Spoilers for The White Lotus season three, episode two ahead.
Thankfully, this season of The White Lotus is finally taking on a well-worn group-chat topic: the age-gap relationship. In just two episodes, I’ve become obsessed with Chelsea, the bubbly and British spiritual seeker played by Aimee Lou Wood. She’s clearly younger than her boyfriend, Rick (Walton Goggins), but could be older than Saxon Ratliff. She also seems to come from a middle-class background, based on some of her reactions to the luxuries of the resort, but I still don’t really know enough about Rick to know for sure if he’s hired her to be with him. She wears a mix of colorful and flowy garments, with some singular bold pieces, including a crochet midi-dress that almost resembles armor, paired with leopard Jacquemus sunglasses. “I’m an Enneagram 9. I’m easygoing, I’m a peacemaker, but it also means I’m quite complacent,” Chelsea voluntarily tells an employee while enjoying a body-scrub treatment. “It isn’t always good. You’re probably a 2. Most healers are.” Whatever that means!
While Chelsea and Rick seem to have a genuine connection, he is so miserable that I can’t understand what she sees in him. He’s grumpy and mysterious, and he clearly has an ulterior motive behind choosing to take a couple’s trip to Thailand. I’ve got my eye on her — and how she’s dressed for a weeklong trip to Southeast Asia. (She’s certainly not as uptight as the Ratliff family, that’s for sure.)
Rick and Chelsea aren’t the only age-gap couple at the resort: The two find themselves out to dinner with a similar pair, Chelsea’s new friend Chloe and … the late Tanya McQuoid’s husband, Greg. They raise eyebrows at each other when their dinner mates state they met thanks to a matchmaking service in Dubai. We still don’t quite know how Chelsea and Rick got together, but Rick calls Chloe a “hooker” with so much venom dripping off his tongue it leads me to believe that he and Chelsea did not meet under similar circumstances.
By now, we all know that these characters’ wardrobes are supposed to signify various forms of wealth (this is a several-thousand-dollars-a-night resort chain, after all). Yet when Chelsea and Chloe take a break from lounging at the beach to shop at the hotel’s boutique, it’s not the clothes on the racks that Chelsea seems to care much about. Chloe takes her armful of clothing to the dressing room, and Chelsea points to the center display. “Can I see that snake-choker thing?” she asks the salesperson. According to costume designer Alex Bovaird, it’s a chunky gold David Webb necklace in the shape of a serpent, finished with an emerald as the eye. But before she can try it on, burglars conveniently break into the boutique, demanding the jewelry in the case. They grab it all, including the gold snake necklace, leaving Chelsea and the workers shaking.
Looking back at previous seasons, accessories worn by characters have caused major problems for them. (Remember, in season one, how Paula convinced Kai, a worker at the White Lotus in Hawaii, to steal jewelry from her best friend’s family? Or how she threw the necklace he made her into the ocean after he got caught?) And while there have been so many cute monkeys hopping around the resort, I’m particularly excited by all of the serpent imagery we’ve seen so far in episode two, because 2025 just so happens to be the year of the snake in Chinese astrology, and snakes play a role in Thai Buddhist culture. Statues of serpents are often found leading into temples and can have multiple meanings; some believe the animal is a representation of the Naga spirit, a half-human, half-cobra being, and that it will bring on true love, protection, and abundance. I suppose it’s fair to say the serpent did protect Chelsea: She was robbed at gunpoint, but she didn’t get hurt. For a woman who seems to be so free-spirited but also tied down to a man going through what appears to be the worst kind of midlife crisis, my bet is that she could probably use as much protection as the universe is willing to give her.