Spare a thought, won’t you, for Fabian. All season long, the mild-mannered middle-manager has been fretting and fawning over the possibility of singing during one of The White Lotus hotel’s nightly staff performances. As he excitedly tells Laurie, Jaclyn, and Kate near the start of this week’s episode, tonight’s the night.
Yet no sooner does he begin singing a song of his own composition, a paean to his native Deutschland in his native Deutsch, than the action refocuses on the increasingly unhappy reunion trio, who have a spectacular falling out that immediately eclipses Fabian’s star. None of the other guests or employees we’ve followed are even around at dinner to see it. The poor man got what exactly what he wanted, but in the end it’s nothing like he wanted.
This, my friends, is a running theme. To take one low-stakes example, consider Piper Ratliff. She spends the day and night at the nearby Buddhist meditation center per her mother Victoria’s wishes, as a test to see if it’s really for her.
To her initial delight, her supportive kid brother Lochlan tags along. But when he tells her he intends to stay with her for the next year and study at the center just like her, for much the same reasons, she seems deeply sketched out by it. Is she detecting weird vibes from Lochlan (understandable)? Or is her spiritual journey only special if she’s the only family member special enough to pursue it? An atmosphere of menace pervades our final shots of her in this .
