But Posey’s performance cracks me up. And it appropriately matches the way Victoria is written by White: as someone who takes every hypothetical to the extreme and refuses to accept any difference of opinion. (It may help that I have spent nearly my whole life in the South and have known many Victorias.)
Victoria and Piper have an entertainingly spicy dialogue regarding Buddhism, with mom calling the young people who live at the monastery “a bunch of grungy kids who have no purpose” and insisting to Piper that “You can be interested in this stuff, but you can never really be it.” She also warns Piper that her beloved Buddhist monk might be leading a cult, and when her daughter counters that he wrote a well-regarded book, Victoria shouts: “Charles Manson wrote books! Bill Clinton wrote books! The list goes on! Hillary Clinton wrote five books!” (Again: hilarious.)
The core of Victoria’s concern — beyond her worry that people in her social circle will think she is a bad parent — is that Piper is young and impressionable, and that “In a year, you could end up with a completely different set of values.” This is at the crux of what happens in “The White Lotus” every season. Are these characters at crossroads, making choices that will affect the rest of their lives? Or are they just on vacation, making mistakes they will forget about in a week?
These questions weave through the other two main story lines. One involves the gal pals, whose partying with Valentin and his Russian bros moves from a wild nightclub to their White Lotus villa, where the alcohol keeps flowing and the clothes start coming off. Laurie, the only single lady in the crowd, doffs her top and drunkenly delights the guys with stories about her corporate career and her costly divorce. But she does not sleep with any of them. Instead it is Jaclyn — married and famous — who risks a scandal by hooking up with Valentin.
Meanwhile, Saxon and Lochlan become drunker and drunker with Chelsea and Chloe, getting lost in sensory overload (with the help of some unspecified pills). Early on, the two men and the two women separately game out the evening in private. Saxon reminds Lochlan that life’s pleasures should be seized whenever possible, while Lochlan — echoing both their sister and Frank — asks, “But what if this life is just a test, to see if we can become better people?” Elsewhere, Chloe confides in Chelsea that she has a weakness for inexperienced youngsters like Lochlan because, as she says, “When they see you naked, they shake, and you can see their little hearts beating in their chests.”
White takes a highly subjective approach to filming all of the party scenes in this episode. The lighting is hazier, the music booms, the dialogue fades in and out, and the screen is filled with images of laughing faces and bare skin. We, like the characters, get swept up in the fervor.