‘The White Lotus’ Knows What You’re Here For: S3 Review (original) (raw)

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Every inch of _The White Lotus_’s Thailand resort induces a mix of envious longing and burbling queasiness. There’s the pool, glimmering and pristine, and the endless cocktails and piles of fresh fruit at breakfast. There are monkeys in the trees above the opulent guest bungalows. Hot stone massages, private yoga, every possible amenity, and also rude, self-absorbed, and entitled rich people in every lounge chair, chasing status and self-improvement, conscious of every flaw but their own. Unlike the Sicily and Maui resorts of previous seasons, this fictional property focuses on wellness, giving The White Lotus creator and writer Mike White plenty of opportunities for stories about wellness-influencer culture, digital detoxing, the way Western tourists exoticize and consume Buddhist spirituality, and luxury tourism when it comes with a particularly bodily agenda (like sex work or medical procedures). It’s a novel device for fueling the series’ reputation as a stunning, complicated piece of travel promotion.

Despite all that promise of novelty, though, season three is most defined by all the ways the show keeps reaching back to what’s come before. Sometimes these moves feel necessary, the repetition of a show building itself into a franchise. Here we are again at the arrivals dock, with the staff members cheerily waving at all the entitled, disaffected rich people who’ve come to spend money on being happy. Here is the concierge, the unhappy marriage, the water imagery, the slyly indicative paperback being read by the pool. Those influences are often deliberate — coy and canny reworkings of previous themes and character types, presented again in new guises and winking reflections. This is when The White Lotus is best this season, when it’s playful and messy and prickly about how nice it is to have established expectations, but also what a burden those expectations can be.

This time, the most novel interpersonal dynamic comes from Laurie (Carrie Coon), Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), and Kate (Leslie Bibb), three longtime friends reuniting for a girls trip that’s not a middle-age crisis vacation or a celebration of turning 40 — it’s a “victory tour.” White, who is so good at writing the blind spots, resentments, and aesthetics of wealthy women, is deeply in the pocket here, and all three performances hit that perfect White Lotus note of a realism heightened just to the point of caricature. Each woman is a plausible, instantly legible mix of insecurities and desires, and the season is especially adept at presenting the unstable orbit of a three-body problem friendship, its members perpetually realigning into new duos to comment on the third. Each new sarong, piece of swimwear, and choice of hat is more careful and telling than the last.

In every other guest grouping, though, The White Lotus loops back to old patterns and types, shuffling around various characteristics and relationships like a kaleidoscope of privilege. Jason Isaacs is Tim Ratliff, a wealthy and inevitably troubled businessman with an accent that drifts in and out of Isaacs’s native plummy British and toward his intended North Carolina drawl, often landing somewhere in the vicinity of Sydney. His wife, Parker Posey’s lorazepam-popping Victoria, has taken up the broad comic role left vacant after Jennifer Coolidge’s departure, and their three kids — Lochlan (Sam Nivola), Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), and Saxon (as in Anglo-Saxon, played by Patrick Schwarzenegger) — are driven by rivalry and ambition and a mutual dislike that sometimes, in Saxon’s case at least, seems to hint at something a little … overly interested. Lochlan and Piper have echoes of season one’s Quinn Mossbacher, the young kid who abandoned his wealthy family to hop on a Hawaiian outrigger and sail into the ocean at the end. Victoria is a little Tanya McQuoid in performance and style, but Walton Goggins’s Rick has some Tanya in his plot arc, as a rich man who arrives at this resort with his adorable younger girlfriend (Aimee Lou Wood) but seems mostly focused on an ulterior motive he’s reluctant to discuss. And like season one, there’s a relationship brewing between two members of the staff: a security guard named Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) has the hots for spa staff member Mook (Blackpink’s Lalisa Manobal), and it’s unfortunately distracting him from some fairly important security-guard duties. Most explicitly, Natasha Rothwell returns as season one’s spa manager Belinda, on a work research trip that allows season three to keep a direct link to previous storylines even after Tanya’s tragic death by murderous gay cruise.

And yes, there is another body, now with an additional element of mystery. Because the first episode begins with the sounds of gunshots, the season gets to play out not just who dies, but who becomes the shooter. This is where the show’s fondness for pattern, symbolism, and self-awareness really shines, as season three becomes an endlessly generous source of theories, possibilities, red herrings, and feints. In the six of eight episodes made available to critics, many suspects seem equally likely, with enough motivation and potential reason to snap. Many characters offer themselves up as probable victims, each one entirely reasonable, each one combining with potential perpetrators in entertaining ways all well-supported by the developing plot. Now with an established history, The White Lotus can play games with its own past, and it makes the mystery side of this show more engaging than in the past.

It’s fun when The White Lotus reconsiders itself in structural ways, but at other points there’s something anxious about how the series wants to wrestle with its previous obsessions, or continue to ignore its repeated blindspots, like pressing on a bruise to make sure it’s still there. As articulated through each season of The White Lotus, Mike White is sincere about his belief in the transformative power of travel, opening oneself to new cultural experiences, and embracing non-western forms of spiritual enlightenment. At the same time, he is painfully conscious of the unavoidable weight of imperialism, objectification, empty spiritual consumerism, wealth and privilege, and the unresolvable paradox of an “authentic” tourism experience. The heft of his sincerity and the weight of all that self-awareness are baggage he cannot figure out how to balance against each other.

This culminates in White’s portrayal of characters of color, an issue that became the source of criticism in season one and comes to the forefront again in season three. (White does not work with a writers’ room, something that became a question regarding season one’s depiction of Indigenous Hawaiian characters, and is now even more pointed in an Asian setting.) So much of season three reads like a deliberate, controlled rearticulation of previous White Lotus obsessions, but occasionally it seems like something less conscious — a hot stove White cannot stop himself from touching. As various season-three characters seek enlightenment or escape, they recreate the season-one dynamic where white characters are full of fascinating, absorbing peculiarities, while the non-white hotel staff are one-note ciphers, destined to keep the plot moving but not have interiority or complex emotional lives. It would be one thing if season three had digested some of the criticism and was flouting it intentionally. Instead, a show that wants to purposefully mess around with its own patterns also can’t help but fall back into some unfortunate old grooves.

Campy, naughty, a little shocking, and a little old hat, _The White Lotus_’s third season has its flaws and its hang-ups, without question. They hint at depth, at complicated things to say about wealth and cultural experience as a consumer product, and how to find meaning. If season three ends at all like the previous seasons did, the show may not figure out how to do more than hint. But as with its first two seasons, The White Lotus succeeds at being fun TV first and foremost — fun to talk about, to dissect, to rip apart and wonder about and be frustrated by. Maybe there’s more under the surface, maybe not. And maybe that’s still enough.

The White Lotus Knows What You’re Here For