There’s More to That White Lotus Snake Subplot Than You Think

Early in Sunday’s third episode of The White Lotus’ Thailand-set third season, the dysfunctional North Carolinian Ratliff family is discussing matriarch Victoria’s (Parker Posey) ominous dream of being engulfed by a tsunami. According to her earnest, spiritual daughter, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), “Every symbol has a meaning. It’s the collective unconscious.” But Piper’s American-psycho older brother, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), is skeptical. “It’s not that deep,” he opines. “We all dream about fire and snakes because we’re all afraid of fire and snakes.”

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This conversation sets the tone for the episode, titled “The Meaning of Dreams.” Fires, tsunamis, the workings of the unconscious mind—these elements keep resurfacing across the show’s multiple storylines. But this week’s most pervasive and symbolically freighted image is that of the snake. The guests of the White Lotus Ko Samui don’t just have serpents on the brain. One couple actually comes into contact with them, in a sequence that feels unnerving even for this high-anxiety series. Taken together with another of the episode’s major motifs—the essentialistic concept of good vs. evil—this snake stuff raises fascinating ideas that dovetail with the season’s overarching theme of Western characters encountering Eastern spirituality.

Snake attack

Just three episodes into this surprisingly action-packed season, The White Lotus has shown us an armed robbery and, in its opening flash-forward, a possible mass shooting. And yet, as far as I’m concerned, Sunday’s snake-show scene was easily its most harrowing moment to date.

High on possibly laced weed, Walton Goggins’ shady curmudgeon character, Rick, wanders into a squalid tourist trap where snakes are kept in small, grimy tanks. His bafflingly loyal girlfriend, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), makes the unfortunate choice to follow him. “It’s f-cked up they’re stuck inside these cages,” Rick complains. Chelsea looks at him like he’s a raving lunatic: “They’re venomous snakes,” she says. Be that as it may, “they’ve still got a right to live free,” he protests. Chelsea: “Not if they’re out biting people.” The exchange captures a fundamental philosophical difference—and one that echoes some of the most inflammatory debates in American politics. What’s more crucial to protect: the snake’s (or, say, the gun owner’s) freedom to wield a deadly weapon in public or everyone else’s freedom from getting bitten (or shot)? 

Their disagreement is also a hint of what’s to come. Sweaty and seemingly delirious at the snake show, such as it is, where a listless host mumbles narration as his colleague pokes at some cobras, to the mild amusement of tourists chomping on bags of chips, Rick returns to the tanks and—deep sigh—releases the snakes. By the time Chelsea comes looking for him, they’re slithering all over the floor. So, of course, one of the snakes bites her right on the leg. The snake–show guys quickly get her to the hospital, so she’s OK by the time she and Rick sit down to dinner with Greg, a.k.a. Gary (Jon Gries), and Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) that night.

But, understandably considering that she could’ve died from the bite, Chelsea isn’t ready to drop the issue. Back in their suite after dinner, she presses Rick on his “insane” choice to free the snakes. Aside from being dangerously stoned, “I felt bad for them,” he explains. By now, it’s clear that he identifies with these creatures that, as Saxon noted, are so widely feared. Chelsea adds a new element to the snake-hate when she replies: “Snakes are evil. Read the Bible.” It would be easy to dispute this premise; a person unencumbered by faith, as Rick seems to be, could point out that animals without consciousness answer to no higher morality than survival. But Rick doesn’t disagree that snakes are evil. “Even evil things shouldn’t get treated like sh-t,” he says. “It’s only gonna make them more evil.” There’s a lot going on in these lines. You could certainly make a connection between the snakes in tanks and violent criminals at the mercy of the penal system. This also feels like a reflection of Rick’s own fragile emotional state, and the capacity of this lonely, miserable, perhaps misunderstood character to wreak destruction.  

Snakes on a spiritual plane

When Chelsea cites the Bible as proof that snakes are evil, she’s presumably referring to the Satanic serpent in the Garden of Eden who tempts Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, causing humanity’s permanent expulsion from this primordial paradise. And, of course, the fruit is itself a product of the tree of knowledge of good and evil—a dichotomy that suffuses Judeo-Christian religion, built on good-evil binaries like God vs. Satan, heaven vs. hell, holy vs. blasphemous. All of this feeds into typically Western assumptions about human nature. If the earthly realm is a battleground for good and evil, then it follows that each individual person must be under the influence of either God or the devil, and thus either purely good or wholly bad.

(As a sidenote, evil doesn’t necessarily look like the snarling, raging, and mustache twirling of a cartoon villain. The most influential depiction of the Fall outside of the Bible is in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which depicts Satan-as-the-serpent as an eloquent charmer who gently persuades Eve to commit the transgression known as original sin, which tarnishes humanity in perpetuity. I’m not fully convinced Rick is the bad guy he makes himself out to be, in his session with the meditation teacher Amrita, played by Shalini Peiris. But I did think of Milton’s Satan when, for reasons we’ve yet to learn, Rick put on a friendly face to introduce himself to resort co-owner Sritala, played by Lek Patravadi, and fawn over the previous night’s performance.)

Ingrained as it is in the Western mind, good vs. evil is not the only lens through which to make sense of the universe. White Lotus creator Mike White often talks about the influence Eastern spirituality—and particularly Thailand’s predominant religion, Buddhism—had on this season. In “The Meaning of Dreams,” Michelle Monaghan’s Jaclyn voices skepticism of Judeo-Christian morality at dinner with her frenemies, Laurie (Carrie Coon) and Kate (Leslie Bibb). “It’s all just so male, you know—the epic battle for good and evil,” she complains. “It just doesn’t speak to me.” Though she’s evidently no expert on the resort’s “witchy” alternative spiritual and wellness practices, she prefers them to the chauvinism of a Christian church that seems to be the center of Kate’s social life in Texas. Jaclyn and Laurie’s scandalized reaction when Kate calls its right-wing congregants good people and implies that she voted for Trump, too, further muddles the conversation’s moral undertones. If goodness even exists, are these people really its avatars?

As it turns out, snakes have their own set of connotations in more than one Eastern religion. The naga, a Sanskrit word for snake or serpent, is an anthropomorphic demigod of sorts that appears in Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain cultures. Now, like Jaclyn, I’m no professor of theology. But, after learning a bit about nagas, a few details stick out to me that seem relevant here. First of all, they are half-human, half-serpent and can be depicted as either creature or a mermaid-like combination of the two. Regardless of the form they take, nagas tend to be represented as having hoods, like the snake that bit Chelsea. Given his affinity for the captive snakes—he seems to have more empathy for them than he does for his girlfriend or, indeed, himself—Rick may, on a metaphorical level, be a human embodiment of the naga.

Nagas are also very specifically neither inherently good nor inherently evil. Though they’re fearsome creatures locked in an eternal feud with the giant, avian Garuda, who in Buddhism is associated with the conversion of outsiders (represented by nagas) to the faith, according to the American Museum of Natural History, “the duo are identified with many pairs of opposites, including light and dark, the Sun and Moon, upper and lower, air and water, and Buddhism and other religions.” Nagas also frequently appear, in sculpture, as temple guardians—a nod to the many-headed naga said to have sheltered Buddha during extended meditation. So ubiquitous is the naga in Thai culture that it was, in 2022, designated as the country’s national symbol. 

Beyond good and evil

It’s a fun thought experiment to try and sort this season’s White Lotus characters into the categories of good and evil. Chelsea and Rick could be two sides of that coin, though they could also simply embody the more naga-esque, morally neutral duality of light and dark. But Saxon seems rotten to the core, while his two younger siblings come off as endearingly innocent. Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) and Mook (Lisa) have, so far, been depicted as the two sweetest, most wholesome people who have ever lived, while the bodyguards who clearly feel threatened by Gaitok’s heroism are the absolute worst. Others, from the trio of girlfriends to Victoria and her scandal-squeezed husband Timothy (Jason Isaacs), are harder to place. And I don’t think it’s an accident that the latter are some of the show’s most compelling characters.

Which is not to say that good vs. evil is a dramatic dead end. Isn’t that, after all, the showdown White appears to be setting up between Greg and Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), who finally confronts him at dinner this week? In three seasons, The White Lotus has given us no more sympathetic character than Belinda, who ekes out a modest living by healing the psychic pain of people to whom she is, at best, invisible. And it has given us no more loathsome villain than Greg, who apparently thought nothing of having his minions murder his heiress wife (Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya) so he could inherit her fortune. (Even Jake Lacy’s overgrown frat bro character didn’t mean to kill Murray Bartlett’s Armond in Season 1.) While he plays it frustratingly cool during their first meeting, denying that his name is Greg or that he knows anyone named Tanya McQuoid or that he met Belinda at the White Lotus in Maui, the way she keeps staring at him from across the outdoor dining room after she leaves his table suggests to me that this storyline is just getting started.

In what may well become one of the season’s biggest subplots—and is already the only thread woven into all three seasons—White has set up precisely the kind of good-evil dichotomy he seems keen to undermine. You never know what’s around the next corner in The White Lotus, but I’d wager that even this battle of archetypes will eventually snake its way to subversion.

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