Belinda Meets Gary & More: All the Easter Eggs in ‘White Lotus’ Season 3

Warning: Spoilers ahead for season three of The White Lotus

“I’m gonna help you get your joy back, even if it kills me,” Aimee Lou Wood’s happy-go-lucky Chelsea promises her older, far grumpier boyfriend Rick (Walton Goggins) in the White Lotus season three premiere. It’s a throwaway line, but worth noting in series creator Mike White’s new Thailand-set season—especially when we have an inkling of how the season will end.

Halfway into the doomed getaway, viewers know that the tranquil wellness center will eventually erupt into gunfire. Zion (Nicholas Duvernay), son of visiting spa center manager Belinda (a returning Natasha Rothwell), is the only cast member we know will be safe from the violence (as it begins, anyway). We don’t know who is pointing the weapon, and which unlucky vacationers will check out of the resort in a body bag.

As we did in Italy, Vanity Fair will be on the hunt for all White Lotus callbacks to seasons past, as well as potential clues about who could be this season’s killer or victim(s). If you’re watching weekly—especially you, Parker Posey!—come back after each episode for a breakdown of all the Easter eggs scattered throughout the series’ third season.

Episode 4: Hide or Seek

The Rule of Thirds

After being bitten by a snake (ah, men) and witness to a robbery, Chelsea wonders what third awful event awaits her: “Things happen in threes.” She shares this theory directly after we see the “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” three-monkey statue, which sits in the Ratliff family’s suite. That in itself is a callback to an earlier Easter egg related to trios.

Out for Blood

This week’s episode also offers insight into Rick’s father, a “do-gooder” who helped the Thai locals prevent a “shady American” from “stealing their land.” According to Rick, he was killed by the man who owns the White Lotus Thailand. Both previous seasons of White Lotus also delved into land ownership and cultural appropriation. “Is this a bit, ‘You killed my father, prepare to die’?” Chelsea asks, referencing Inigo Montoya’s (Mandy Patinkin) famous scene in 1987’s The Princess Bride. In that movie, Inigo rightfully avenges his father and survives the duel. Here’s hoping Rick gets just as lucky.

Careful What You Google

After spotting Jon Gries’s Greg (now going by Gary), Belinda can’t shake the feeling that she’s seen that guy before. So she Googles Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya McQuaid in search of answers. Naturally, we paused the screen to read Tanya’s fake bio, which refers to her as “an American businesswoman and heiress to the McQuaid shipping fortune” who “was briefly married to Greg Hunt from the Bureau of Land Management” from 2020 to 2022. (Who else remembers Tanya mistakenly thinking the “BLM” to which Greg referred stood for Black Lives Matter?)

“Tanya spent most of her time traveling the world and visiting exotic locations,” it continues. “Before her untimely death, she had a desire to support aspiring business owners and entrepreneurs.” This suggests that Tanya made many offers to fund the dreams of people like Belinda—even if she never got around to fulfilling them with her $497 million net worth.

Belinda’s shocked face makes it clear that she didn’t know of Tanya’s demise until this moment. Among the news articles about her death is one that refers to a potential true-crime docuseries, plus a headline that reads “HEIRESS’S HUSBAND WANTED FOR QUESTIONING IN ITALY.” Before his name change, it appears that Greg did not return authorities’ requests for questioning. Belinda has the only appropriate response to this information: “Motherfucker!” And across the resort, Greg/Gary is doing a bit of scrolling himself, taking a look through Belinda’s Instagram.

Man to Man

Speaking of shady men: Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) questions “Gary” while riding on his yacht. “I just heard someone say that anyone who moves to Thailand is either looking for something or hiding from something,” he says, before asking which Gary is doing. “Neither,” Gary replies. “I just got sick of the rat race.” And he also wanted to evade the cops while he deposited Tanya’s fortune, but he conveniently leaves that part out.

Later in the episode, Timothy receives a devastating call about his possible prison sentence for unspecified financial crimes. He then spots the gun that security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong), who is already on thin ice with the hotel after the robbery, was instructed to learn how to use. Gaitok leaves his post to chat with fellow employee Mook (Lalisa Manobal, a.k.a. Lisa from Blackpink), and Timothy waltzes in to steal the weapon. Friendly reminder: This season’s murder may very well involve gunfire.

Episode 3: The Meaning of Dreams

Nocturnal Animals

As the episode’s title suggests, Posey’s character, Victoria, has a foreboding dream involving her family. In it, she walks on one of Thailand’s beaches at dusk, clutching her precious Lorazepam. She runs into her son Lochlan (Sam Nivola), flanked by two White Lotus employees, who tells his mother, “This is what it looks like before a tsunami.” Victoria proceeds to walk into the disaster headfirst, her house soon to be engulfed by water. “Could be some sort of warning,” her daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) declares the following day. We agree!

Ex Marks the Spot

“Jon Gries has shown up. I hope he gets it! I hope they do something terrible to him,” Jennifer Coolidge told Forbes of the return of her deceased character Tanya’s ex-husband Greg, who is now going by the name Gary in Thailand.

In episode three, more light is shed on what “Gary” has led his much younger girlfriend Chloe (played by Charlotte Le Bon) to believe about his past. “He has an ex-wife, but he never talks about her,” she tells Chelsea. “All I know is she was a real mental patient. Like, killed-herself bad. One day, she was so depressed, she couldn’t take it any more, she just walked out into the ocean and kept going and never came back. All they found was, like, part of her leg.” (Loyal White Lotus viewers will remember that wasn’t exactly how things went down.)

Belinda and Gary Break the Ice

Tanya’s name is being whispered about elsewhere in the resort. Belinda confides in Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul), the White Lotus Thailand wellness expert assigned to train her, about her history with a friend who “died in this freak accident” at a different location. “This rich woman, she was supposed to help me open up my own spa, so I could be my own boss—something I’ve always wanted to do,” Belinda continues, referring to Tanya’s season-one offer of financial assistance. “And of course, she flakes, runs off with some guy she just met.” Come to think of it, Belinda adds, she saw someone who looked awfully like this man in Thailand the night prior.

The second time Belinda runs into Gary, she confronts him about his former name, his presence at the White Lotus Maui, and his involvement with Tanya. Gary evades Belinda’s questions and later eyes her suspiciously with a look that could easily kill.

Episode 2: Special Treatments

So Long Greg, Hello Gary

Those with questions about the re-emergence of Greg—Tanya’s ex-husband who presumably acquired her entire fortune upon her death last season—learn that he now goes by Gary. So, he’s your run-of-the-mill con man who has changed his name and evades any and all personal questions. When asked about what he did before retirement, Gary replies, ““This and that,” the universal sign for mayhem and foolishness, people!

It also becomes clear during Chloe and Gary’s double-date with Rick and Chelsea that the former couple don’t know each other well. After meeting in Dubai through a so-called matchmaking service, Gary mistakenly thinks that Chloe is French (the Quebec native clarifies that she’s Canadian). And there is someone who clocks Gary from across the hotel restaurant: Belinda, who was present for Greg’s season one meet-cute with Tanya.

Who Is Behind That Robbery?

In the second episode, Chelsea is the only customer to witness a robbery in the hotel gift shop. Not much is known about the suspect, who covered their identity with a hood, sunglasses, and mask. Despite the intervention of security guard Gaitok, the assailant also escaped unscathed. With little to go on, there may be a connection to the criminal behavior of Southern patriarch Timothy Ratliff, who appears to be involved in some sort of money-laundering and/or bribery scheme that gets the attention of some national news outlets.

Speaking of which, a familiar voice can be heard on the phone as Timothy’s friend Kenny. That would be Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All At Once star Ke Huy Quan, who calls Timothy to discuss why both the FBI and The Wall Street Journal are sniffing around a “favor” Timothy did for Kenny years ago. Just last season, it was Laura Dern who dropped by for a brief voice role, playing the estranged wife of Michael Imperioli’s character, Dominic, in another offscreen phone conversation.

A Vengeful Voyage

It’s also worth keeping tabs on Rick’s fascination with the mysterious husband of Sritala Hollinger (Lek Patravadi), one of the owners of The White Lotus Thailand. In early episodes, he appears dismayed to learn that he is receiving medical treatment in Bangkok, even making plans to desert Chelsea and pay the man a visit. This isn’t dissimilar to Greg/Gary’s mid-trip desertion of Tanya in season two, and we know how things ended for her.

Episode 1: Same Spirits, New Forms

Belinda’s Turn

The first character viewers meet in The White Lotus’s latest season is Zion, the teenage son of Natasha Rothwell’s Belinda. Fans will recognize her from the show’s Maui-set first season, where her transformative spa treatments caught the fleeting attention (and cashflow) of Jennifer Coolidge’s now dearly departed Tanya. Belinda has traveled to Thailand to learn some new wellness techniques, and extended an invite to Zion, who hopes to escape from the stress of finals and some other stuff he’s not divulging just yet.

In the season’s opening moments, Zion hears gunfire within the resort, and says a prayer for his mother’s whereabouts. The action soon flashes back to a week earlier, where Belinda lands in Thailand for what is meant to be a three-month stay. “I wanna learn everything I can and bring the magic back to Maui,” she declares upon her arrival.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Following the premiere episode, some fans noticed that the Ratliff siblings are fashioned in the “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” pose en route to the resort. Patrick Schwarzenegger’s Saxon sees no evil in sunglasses, Sarah Catherine Hook’s Piper hears no evil in headphones, and Sam Nivola’s Lochlan takes a sip of his drink in a nod to speaking no evil. This visual reference to “three wise monkeys,” an East Asian emblem for the proverb, blends into the recurring motif of monkeys within the show itself. But it could also foretell some dark dealings among the three siblings.

Tribal Council in Thailand

Mike White’s reality TV past has been referenced once more. Last season, the series creator invited Angelina Keeley and Kara Kay, who both competed against White on 2018’s Survivor: David vs. Goliath, for a small cameo on the Italian coast. This season, viewers spotted fellow season participants Natalie Cole and Carl Boudreaux as guests in the premiere episode. After seeing them at the hotel, Belinda later calls her son to excitedly tell him: “I saw two Black people tonight, and they weren’t staff!”

Cole has since said she was surprised to get the call from White, considering he was the one to cast the deciding vote to eliminate her in Fiji. “The fact that he could look beyond the way he felt about me in Fiji and ask me to come do a part speaks volumes about him as a person,” Cole told Entertainment Weekly, before teasing that her time in Thailand isn’t over.

“Initially when [White] and I first talked, it was just going to be a cameo, and then when we talked again, he sent me some lines,” said Cole. “And it was quite a few lines, and then when we got there, he increased the lines even more. I found that pretty interesting, that we went from the cameo to me having several lines, and I thought I was going to be in one episode, and then it went to two episodes.”

A Dirty John Descends

Thought you knew every actor who was making the trek to Thailand? The surprise appearance of Jon Gries, a.k.a. the man who conned Tanya in season one before marrying her, reappears in The White Lotus’s third season. Only this time, Greg is joined by his much younger girlfriend Chloe (played by Charlotte Le Bon), who refers to him as “the bald guy with the orange shirt” while bonding in the hotel bar with Aimee Lou Wood’s Chelsea.

Chloe and her boyfriend of roughly a year aren’t guests at The White Lotus, but they live up on a hill near the establishment, often dropping down to dine at the resort’s restaurant. Perhaps it’s because they want to mingle with the guests—and get away from each other. “He just tells me to get lost because I get on his nerves,” Chloe tells Chelsea. “But honestly, he’s so fucking boring. I almost don’t even care.”