The White Lotus is back for its third season and third location, this time in the verdant jungles of Thailand. It’s back in form also, with a riveting premiere that sets the stage for things to come, as tensions between all the principal characters heighten, and mysterious abound. Spoilers ahead.
Same Spirits, New Forms
In both the past seasons of The White Lotus, we find ourselves in a luxurious hotel filled with wealthy, privileged and largely unhappy guests, and the sympathetic staff members at their beck and call. There are archetypes, though each season they take on slightly different forms.
There is The Family. In Season 1, this was a married couple and their two children plus their daughter’s friend. In Season 2, a grandfather, a father and a son all traveled to Sicily’s White Lotus together. In Season 3 we meet the Ratliffs, a southern family led by Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), a rich financier haunted by his past and hounded by a Wall Street Journal reporter.
Timothy is married to Victoria (Parker Posey), a country club wife with a weakness for jet-lag and (it appears) benzos. They have three children. The eldest is Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), a brash young man whose only interests are money, power and chasing girls. The middle child is Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) whose religious studies major, and desire to seek out a Buddhist monk at a nearby temple, precipitated the family vacation. The youngest, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), is still in high school. I think he’s gay, though the sibling dynamics here are . . . strange, to say the least. There’s a scene where Saxon heads to the bathroom to look at porn, and Lochlan’s eyes follow his naked body. This is moments after Saxon talks about how “hot” Piper is. I’m nervous.
Then there is The Couple. In Season 1, this was a pair of newlyweds, hopelessly mismatched. Here, it’s Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins) and his much, much younger girlfriend, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). Goggins is perhaps the crabbiest and least charming I’ve ever seen him in a role. Rick has a bone to pick with the world, though it’s unclear why. He’s clearly determined to meet the husband of Sritala Hollinger (Lek Patravadi) one of the owners of the White Lotus, but we’ll have to find out why in a later episode. Chelsea handles his crabbiness well enough, though it’s pretty obvious she enjoys traveling the world more than his company. At one point, she meets a woman at a bar who tells her the locals have a term for all the bald, white men at the resort: LBH’s, or “Losers back home.”
At this point, we must break for an interlude before introducing other members of the cast. Because it’s during this scene that we meet our very first surprise guest. The young woman’s boyfriend is one of these LBH’s and when she tells Chelsea who he is, the camera turns to a familiar face: Greg (John Gries). I found this rather shocking, as I was under the impression only Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) was returning from previous seasons. This is important for two reasons:
- First, Greg is now the only character that has appeared in all three seasons of The White Lotus. Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) was in the first and second, and Belinda in the first and third, but Greg is like a bad penny. He just keeps turning up.
- And what a bad penny he is! We learned in Season 2 that he was very much in league with with Quentin (Tom Hollander) in the effort to kill Tanya and take all her money. Tayna thwarted Quentin’s plans, and killed the man, but she didn’t live long enough to stop Greg who, I assume, has inherited all her money after her untimely—and ungainly—death. What part he’ll play in this season remains to be seen.
Finally, we meet The Friends, a trio of 40-something women on vacation that do their level best to illustrate what the term “third wheel” means. Jaclyn Lemon (Michelle Monaghan) is a celebrity TV star who has paid for her friends Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Laurie (Carrie Coon) to join her on this extravagant holiday. Jaclyn and Kate trade compliments endlessly in a weird game of one-upmanship that seems at once entirely superficial and malicious. Laurie is left out of the constant back-and-forth, only remembered as an afterthought. At one point she leaves the table, blaming jet-lag, and takes her bottle of wine up to her room where she watches the other two fawn over one another. She bursts into tears. There is a great deal of history here.
Of course, tensions begin to bubble up elsewhere as well. When Rick lights a cigarette on the boat, the Ratcliffes are visibly annoyed. Saxon confronts Rick but he doesn’t back down. This entire scene plays out muted, under the lively Thai song playing over everything. The music is already just as incredible as it has been the past two seasons. When Timothy and Rick pass in the hotel grounds, after Timothy’s uncomfortable call with the WSJ reporter, they trade barbs. Some people just hate one another from the get-go.
We meet some of the staff as well. Mook (Lalisa Manobal) is one of the health mentors for the visitors of the White Lotus. This property seems much more focused on health, which I suspect has something to do with the role of Eastern Medicine in Western Tourism. This is why Belinda is here, to take some courses and learn some new stuff to bring back with her to Maui. The health mentor for the Ratcliffes informs them that there is no WiFi, and that they are encouraged to deposit all their cell phones and laptops in a bag which will be returned at the end of the week, a suggestion met with disbelief and scorn.
Gunshots In Paradise
Everything about this episode is stage-setting. We meet our new (and returning) cast of characters and get a tiny glimpse into their lives and relationships. Creator, writer and director Mike White gives us oodles of juicy, sharp dialogue to chew on, making it easy for us to get a sense of who it is we’re dealing with and all the little, subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways these people tick. But there isn’t a lot to go on yet in terms of story. We know based on the past two seasons that things will escalate, and we can guess at some of the ways that might happen, but it’s too soon to tether our predictions to anything solid.
Each season has focused on a theme. Season 1’s theme was largely wealth, Season 2’s was sex and Season 3 is spirituality and death. Obviously wealth, sex and death are themes we explore in each season, but each also tugs a little more in one direction.
Each season also follows a formula, beginning at the end with a death of some sort, then rewinding a week to show us how it all unfolds. In Season 1, it was just a coffin in an airport. Season 2 had multiple bodies washing up on the beach. Season 3 opens with the most dramatic moment yet. A young man sits with a meditation guide near a tranquil pond surrounded by green foliage. As she guides him into tranquility, he hears something in the distance. A popping sound. He’s unsettled, but the guide doesn’t seem to notice.
Then he hears it again, closer now, and it’s clearly gunshots. He interrupts the guide, who tells him to remain calm. The gunshots grow louder, they see people running. Then the glass breaks. Bullets are flying near enough to hit. The guide runs and the young man crouches and makes for cover, before sliding into the pond and making his way to a statue of the Buddha. Here he prays and then demands that Buddha keeps his mother and him safe. Then a body floats by in the water.
Talk about upping the ante! Suffice to say, I was hooked from the moment this episode began and remained engrossed throughout the episode. Sure, after this opening moment not a lot really happens, and yet the writing and production are so great, I can’t help but hang onto every word. Each scene, each interaction between characters, is crackling with tension. You know the writing is on point when everything spoken is just the grassy surface atop unspoken depths. This is rich soil for storytelling.
It’s also beautifully shot. The cinematography is spectacular. Season 2 made me want to go to Italy rather badly, but Season 3’s Thailand is shockingly gorgeous. From the opening credits (which I’ll need to watch more closely soon) to the establishing shots of this tropical paradise and its leafy canopy, filled with lizards and monkeys, it’s just tremendously vivid. The way the camera lingers just so on each face, to the final shot of the Ratcliffes sitting in bed as it zooms out and out further, out into the night, the window like a painting of these two foreigners, strangers in a strange land, but perhaps just as much strangers to one another.
There’s much to ponder and much to look forward to as we wait for Episode 2 next Sunday. What did you think? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook. Also be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Sign up for my newsletter for more reviews and commentary on entertainment and culture.
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