‘The White Lotus’ Episode 2: What Goes Around Comes Around – Rolling Stone

By

Alan Sepinwall

This post contains spoilers for the latest episode of The White Lotus, “Special Treatments,” which is now streaming on Max. 
Early in “Special Treatments,” Kate realizes that she met Victoria once through a mutual friend, and that they spent a weekend together celebrating that friend’s birthday. Despite this connection, Victoria has no interest in so much as making conversation with Kate. Their social circles may overlap slightly, and they may have hung out once, but Victoria Ratliff’s preferred circle is the four people she’s on vacation with, and maybe a few others from back in North Carolina. Everyone else is beneath her and her family, in one way or another. When Saxon is impressed to recognize Jaclyn, Victoria shrugs off her stardom by arguing that “actresses are basically prostitutes.” Later, she warns her children to stay away from essentially anyone they don’t already know, because the kids are rich and beautiful, while “most people don’t have good values!”

So, yes, Victoria feels superior to anyone else she meets, but there’s unsurprisingly a lot of that going around at the hotel, and in “Special Treatments.” Outside of that awkward reunion between Victoria and Kate, plus Gaitok’s mistake briefly putting Chelsea in harm’s way, the various character groups are pretty siloed off from one another this week. So let’s check in on them one by one, to see if any of the characters have more justification than the others to feel like they’re the true best of the best at a resort that Piper describes as “like a Disneyland for rich bohemians from Malibu and their Lululemon yoga pants.” (Even she feels like she’s better than this place!)
The insularity that Victoria takes such pride in has turned her offspring — or, at least, her sons — into creepy weirdos who think about each other way too much. Early in the hour, Lochlan is again gawking at a nude Saxon. And later, he can’t resist telling Piper about his conversation with Saxon from the premiere regarding her alleged virginity. What could perhaps come across as one sibling being protective of another instead has an unmistakable whiff of curiosity — as if once Saxon put in Lochlan’s head both the idea of Piper being a virgin and the permission to say that their sister is hot, he can’t stop thinking about it. Piper very wisely bails on her hammock and heads away, opting to not engage at all with this inappropriate conversation. 

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Saxon doesn’t spend a ton of time around Piper this week, nor does his path cross Chelsea’s again. So instead, his rampaging libido attempts to express itself during one of his treatments, much to the surprise and discomfort of his massage therapist. Like his mom on the subject of actresses, he seems to view every masseuse — particularly in a non-white country like this — as a sex worker. (Though, to his credit, he doesn’t push the issue when it becomes clear that she has no interest in giving him the kind of massage he’s expecting.) And later, as he jokes about Thai ladyboys with the family, you get the sense that he’s not entirely incurious about the idea.  
Plot-wise, the most significant development for Team Ratliff is that Tim finally gets his ex-partner Kenny on the phone. (Kenny is played by none other than Ke Huy Quan, following in the tradition of Laura Dern as the voice of Michael Imperioli’s wife in Season Two.) None of the news from the call is good: The feds are all up in Kenny’s business regarding their Brunei deal, and Tim is implicated in whatever they did. It’s a nightmare for Tim, who notes with some indignation that he made “only $10 million” on the illegal deal. This kind of attention from the law is beneath him, but especially for such a paltry sum, relative to his vast, vast wealth. 
The episode opens with us getting to hear the conversation that Laurie watched the other two having about her at the end of the premiere. As she suspected, they are gossiping about her, constantly reiterating their love and affection for her while continually running her down and expressing pity for her situation as a divorced career woman with a difficult kid, who didn’t even get the big promotion she’d been working towards for so long. 

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Laurie is clearly used to the other two looking down on her. Later, she immediately recognizes how incredulous and offended Jaclyn is to realize that Valentin(*) paid her and Laurie the exact same compliment about having the healthy physique of a much younger woman. Laurie believes that Jaclyn sees herself as the glamorous, fabulous one and treats Laurie as the one lucky enough to get to shuffle along in her shadow. And it’s been this way for a long, long time. 
(*) The women don’t outright call Valentin a sex worker, but there is some half-serious banter about how Laurie, as the only single member of the trio, should try to sleep with him before the trip is over, along with Jaclyn obviously lusting after him, despite her insistence that she’s addicted to her new, much younger husband. There are patterns with all this; Kate dubs this one “Cancun all over again.”  
But if the story were only about Laurie resenting her third-wheel status, that would get old quickly, despite the talents of Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan, and Leslie Bibb. Fortunately, this corner of the show takes a fascinating turn later on. When Laurie and Kate get a chance to talk while Jaclyn is elsewhere in the villa, now it’s Laurie who’s the insider, and Jaclyn the easy target. Kate seems a bit more reluctant to play along this time, in part because Laurie’s comments about Jaclyn are more overtly critical than the patronizing tone of the earlier scene. But soon, even Kate the referee can’t resist acknowledging that their famous friend has had some significant cosmetic surgery, and also that Jaclyn can be awfully full of herself a lot of the time. 

Friendships that last from childhood into middle age can be messy, with many hidden resentments and vulnerabilities. What Mike White and these three actors have done so well with to this point is making clear that it’s never outright hatred or bitterness, not even from Laurie towards Jaclyn. All of them love one another. But there are things each of them have lost patience with over the decades, and this comes out more starkly than normal when it’s just the three of them, away from any of their homes or other loved ones. 
Continuing with the episode’s running insult, late in the hour, Rick dismisses Chelsea’s new best friend Chloe as a prostitute. And there is definitely something transactional in the nature of Chloe’s relationship with the man she knows as “Gary,” whether or not it’s as straightforward an exchange as Rick suggests. But it also feels to some degree like Rick is projecting, and thinks Chelsea is only with him to enjoy the benefits of his own fortune. Certainly, he’s not giving her much emotional reward from their time together. 
We do, however, get some insight into why he’s so closed-off and bitter, when he reluctantly attends a stress management session with Amrita, which quickly turns into straightforward psychotherapy. He tells her his stress level is always at least at an eight out of 10 without pot, and that he considers himself to be “nothing” because his mother died of a drug overdose when he was 10, and his father died before he was born. 
Or did he? Rick continues to show an awful lot of interest whenever Sritala’s husband gets mentioned, and Scott Glenn is the right age to play Walton Goggins’ father. Is Rick perhaps lying about his tragic backstory, and is instead in town to confront the father who abandoned him to such a miserable, if lucrative, life? 
Oh, things seemed to be going so well for Belinda for a while there. Pornchai’s massage and other titular treatments do wonders for her physical and emotional well-being, and she’s more than a little intrigued when he strips down to receive a massage from her and turns out to be jacked. (Dom Hetrakul has a number of action and martial arts films on his resume, and is built like he could smash through a few cinder blocks at once with his bare hands.) But Belinda is also the Charlie Brown of The White Lotus universe, forever getting the football pulled away from her right as she’s about to kick. And the football here appears to be Greg, whose use of an alias suggests he’s lying low after all that went down with the gays trying to murder Tanya in Italy.
Belinda recognizes him, but so far only in the sense that she knows she knows him from somewhere. But Greg’s presence, plus his willingness to have Tanya knocked off, suggests at least one possible scenario for the active-shooter incident from the premiere. Maybe Belinda will get too nosy for her own good, Greg will panic, and, like his late wife, start firing wildly at anyone around him? 

This episode’s scene of violence is more of a one-off, as an armed, masked man bursts into the Lotus gift shop and walks off with a lot of expensive jewelry, terrifying Chelsea and the shop clerk in the process. How does he get in there? Gaitok, whose job it is to monitor every car that enters or exits the resort, is too distracted chatting with Valentin about an upcoming Muay Thai fight to lower the gate before the bandit’s car can get through. After the fact, Gaitok at least makes an effort to stop the man’s escape, but the thief has a partner, and Gaitok winds up getting pistol-whipped for his belated heroism. 
The class consciousness of the series is meant to put viewers on the side of the resort staff and other less-than-wealthy characters. But Mike White likes to make it more complicated than “rich = bad, poor = good.” Back in Season One, for instance, Armond made several mistakes that contributed to his own destruction, starting with double-booking the Pineapple Suite. And here, it’s not hard to suspect that Gaitok isn’t that great at his job. He’s too easily distracted for someone doing security work, especially whenever Mook is around. Here, he finally asks her out on a date, after clearly nursing a crush on her for years. Is she just surprised by his overture, or is she genuinely not interested, laughing nervously and trying to be gentle because they’re old friends? It’s hard to tell, in part because Lalisa Manobal is a less experienced actor than many of her co-stars, in part because so far White hasn’t given nearly as much time or depth to any of the employees as he has to the guests. He may not find the upstairs characters morally superior to the downstairs ones, but he’s definitely more interested in them to this point. We want to hear it. Send us a tip using our anonymous form.Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2025 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.

Source: http://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-recaps/white-lotus-season-3-episode-2-1235267849/