This story contains minor spoilers for the third season of ‘The White Lotus.

If you know much about watches, you could have fully diagnosed Saxon Ratliff (played by Patrick Schwarzenegger) within the first few moments of The White Lotus season three. Seated on the ferry to a Thai resort, Saxon is conspicuously sporting a Hublot Big Bang Black Magic. Unlike the rest of his family, Saxon eschewed traditional tastes and brands in favor of something bolder—a watch frankly tailor-made for a wealthy gym bro obsessed with protein smoothies and getting deals done. The rest of the characters’ wristwear choices are just as significant—like many prestige series these days, The White Lotus seems to be paying closer attention to its timepieces than ever.

It’s a curse, really. My days of sitting down to relax with a movie or TV show are long gone. It doesn’t take long until I’m ignoring the dialogue to focus on what’s on a character’s wrist. And that Spidey sense has been tingling nonstop during the Thailand-set third season of The White Lotus, where virtually every character has a timepiece that helps us better understand their personas. Even the choice by some folks to not wear a watch speaks volumes—and Michael Cory, the show’s prop master, confirmed to me that those choices were intentional. “That definitely factored in,” Cory said.

This year, The White Lotus is primarily interested in themes of spirituality, with characters searching for purpose through increasingly desperate means. Some seek it through guided meditation sessions; others attempt to join the local monastery; Sam Rockwell’s character, meanwhile, opts to simply invite “three, four guys [to] come over and rail the shit out of me.” A consequential plot point revolves around the resort’s phone-free policy, elevating the importance of the characters’ watches as time-telling devices even further. When the wealthy Ratliff family arrives, patriarch Timothy (Jason Isaacs) initially refuses to give up his phone before using the rule to keep news of a serious lawsuit against him from reaching the rest of his household.

The significance of watches as the season wears on can best be tracked through the evolution of Carrie Coon’s character, Laurie. “You’ll notice Laurie just starts to forgo her watch,” Cory said. (An even bigger deal when you realize it’s a really cool Cartier!) “She’s escaping a world of stress and she starts to embrace this White Lotus’s setup more around the spa and the wellness. As the episodes go, the time of day starts to matter less.”

The characters most able to abandon their day-to-day stressors are the ones who ditch their watches or never wore one at all. Notably, Piper Ratliff (Sarah Catherine Hook), Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), and massage therapist Belinda Lindsey (Natasha Rothwell) never have a timepiece throughout the show’s run. It’s no coincidence that these are the most grounded and tuned-in individuals at the resort.

With the volume turned all the way on the timepieces this season, we asked Cory to walk us through a few of the more intriguing choices.

Victoria and Timothy Ratliff’s Rolex Day-Date

HBO

HBO

An addiction to Lorazepam isn’t the only thing this couple has in common. Both Ratliff parents wear a gold Rolex Day-Date, a choice with even deeper meaning than we previously knew. The third episode of this season starts with Victoria (Parker Posey) dreaming about a tsunami, but according to Cory, an important watch-centric backstory was left on the cutting room floor. “There was an extended version of the dream sequence where you actually see her dream of her father, and he was wearing that watch,” he explained. (It was Posey’s idea that Victoria’s watch would have been passed down from her dad, Cory said.)