“Not happening…way too laid back…zero narrative urgency,” I was muttering from the get-go. Basically the sixth episode of White Lotus Thai SERIOUSLY disappoints. Puttering around, way too slow. Things inch along but it’s all “woozy guilty lying aftermath to the big party night” stuff. Glacial pace…waiting, waiting.
I was told the story strands were going to begin to tighten up, but they’re just lying there in repose. Flaccid, lazy.
Two more episodes to go, and if episode 7 is as weak as 6 was tonight, everyone will say the whole thing was a bust.
SPOILERS FOLLOW: Before episode 6 began, series creator Mike White had only three hours to go. It’s obviously time to up the drama and intensify things (David Chase knew how to gradually turn the screws and tighten the strands in The Sopranos, not to mention deliver occasional dramatic crescendos) and he’s basically pissing away the time. In episode 6 White essentially says one thing: “I’ll deal with all this stuff later.”
When is Jason Isaacs going to finally DO something? Or at least BLURT SOMETHING OUT? His character is a terminally boring fraidy cat, enveloped in silent anguish, hopelessly inarticulate, buried in self-loathing. I’ve been watching this shallow-ass guy lie to his family as he shudders and trembles inside for five episodes now.
All White does is (a) show us two fatalistic shooting fantasies (it was interesting that he imagined killing Parker Posey before shooting himself) and (b) asks the spiritual guru guy what it’s like to die, and is curiously moved by the Buddhist cliche about life being a fountain and we’re all drops of water, etc. Who hasn’t heard that one?
It’s actually a line from a joke I heard back in the ‘70s. A spiritual seeker endures a long and arduous journey in trying to find the hallowed and supreme guru and thereby divine the essential secret of life, and when he finally finds him is told “my son, life is a fountain.” The seeker is stunned, outraged. “That’s IT?”, he barks at the guru. “I’ve spent months trying to find you, enduring all kinds of pain, danger, exhaustion and hardship, and all you can tell me is that life is a fountain?” Supreme guru, taken aback: “You mean life ain’t a fountain?”
And Parker Posey has been married to Isaacs for…what, 25 or 30 years and she can’t intuit that he’s seriously melting down and going to hell inside over something very scary? She can’t confront him about stealing her pills? She can’t put two and two together and deduce that something has gone horribly wrong with his investment portfolio? All she can say to Isaacs over and over is “what’s going on?” How many times has she fucking asked him that? A financial shark or hotshot of some kind, Isaacs has presumably been up to some sketchy, slippery stuff and knows, being the cagey type, that the regulatory authorities might conceivably get wind of this or that financial crime, and he hasn’t figured ways of hiding assets and socking away cash in hidden foreign bank accounts on a just-in-case basis?
What’s he looking at…several months or a year or two in a country-club prison? And he can’t get started again after serving his term? He doesn’t have friends and allies who might rally round and help him out? All he can do is think about killing himself because his wife is a fragile, drug-addled zombie? Pathetic.
There’s no insight or articulation or imagination in Isaacs’ character. His frozen-in-fear, “I can’t move or even breathe” psychology is dramatically suffocating, and hanging out with this guy is driving me nuts. I’ve really and truly run out of patience.
