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Uh oh. The Lorazepam is running low in the latest episode of ‘The White Lotus’
Editor’s Note: This story recaps plot points from “The White Lotus” Season 3, episode 4.
Things at “The White Lotus” continued to trickle along this week, in that way only Mike White knows how to pull off… until they ramp up considerably.
Here’s a recap of episode 4:
After that unfortunate armed robbery incident, guard Gaitok gets a handgun from management to help beef up security at the resort. He has no experience or training handling a firearm though (we see just how sorely he needs it by the end of the episode), and is instructed to go to the gun range to learn how to use it.
Timothy’s stealthy pill-popping continues – dry-swallowing two in a row and eventually outright stealing his wife’s entire stash – to the point where he can barely stand. Later on, he gets his phone back and speaks with his lawyer, which was probably a bad idea since he realizes just how bad things are back home: Tim is going to lose everything, even his house, and will most likely go to jail.
“What am I supposed to tell my family, we’re f**kin’ poor now?” he says, panicked, before he starts to retch. It’s at this point that his and Gaitok’s storylines collide, since Timothy is speaking on his phone outside the security gate… where Gaitok left the gun out, unattended, while he walks with the lovely Mook back to the main resort area. When Gaitok returns, the gun is missing, of course.
Meanwhile, our trio of blond girlfriends scheme to get off the White Lotus property – led by Jaclyn obviously, who wants more of a “vibe” – but the notion backfires in a big way when they first end up at a nearby retirement resort which she does NOT like. Then they get soaked in a massive water fight on the street, which is an actual thing that happens in Thailand as part of new year celebrations, as it happens.
The episode ends with Saxon, Lochlan, Chloe and Chelsea partying on Gary’s boat – which looks EERILY similar to the boat Tanya died on in Season 2!! – as they let loose while heading to the full moon party on nearby Koh Phangan. “Sh*t’s about to get crazy,” Saxon says, drinks in hand. We can’t wait to see how much.
“You don’t have enough lorazepam to get through one week at a wellness spa?” ~Piper Ratliff to her mother Victoria
“We can’t just sit at the pool all week. I mean, it’s a beautiful pool, but we should at least one day sit by a different pool, don’t you think?!” ~Jaclyn to Kate and Laurie
Two lines not fit for print, uttered by Saxon Ratliff on the boat. One is his summation of what traveling girls in Thailand are “thirsty for,” followed immediately by his butchery of the common Thai greeting “Sawadika.” Cringe!
“I’m a pillar of the community.” ~a slurring Timothy to fellow guests on the yacht
“We know how to make fun!” ~Vlad, one of Valentin’s Russian friends, to the frenemy girlfriends (this is a subtle callback to Season 2, when Lucia says, “Let’s fun”)
“Federal prison. Most of them aren’t too bad. I know a few guys who’ve come out fine.” ~Tim’s lawyer, to Tim
While it’s still too soon to tell who the body(ies) might be at the season’s conclusion, suspicion around Gary (as the potential culprit, maybe?) continues to simmer. When Victoria asks him what line of work he was in before he retired when she arrives on his boat, he replies, “Government work, a little investing.” Hmm… government work, like Greg and his work with BLM (that is, the Bureau of Land Management)?
Then there’s Belinda, who can’t get over Gary’s familiar face. A Google deep dive leaves her shocked to discover some unsavory facts about her old contact Tonya McQuoid, namely, that she’s now dead and her husband has seemingly vanished into thin air. When Belinda searches for said husband Greg Hunt, she is chilled to see the face of the man she had recently approached in Thailand staring back at her from the computer screen.
Another foreboding moment toward the end of the episode sees Gary/Greg doing some research of his own… looking at Belinda’s Instagram on his computer, where he pauses on a picture showing her with her son Zion. In the dark, the screen glints in Gary/Greg’s cold, dead eyes. You better keep away from them, sir!
“The White Lotus” airs Sundays at 9 p.m. EDT on HBO, with the episode available to stream on Max. HBO and Max, like CNN, are owned by the same parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.
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White Lotus has finally revealed its secret main character
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The real dark heart of the HBO anthology series.
by Alex Abad-Santos
In a show full of unlikable people, it takes a special character to be the absolute, no-contest worst of the bunch. On White Lotus’s season three, it’s without a doubt Greg (Jon Gries) a.k.a. Gary a.k.a. the not-so-grieving widower of season one and two’s Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge).
In a bit of a twist, Greg is the only character to appear on all three seasons of White Lotus, as he was reintroduced to viewers in the first episode of season three. Technically, he’s not a guest at the resort. Having inherited Tanya’s giant fortune, Greg now owns a luxurious house steps away from the White Lotus in Thailand. He’s also dating a model named Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) who slightly resents him, and is dating him for his wealth — not unlike his own relationship to Tanya. He’s also going by the alias Gary, presumably because law enforcement is looking at Greg as a suspicious person in Tanya’s death.
White Lotus is an anthology series, following a different group of appalling rich people around a different lavish resort each season for a vacation that inevitably ends in someone’s death. Although the show has seen some characters return — namely Tanya and Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the saintly White Lotus Hawaii staffer who Tanya plied with promises of her own spa in season one — it hasn’t seemed to have (or been billed as having) a throughline narrative, until now.
The problem for “Gary” is that Belinda just so happens to be at the Thai resort as part of an exchange program. She finally recognized Greg in episode three, but while she knew that he distracted their mutual patron from funding Belinda’s dream of owning her own business, she didn’t yet know about Tanya’s untimely demise — or Greg’s role in it. (Quick refresh: Greg employed a coterie of scamming homosexuals to have his wife killed, but ultimately she smacked her own head on the side of a boat while trying to jump to safety.) He denied they’d ever met (he’s Gary after all), but in the season’s fourth episode, Belinda is up to speed thanks to a quick Google, and terrified. So is Greg. If Belinda exchanges enough information with authorities, she could shatter everything he worked to hide!
Episode four picks up after Greg and Belinda’s face-to-face. He has a boat party to begrudgingly host, and she’s preparing for her son’s arrival. But they can’t stop thinking of each other (negatively) and seem to be on a collision course. Now it seems more and more likely that the man who appeared to be nothing more than a side character/love interest in season one has, this whole time, been taking White Lotus fans on the familiar arc of a true crime romance scammer: seduction, violence, and the desperate struggle to not get caught.
As certain that the sun will rise tomorrow, the characters on White Lotus will get on a boat and have an awful time. In season one, Tanya scattered her mother’s ashes in the Pacific Ocean (or attempted to) with newlyweds Rachel (Alexandra D’Addario) and Shane (Jake Lacy) along for the ride. In season two, Tanya again found herself on a ship in the Mediterranean where she accidentally died after killing the rich gay guys who were trying to murder her. And, in season three, episode four, the White Lotus Thailand’s guests are at sea once more.
With (presumably) Tanya’s money, Greg has procured a yacht, and at Chloe’s behest invited the Ratliff family — parents, children, and lorazepam stash — as well as Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and Rick (Walton Goggins) all spend a day aboard.
Technically they’re all Greg’s guests. But most everyone, including Greg, seems a bit miserable.
The ship is full of older men and their much younger female company. As Chloe says, these old bald guys are all the same. Even on open water with champagne flowing, tension — missing pills, inappropriate flirting, wrong-headed revenge plots, and some previous antipathy between the Ratliffs and the incredibly nervy Rick — is unavoidable. It all goes back to the idea that no matter how rich you are and how many things you buy to throw at your problems, you can still absolutely hate the life you have.
At the bar, Tim Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), the rapidly unspooling South Carolina businessman loaded on his wife’s lorazepam and many, many midday drinks, wants to know about Greg’s life in Thailand. When Tim asks if he likes it, Greg tells him, “I never want to leave.” That could be true, but with the police on the lookout, he also never can.
“Just heard someone say that anyone who moves to Thailand is either looking for something or hiding for something,” Tim slurs.
“Neither,” Greg tells him, “I just got sick of the rat race.”
Greg is in a race of his own now, though. Finding him sitting alone on the upper deck, Chloe asks if she can take the boat to a different island to celebrate an upcoming full moon party. The man she calls Gary tells her she can take the boat without him, and she doesn’t seem to care when he tells her, “There’s something I gotta deal with at home.”
The “something” is Belinda.
Back on land, Belinda spots Greg talking to the hotel’s grinning manager. From the look in his eye, she can’t help but assume it’s her. She and Greg make brief eye contact. Later, in the sleek home Tanya’s fortune bought, Greg looks at Belinda’s Instagram, examining pictures of her and her son.
Given what we know about Greg’s history of grifting and Tanya’s eventual demise, it certainly can’t be good for Belinda to be in his crosshairs.
With Belinda knowing who Greg is and Greg knowing that Belinda knows about him and Tanya, it raises a very obvious question: Is Greg going to kill Belinda? And further, is Belinda the mystery person who dies in episode one?
Many signs point to yes. Belinda seems to be the only person in Thailand who knows that Greg isn’t Gary. Even if Belinda is intent on keeping quiet, Greg doesn’t know that. It would seem like this man, who has no qualms about grifting and murder-for-hire, wouldn’t think twice about finding a way to silence Belinda for good. That’s as clear a motive as we see on the show.
But there’s one absolutely huge reason why he’s not the killer stalking the resort in the season opener — shooting and killing Belinda wouldn’t be his MO or beneficial to his endgame.
The murder that we get a glimpse of in the beginning of the season is just too blatant for Greg to be the killer. The man is wanted in Italy, and the last thing he wants to do is draw even more attention himself. You know what draws attention? Repeatedly and wildly firing a gun at a luxury resort full of the richest people on earth. There’s a higher chance of Belinda using the gun in some kind of self-defense than Greg shooting her.
Greg has also proven himself to be the type of guy who would not do the murdering himself. Back in season two when he went to Italy with Tanya, Greg actually left Tanya and let the “evil gays” (one of whom Greg had a previous relationship with) toy around with her. If Greg is going to off Belinda, he’s going to figure out a way to do it without being directly involved.
No doubt, the tension between Belinda and Greg is going to drive the rest of the season. She’s going to be cautious around him. He’s going to want to keep her close, close enough to sniff out how much she knows and whether or not she’ll snitch.
What’s fascinating here is what a turn this is for the show, which usually tells contained stories.
White Lotus has always been a work made up of closely observed character study (please see this season’s three quietly warring white women who have been friends since childhood). Since his first appearance in season one, though, Greg has been more than a bit of a cipher. He’s taciturn, he’s reserved. Yes, he’s angry, as he proved in season two when Tanya brought her assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) along on vacation, but he’s fairly unknowable. We think he likes fly-fishing, and we’re pretty sure he worked at the Bureau of Land Management. What exactly was his relationship with Quentin (Tom Hollander)? Did he ever really have cancer, as he claimed when he met Tanya in Maui?
Greg also doesn’t neatly fit into the show’s class criticism. So many characters on the show are cartoonish, exaggerated versions of the one percent. They get away with spoiled entitlement, and impose themselves on places where common people are shut out. Greg’s grift feels slightly different, but maybe more egregious — here’s a thief who is worse than the rich he’s stealing from. Arranging Tanya’s death and getting away with her fortune feels unjust.
White Lotus is a show about personal unravelings, what these affluent people really look like when their money can’t buy what they really need. But Greg is wound tight. He may be more desperate than ever, but there is no true sense of who this man is.
It’s only slowly and methodically, over years, that this show can let us into a character like Greg: a man who doesn’t go on vacation to let go, who isn’t there to relax or make friends, who is moving like a shark toward some longer-term, darker goal. Unlike the rest of our travelers, he doesn’t indulge in self-exploration. Greg knows who he is. It’s his job to make sure that no one else does.
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