The White Lotus has been circling the possibility that it’s a show with something to say, but this week, Mike White finally lands the plane .
For every morsel of intel about Belinda, for example, we watch five minutes of Rachel and Shane’s interminable quarreling — does anyone think she has the backbone to leave him? However frivolous the show believes its upstairs cohort to be, they’re what the show is made up of.
Kai is caught between two visions for modern Hawai’i: one where the tourist is king and one based on sustainable agriculture, more closely resembling Hawai’i before annexation.
Overall, the Mossbacher suite is in disarray on the morning of “Recentering.” Mark wakes up hurting from yesterday’s bender, and Nicole’s sympathy is nonexistent.
Quinn, permanently bunking on the beach now, stares out at the glassy blue sea as local guys paddle an outrigger canoe, bonding in the exact way his father is trying to force.
No particular cause or charity is identified, and there’s no explanation for why a person who doesn’t have the “drive” for media would succeed elsewhere.
And Armond really seems like he’s about to return the girls’ their depleted drug stash when Shane shows up to complain about the previous episode’s Titanic of a sunset cruise.
She’s a daughter-in-law’s nightmare, fretting over little Shane’s little swimmer’s ear and going on about the wedding like she was its main character.
Because by this point in the season, the episodes are definitely taking familiar shape: sunrise; a breakfast spat with the Ps; Armond ping-ponging aimlessly among his guests; Tanya’s problem of the day, which never quite coheres to the rest of the action; and finally, a hectic, quick-cut, Christopher Nolan-esque dinner hour that brings us to a banal yet thrilling crescendo.
But when she meets a bald deep-sea fisherman too drunk to find his own hotel room in the middle of the day, she abruptly cancels their business dinner.
A couple of tables over, before the Mai Tais arrive, Shane unilaterally decides to run Rachel’s new trajectory by Kitty, whose idea of nonprofit work is donating a weekend at her Aspen place to a silent auction.
I wonder what she’d think if she knew her would-be mentor had declared herself for the forgotten white man — and Hillary, of course.
Olivia doesn’t answer, either, but a few scenes later, when she’s sure Paula can’t see, she approaches Kai: “That’s such a cool name.” Olivia’s grown up in the context of extreme privilege, but there remain other kinds of power she’d like to grab.
Usually, this is the point in the episode when Shane and Rachel convince themselves they’re compatible enough to make it through another day.
Is she any different than Tanya, who is never in a million years going into business with Belinda? At least Shane knows what he’s doing: ruining a stranger’s life over a series of small to medium slights.