreement here about like what we thought kate was exactly up to uh in this moment so what how are you reading kate's delivery of the news to laurie and then her like retreat into well i just thought you would think it was funny i actually do kind of take her at face value with some of that i think she thought she was participating in relatively harmless gossip right as she is what we've been doing this whole time it's what we've been doing this whole time it's what me and my austin friends do together like it's just a little bit of chatter behind the scenes and then we're all going to go about our day and maybe we'll exchange a knowing glance as we have throughout this trip i don't think i really don't think she understood what this was going to do to laurie and maybe that is a misdiagnosis of the entire history of that dynamic between jacqueline and la happened way back when. Maybe it's just a misunderstanding of what kind of person Lori is and the fact that she is not one to play with the kinds of niceties that are so important to Kate.
Kate is a, we have to keep this boat steady to get through this trip at all costs. We will not rock it in any conceivable direction.
And she seems most put out by the fact that Lori would indicate at all that the information came from Kate. Like that's where she is hurt in sort of this new triangulation of pain.
And I love that after setting up every permutation of two women against the other over the first five episodes of the series, now it's every fancy for themselves. You know, like there is no one to turn to but their own insecurities i love that that's where this dynamic has ended up well every fancy for herself um and i do not envy them what they've got going on here um is this gonna come to like how is this gonna culminate is this is this the kind of thing that it's like it's gonna come to blows uh or we're just gonna the shot back home on the boat is them instead of them sort of gathered together giggling happily it's them on like three different parts of the boat in isolation from each other provided all of them make it onto the boat alive you know i mean laurie seems like she could be a fighter i could i could see her being a couple glasses deep and getting getting a little physical i could see that her like kickboxing moves that she keeps showing us yeah like i bet jacqueline's done like some action movie training oh yeah but maybe is not as she's not as attuned to having like to being in a fight with real hands as you might want to be if laurie's coming at you kate is not participating in any of that or if she did it would take like a different kind of explosion and agitation of that character that we've never really seen before right like she is to a certain extent unflappable you can come at her for her church you can come at her for her voting history and she is going to bless your heart and move on and keep the peace like i think it would be it would be really interesting if we see something different from that character but we should really have to be pushed there i want to go back to the boys i've i i'm sorry i thought you i know you thought we were done with talking about saxon and locky but i have to address something that um two two things okay so one is i've seen this theory floating around i've we got emails about it i've seen it on social media this idea that like lachlan spit the drugs out this is when the freeze framers come to like bite themselves in the ass honestly that lachlan spit the drugs out and was not at all impaired yes uh in the night and just sort of made a very purposeful move on his brother um i think the episode whatever it is you think you you saw in the spitting, in the spitting out or not of the, of the drugs in the previous episode.
I think his, the way in which the memory comes back to him at the meditation center, I think negates that no matter what, but I will also say inside of white Lotus, unlike say severance where like you can be forgiven for some of your wild speculations because that's that's what severance is courting to a certain degree yeah white lotus to my memory is not really a gotcha show it's not really a like oh if you pay pay pay close close close attention we sort of tricked you in this moment and we're going to reveal that later that's not something white lotus to my memory has ever done so i think you're barking up the wrong tree if that's if that's what you're trying to pursue but i do think what's very clear for both lachlan and saxon and and we did get some emails about this is like this is a clear case of like no one's in in a place where they can consent uh inside of this evening you know and like everyone is impaired all judgment is impaired i would say that like saxon was definitely i don't know i don't know can you take well i don't know i don't want to i don't want to get too gnarly into the idea of consent, but no one was able to give consent inside of this situation. This is a horrible situation.
It's very murky. Yeah, yeah.
You know? It's fun to make some jokes about it, but it is also a horrible situation. It is a horrible situation.
I think it's incredibly murky. I will say this.
I think when they wake up in the morning, I think both Saxon and Lockheed have some memory of what happened. And it is kind of coming to them in stages.
And I agree with you. Lockheed is sort of the maybe putting all the pieces eureka moment when he's trying to silently meditate and quiet his monkey mind.
And that monkey mind is in full effect and will not be silenced at that particular point in time. Very weird moment to be about jerking off your brother to say the least but i think when they wake up and they're finally kind of meeting on church you know what i mean this is the thing there's a time and a place yeah uh when they meet on the yacht deck the morning after and saxon's drinking his coffee and lockheed's coming up from the bedroom it feels like lockheed is looking for affirmation from saxon that like this was this was okay like we're we are okay like we're kind like he's looking for saxon to kind of break the ice about it and saxon is i think ready to never speak of this ever again to anyone under any circumstances and where he's most riled up in the episode is when mostly chelsea and chloe start bringing it up and maybe maybe needling him a little bit on it yeah i mean i don't know on the locky front it's sam nivola's performance in that morning after moment is like very interesting to me yeah um i'm tempted to say it's almost like a subconscious like subconscious.
You know, Mal and I were both particularly struck by the fact that they're wearing each other's swimming trunks. I didn't even clock that.
That's amazing. On the other side of this, that like Saxon in his beleaguered state pulls on his brother's swim trunks and they're just like a little too, they're like not quite fastened at the top.
They're just like a little too small for him and then locky's sort of slightly swimming in his brother's uh trunks and it's just sort of like this reversal of power and dominance and and all this other stuff and i think that's sort of in the mix without any intentionality yeah behind it you know we did get that lachlan line of like someday i'm going to take you down in the previous episode, but I don't think any of this was a targeted attack of any kind. I think there is the thing in the air that we've been talking around all season, which is there is an infatuation, an attraction, an interest in his brother that has been there.
You're not checking out your brother and watching him go off into the bathroom to jerk off if there's not like some level of intrigue yeah but as far as like a targeted thing where he's spitting out drugs and manipulating his brother i just don't think it's ultimately that malicious i think it is coming from a more instinctive animalistic kind of place right it is it is coming from a a similarly altered place where he is also on something he is like following his particular bliss maybe not as mindfully as he should be as far as where that should take him and i have to say just from a manual dexterity standpoint very impressive what he's able to pull off under those circumstances uh there's a there's a lot happening there's there's a lot of balancing of different tempos and for for an alleged novice locky seems to have some uh some natural aptitude it seems like some real left brain right brain sort of like yeah cross communication stuff that's going on i don't know if i'm impressed but i it's notable you're impressed it's okay you can say so in a like uh rub your stomach pat your head kind of way yes all right what about rick and chelsea

um or more specifically rick i suppose since we've been talking a bit about chelsea but uh rick miss a pretty rick light episode which makes sense given that like half of the runtime of the previous one was walton goggins reaction shots but he's kind of just putting things in motion what's's your take on Rick showing up to a con without one single solitary title from this woman's filmography in his back pocket in order to execute the con?

Irresponsible.

This is my main sticking point.

Complete irresponsibility.

It takes one search.

You can't read a plot summary i just for comedy's sake i understand but like i mean i guess what i'm given to understand is that if this is the kind of thing rick does which is the implication as he's talking to frank that this is the kind of thing they've done before is it uh is he just really bad at it you know is he a really bad con man i don't know but like he's done no no research and then also and this is you know this is bill's question i'm not sure where i fall on this but do you think sitala is buying it do. I think she's all the way in based on like the vulnerability of her vanity.
But like Rick is so bad at this that it's like starting to stretch credulity that she would just invite this person into her home based on what the fuck exactly, you know? So. I think it's starting to stretch credulity and I think she's starting to be put out a little bit by the imposition of, you made me come all the way to this restaurant to not have a meeting.
And now you want to come to my house for a drink? There's a level of decorum and hospitality that she is willing to participate in for the sake of getting this job. And at some point, it's going to run out.
I i think for now she's going along for the ride enough

to say like i at least want to meet this guy and see what's going on but she doesn't strike me as oblivious to the fact that rick is bad at this in terms of like the way this season is pacing out in terms of this like build to this episode do you think do you think in your experience with Lotus, this is a thing that is just going to build and build and build and build. Obviously, we're headed towards some kind of shootout of some kind, monkeys or otherwise.
Is this the kind of thing where people have been complaining for the first half of the season that nothing was happening, but they'll only remember on the other side of the season that there was this like boat encounter at the very least not to mention whatever's going to happen at the shootout um and do you think like in a binge scenario the slowness of the first half of the season wouldn't bother people at all you know what i mean like my working theory has been that people don't remember what the cadence of white lotus season is. And so like, are we on a normal track or, you know, we've added an episode.
Are we like, you know, stretching out a bit to fill our runtime? What do you think? I think it will mostly feel like a White Lotus season by the end of it. And I think ultimately, like, it's just just it's just a factor of the kind of action

that we see on screen in white lotus which is you're going to remember the incest and not the

absence of incest and so you may have a vague recollection in your mind that like oh i remember

thinking that that season was kind of slow but not really being able to articulate why other than

that and so that feeling can last but i think ultimately like we have the stuff with the rat

lifts just really kind of starting to pop off i would would say the stuff with the Fancy's just kind of starting to heat up as far as the real kind of tensions between all three of them simultaneously. We've been building, of course, to Rick and his dad in this ultimate confrontation.
And we get not the first sight of Scott Glenn on this show, but the first sound of his gravelly voice. i'm sure knowing scott glenn and the way he performs another deeply philosophical conversation to come as he is ought to do in basically every show he appears in uh and so it's like we're gonna get the heady emotional stuff in basically every plot line that exists right now to say nothing of whatever happens with belinda and greg and all that mess and the dinner party that i want to say this from saxon's point of view.
If you do participate in a threesome with your brother and another woman, and that woman invites you and your parents to a dinner party, do not go to the dinner party. Why would you ever do that? Why would Saxon go? Why would Belinda go? Why would anyone go to Greg Gary's? And yet, do you not feel certain that they're all going to go? Oh, they're going to go all right.
Yeah. Tim now is on board.
He's like, yeah, I've been wrestling with the enormity of existence in my small place in it all day. I would love some hors d'oeuvres at this point.
So Piper and Lockie are going to spend the night at the monastery together. Tim and Victoria, everything's be everything's it's not look if your dad accidentally creates a couple portmanteau nickname for you i just think bad things are gonna happen i don't see that going well um if tim and victoria and lockie and sorry and saxon Saxon and Belinda and Zion are going to Greg Gary's and Chelsea.
Wait, is, is, do you think Belinda is going to make it? Because she's also gotten this competitive invite from Fabian to come watch her, watch him perform. Well, that's my question.
Like I'm, I'm trying to figure out where everyone's going to be next week. Yeah.
think belinda's at the party do you think zion goes to the party alone i think it's possible they split up and she goes to greg's and zion stays in part i don't know if you clocked this or if i'm just misreading it zion was given fabian a bit of a look oh i didn't see it like as you know fabian comes by their table at breakfast and invites Belinda. Yeah.
And it's just like, on the one hand, it could be

a kind of skepticism. On the other hand, like, there's a read on that performance where he's

kind of looking at Fabian like a piece of meat a little bit. Oh, interesting.
And it's kind of

clocking him in a way. I have no idea if that's the case or not.
But there is a lingering shot

of Zion's reaction that seemed notable. I love when Fabian's like, are you feeling better? And she's like, not really.
Not a bit, but we're going to move on. Not really.
Yeah, I guess I read that more of like, I'm judging you for your behavior unless I want to see you sing a beautiful ballad but i'm delighted to be proven wrong zion just seems open-minded in general i will say he takes walking in on his mom he's pretty cool about the whole thing ride in stride and then guy talk and mook and perhaps laurie and kate and jacqueline are going to the fight i mean laurie's flipped on this pretty hard and it seems like she didn't want to go in the morning but then when it became clear that it could be used as a way to needle jacqueline now all of a sudden she really wants to go and to put them all in the same place again i think they will will probably end up there. Just because I don't know where else the fancies would end up.
I guess they could just stay at the hotel, but it does feel like we're kind of gravitating toward these. They did seem to appreciate Srutala's performance.
So maybe they just like a live show. There is a thing too, as we were talking about, you know, Rick and Srutala's like incredulity or lack thereof about his story and her desperation as as an actress like we get laurie invoking very specifically this idea with jacqueline this week of like she is an aging actress who only gets her validation from male attention and there's there is something you know like sarita's been very eager to make that comparison with jeline of like, oh, we are both performers together.
And I think putting them on a continuum in that way, where it's like, you see the increasing desperation for women in that position and the increasing desperation in people in that line of work over time. puts I think puts Jacqueline in such a fascinating place as she's sort of navigating all this stuff because I wonder if there was a world where if she doesn't get the call from her husband Harrison

at the beginning of this episode where she's maybe more open with the girls about valentine where it is like a thing they can talk about and is is maybe even funny or that she's not denying it i mean that's the thing is like it's all gonna bother laurie no matter what it's true but if jacklyn shows up and like, I was feeling so insecure. I couldn't get a hold of Harrison.
Like there's a way in which they're not allowed to show weakness to each other because they've got this like competitive thing going on. So like they talk about each other's weaknesses without sort of like bringing their vulnerabilities to each other.
But if Jacqueline had showed up at breakfast and she's like, oh, my God, I'm so know you guys were vibing i just was feeling so desperate you know blah blah would laurie still be pissed yes would it be as like volcanic as it is no because you know jacqueline lying about it as a viewer jacqueline lying about it is so much almost worse than her doing it you know it too, but it's like, we're not even at the magma stage yet. We're just like venting out hot air.
It's just like very, there's a lot of antagonism happening, but it's not truly explosive in the way that I think it's going to get truly explosive. Okay.
Okay. Run for the hills.
The magma's coming. Anything else you want to talk about all my lettuce i think i want to dig back into saxon just a little bit more because sorry i don't know what that means in this context i don't know that i want to know but this idea that he's been proposing throughout the season of like he's been talking about piper as someone who sort of hides away from the world and hides away from her problems and as soon as chelsea and chloe start talking to him about the fact that he had a threesome with his brother which first of all as soon as chloe brings it up we get the reaction shot where saxon looks to chelsea for her reaction do not look you do not want to see what amy lou has in store for you in that moment even though for us it was wonderful but as soon as they start giving him a hard time he's like i'm going back to my room like i'm going back to hide hide away now from the problems that are kind of out here and i think like patrick schwarzenegger is so great in this episode at basically being like in perpetual gag reflex mode like he just cannot get out from under that visceral feeling that like very physical reaction to what has happened and i think it's it's a physical reaction to obviously being in a weird incestuous situation with your brother in a way you didn't anticipate but also this whole idea of like as we're dealing with concepts of identity like he is not the older brother in control giving the younger brother advice anymore he's the guy sitting on the side here's the thing sometimes in life you're the person...
You know what? I was going to say you're the person getting jerked off or doing the jerking. I'm going to put it this way.
Lachlan has the agency in that sexual exchange. Sometimes you're driving the tugboat and sometimes you're merely a passenger.
That's exactly what I mean to say. Thank you for the save, Joe.
But yeah, Saxon is laying there. He is experiencing something and he is present and he is tripping out of his mind Lockheed is in command in a totally different way that I don't think Saxon understands how to wrap his head around yeah I think it's interesting to think about all these people and where they are in terms of like their identity versus where we found them at the beginning and that's why I'm talking about all these like sort of mirror flips on the boat ride home.
That's something that the White Lotus is always interested in. And I think something like Jacqueline and Laurie and Kate, thinking about Laurie as like, you identified this in the first couple episodes.
Yes, they were all gossiping about each other, but it was very much like Jacqueline and Kate and Laurie was what sort of the first couple episodes felt like. They were complimenting each other but it was very much like jacqueline and kate and laurie was what sort of the first couple episodes felt like yes uh they were complimenting each other about how good they look and they're like oh laurie you're also here sort of stuff so laurie's place is supposed to be i'm grateful i'm just grateful to be here with my two friends who are more polished than i am again this is nothing to do with how hot we think carrie coon actually is um my friends are more polished than I am.
Again, this is nothing to do with how hot we think Carrie Coon actually is. My friends are more polished than I am.
Maybe I have a bit more money than I do. So I'm just supposed to be here and be grateful.
And I don't care. I almost sleep where I'll sleep in the, you know, next to the monkeys.
Like, I don't care. It's fine to like, fuck you, Jacqueline.
I'm not going to just be like meek and go along with what, you know, like Jacqueline. Jacqueline is a person who's like gets to be the gracious giving host to this person who is like being attacked kind of rightly so by her friend.
I mean, who the fuck cares if she has sex with Valentin? But like the way she did it is is the problem and the lying about it is a problem you know so what i love about the fancies in this episode is that they are all they're all wrong in their own ways and they're all misbehaving in their own ways like even laurie who i think we are naturally inclined to feel for given given the way the last episode kind of unfolded and she was having such a great time as you said she was in her power and really like feeling herself yeah but she turns into like a straight up like shit-stirring chaos agent in this episode like she is like provoking reaction as much as anything like she's it's a kind of like retribution and revenge but it's not like a very clear-cut one and so it results in her just like lashing out in a bunch of different directions at once. Sometimes Kate is taking fire for not being quote unquote honest, even though I wouldn't say Lori herself is being 100% honest throughout this episode.
Jacqueline is obviously pretty wounded by a lot of the things that Lori is saying, even though there's some truth to it. But attacking your friends in that particular way when maybe you should have resolved those things 30 years ago also has something to do with you.
So no one is getting of this clean and this is this is often what is to me the best parts of white lotus is when everyone has their hands dirty everyone has shit all over them and there's just like no there's no escape right it's like the only way through is to either clean this up or you just have to wear it yeah and like the hope is that whatever shit you're going through on the other side, you come out with a better understanding of what you want or who you are in some way. And again, what is usually the case on my Lotus is that it'll be true for a few people.
Yes. And not true for most people.
So who's to say anything else you want to say about this episode? I do want to talk about Victoria who doesn't have a ton to do in this episode. But I will say the the perma scowl that Parker Posey is delivering.
And of course, the long vowel sounds are just working overtime as usual. Her read on Piper continues to fascinate me.
And it's sort of proposal that she brings to the table. Like, I've seen how these exactly that of having seen the lodgings at the monastery, challenging her daughter to sleep here for literally one night.

And overall, after she proposes that and Piper has to go talk to some of the monks about those accommodations, the look of just like deer in the headlights terror on Piper's face when she turns around, I think is quite telling.

And the fact that she only finds some relief when Lachlan says he will also come. She's not ready for this.
This girl is just not ready for the life that she's trying to embark on. And I think ultimately, White Lotus has a lot to say about, as it engages with pretty directly in this episode, the spiritual malaise of younger people who are so desperate to find something.
And Piper is engaging in that idea more openly than I would say any of the younger characters we've ever had on White Lotus, right? There's people who are kind of like have all of the privilege in the world and don't know what to do with it and don't know what direction to point their life. She thinks she knows.
It's just unfortunate that it seems to be that she might be very, very wrong about what it is that she's actually ready for um i think that and you and i sort of clocked that several episodes ago when she was just sort of like looking around and was just sort of like yep this is the place for me i can tell this is the one i can tell on the on the on the pleasure seekers finding only pain front uh that we heard from um this monk inside of this episode again I would circle back to someone like Saxon, who's like, running after pleasure in this full moon party scenario, this sort of like lotus eater, pleasure seeker mode and finding extreme psychic pain on the other side of it in terms of not just the physical pain of the hangover but the psychic pain of like what the what the fuck did i do what boundary did i cross that you know they're never gonna they're never gonna want to hear this back at duke you know the frat bros aren't gonna want to know are they okay they might want to hear about it i don't know um yeah and something i didn't get into much when i was talking to uh bill and mal about this episode because i never uh love to bore them with literature corner um is incest as this staple of like southern gothic storytelling classic southern gothic storytelling yeah that it shows up in, I don't know, you've already come out against some of our profound, most famous novelists, such as Charles Dickens. Do you have anything to say about Faulkner, William Faulkner? See, this is where you've stumbled into the right place, Joe.
Faulkner's my guy. Oh, okay.
An overly flowery kind of prose. Who am I to turn that away, you know? I think over on the

Hemingway-Faulkner spectrum, I'm probably like 70 Faulkner, 30 Hemingway, ultimately. I find

Hemingway maybe a little too sparse for my particular taste.

Oh, yeah. He's very short declarative sentences.
All right. So William Faulkner,

Sound of the Fury, a classic incest tale yep for the ages tennessee williams glass menagerie suddenly last summer streetcar on uh not streetcar necessarily but like um those stories often there's often like a bomb hitting hidden somewhere in the family's background and whether or not it's homosexuality or incest those are like the two things that Tennessee Williams likes to go for and like Mike you know Mike White's like why not both sort of the vibe here and then I know you love you like a UK TV series but were you ever a Gavin and Stacey watcher? No I don't think I really Gavin and Stacey at all. What's the deal there? Well, we don't need to go into it, but there's this long-running bit on Gavin and Stacey from Rob Brydon, who's a great comedian, about this fishing trip that this uncle and nephew went on, and just nobody wants to talk about whatever happened on the fishing trip.
Nobody wants to talk about it. The uncle and the nephew don't want to be in the same room together they don't want to talk about it there's like occasional hints about it that it was like awfully cold what are we gonna do like all the sort of stuff like that it's just this like like multi-season fishing trip joke that just sort of lingers in the background of that great UK sitcom.

And I was thinking about that a lot when I was watching this.

But yeah, like this idea of like our most Southern storytellers

and the idea of incest, much smarter people than me

can email us at monkeyshoot at gmail.com

if you understand why that has been such a part of that kind of literature.

But given that Mike White has like ripped these archetypes

This is a production of the U of literature. But given that Mike White has ripped these archetypes, given that Victoria is the most Blanche DuBois sort of southern flower that we could possibly find, what is he engaging with there when he goes in this particular direction?

I've had to offer a layman guess as a native Southerner myself.

Sure.

I would say... But you're...

Don't you think that like Texan Southerner is different from...

It is definitely different.

There's a revolutionary spirit.

There's a frontierism that's a little bit different in Texas for sure.

Your classic fondness for beans, you know? Again, there's a lot going on here it's it's a very diverse place uh but as far as these like southern empires go i think what you're running into is this like very specific intersection in the storytelling between these huge familial structures in which it's not just the ties that bind us as fathers and sons mothers mothers and daughters, siblings, like across the family tree, but these are like an investment in legacy, right? Like there is something that we are participating in that is bigger than us and thus where we have something to lose. In this case, like with the Ratliff's family fortune, disgrace, all of that.
And so it's like you have these very well-articulated familial structures and a suggestion from the people who are in them that that's important to them, whether it is or not, your mileage may vary, versus this like Kate level obsession with decorum, right? Like nicety, politeness. And so it's this idea of you have to project in a very specific way.
You have a very messy family. And how do you reconcile those things? And usually the skeletons end up popping out of the closet, whether you want them to or not.
Love it. Love that interpretation.
Great stuff from you, Rob Mahoney. All right.
Anything else? Any other nuanced incest takes you want to share with us? I just can't believe we're here. I would say it's one thing for incest to be like front street commentary in Game of Thrones

in Fantasy Fair.

It's just at this point not that big of a deal for a character on one of those shows

to go to bed and wake up dreaming of going down on his mom.

That's just part of the fabric of those stories.

But this is ostensibly close to real life people.

And I feel like it's always a very different thing when you trip out of genre into like

Thank you. of those stories but this is like ostensibly close to real life people and i feel like we're it's always a very different thing when you trip out of genre into like as we've talked about like kind of sexually transgressive ideas and portrayals on screen and as even as we're trying to diagnose in this episode like the consent of it is so murky their dynamic is so un like perpetually unbalanced by the nature of their relationship uh and we're out here and like mike white is like you if you're watching this show you're gonna have to talk about this and you're gonna have to engage with these ideas and you have to watch these characters go through extraordinarily uncomfortable circumstances afterwards and if i have one great regret about this episode it's that we don't have to see saxon and lockie go back to the same bedroom at the end of it at the end of the night because Lockie is off with Piper and so for now they at least have some space from each other where they have to like process their own shit great point great point well made all right well this has been a very special episode of it sure has to podcast of White Lotus what a time to be alive we'll be back with our pit coverage.
Incredible stuff happening over on the pit. Really recommend.
And thank you, Rob Mahoney. Thank you, Joe.
What a pleasure. What a treat.
What a delight to speak to you about this episode of television.

Thanks to John Richter, Justin Sales, and Kai Grady for this work on this episode as well.

I will be back later this week. thanks to John Richter Justin Sales and Kai Grady

for this work

on this episode as well

I will be back

later this week

and until then

bye