The White Lotus Review: Recentering (Season 1 Episode 4)
On a show like The White Lotus where you’re constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, it’s refreshing to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The White Lotus Season 1 Episode 4, “Recentering,” still delivers plenty of drama but also explores the larger theme around privilege in a more direct way.
For a change, the episode doesn’t start with its gaze on the guests, instead finally addressing the underlying issue of the resort itself.
A scene between Paula and her fling Kai leads to a discussion about how the resort displaced Native Hawaiians like his family and looks back at the deeper history of colonialism in Hawaii.
Just like Lani, Kai works there because he has no other choice. The resort isn’t paradise to him, it’s a sort of prison.
While the themes of colonialism, whiteness, and privilege have always been present on The White Lotus, they come into even sharper focus as the narrative settles on Paula. It’s not a coincidence that the only non-white guest we see is the only one to feel even the slightest real discomfort about the resort.
Her scene with Kai is the most we’ve heard the character talk aside from snarky one-liners in the whole season and shows just how uncomfortable she feels around the Mossbachers even if she hides it well.
The White Lotus also finally explores Paula’s relationship with Olivia, making it very clear Olivia views Paula as someone to control not love. The reveal that this is not the first time Olivia tried to steal a guy from Paula proves how little she respects her friend.
Olivia’s shallow proclamation that she’s not like the rest of her family underscores something even more insidious beyond petty jealousy in their friendship. She tokenizes Paula’s friendship to make herself feel like she’s somehow better than her other wealthy white peers.
Olivia is not the only guest to lack awareness about herself or the world. All of the other guests expose how little they really think about the world in some fashion on this episode.
From the Mossbacher parents declaring not everything should be about race, to Rachel professing she wants to do good with her career without any real idea of what that means, they’re all varying shades of clueless. Look at how quickly Tanya drops Belinda and their potential business partnership when she meets Greg (Jon Gries) and he expresses interest in her as another example of this self-centeredness.
Shane’s mother Kitty arrives, played by a delightfully unhinged Molly Shannon, to further intensify the spotlight on the guests’ privilege. Her behavior makes Shane’s tactless attitude towards wealth seem mild in comparison.
Beyond the obvious faux pas of crashing her son’s honeymoon, Kitty repeatedly lectures Rachel about not needing a job when she can contribute to charities as a donor and board member. She completely misses Rachel’s desire to work for a cause because who needs a cause when you have money?
Her and Shane chanting “money, money, money,” with Native Hawaiian performers and music soundtracking their conversation creates an unnerving contrast and reminder of how wealth is their only system of belief.
If there was an award for acting with only your eyes, Alexandra Daddario would easily win it for the amount of time she spends looking at Shane with a mix of disgust and disbelief. Her expression says more than words could.
The Shane and Rachel scenes still feel a little repetitive, but at least by throwing Kitty into the mix we better understand why Shane is so awful. What we still don’t understand is why Rachel agreed to put up with it through their wedding.
Watching Armond devolve into his worse self is even more painful to watch. His abhorrent behavior after breaking his sobriety pushes the viewer’s sympathy to its limits.
When we all have the common enemy of Shane to root against, it’s easy to side with Armond. However, abusing his power as resort manager to mess with Shane is much different than abusing his power to bribe Dillon into having sex as he does on this episode.
If the point of The White Lotus is to show that we’re all bad in our own way, Armond’s turn to villainy shouldn’t surprise anyone. Without anyone to stop Armond from giving in to his worst impulses, he becomes just as repugnant as his guests.
Still, it makes it hard to watch when there’s no one left to root for. At this rate of self-destruction, I would not be surprised if Armond ends up in the body bag at the airport.
“Recentering,” is one of the most interesting installments so far because of its commentary on colonialism, but it also sometimes exposes how the story stretches the main conflicts too thin.
How many more scenes of Rachel being miserable or Mark being self-pitying or Armond being self-destructive do we need to watch before a breakthrough happens? Armond especially doesn’t seem to have a choice at this point but to confront his demons.
Hopefully, The White Lotus continues to build on the ideas brought up on this episode instead of relying on the same self-absorbed drama of its increasingly predictable characters.
No one is making it out of the resort fully intact, but whether they learn anything from the experience remains to be seen.
What did you think of this episode of The White Lotus? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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The White Lotus airs Sundays at 9/8c on HBO.
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Breeze Riley
Breeze Riley is a pop culture enthusiast who decided to turn her love of watching too much TV into a hobby writing about it. Although she's a convention-going sci-fi and fantasy nerd, she's just as likely to be watching an off-beat comedy or period drama. She is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic.
One thought on “The White Lotus Review: Recentering (Season 1 Episode 4)”
I don’t know if it was a fail on the writer’s part or it was supposed to be this way, but I thought Shane’s attitude toward Armond was actually very understanding for the first half of the show. Very few people would pay for an expensive room and have a resort host be that rude about messing up reservations. Shane actually gives Armond several chances to make his mistake right, and Armond just gets progressively more hostile about it. Messing up a wedding or honeymoon is messing up one of the biggest moment’s of someone’s life, and Armond acts almost offended that he even cared about it.
It also made Rachel’s reactions seem disproportionate to how “bad” Shane was really acting. He was relatively kind/understanding when the first mistake was made, and he never devolved into outright aggressiveness or cussing the host out (which happens in real life). Armond didn’t even apologize for it and instead just lied about the mistake. Then he took it further by setting them up on a “romantic boat trip” with a grieving woman who was going to scatter ashes.
Not sure how they expected viewers to take Shane, but compared to the rest of the guests, he was fairly simple-minded, a bit spoiled, but he never came across as the villain Armond did. He had a singular purpose: make a great honeymoon, and he was willing to press for that. In the meantime, Armond disregards his guest entirely and Rachel acts judgmental toward him even though she spends the whole trip complaining, too, just about different things.
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