Season 3, Episode 1: ‘Same Spirits, New Forms’
Take a moment. Focus on your breathing. Calm your mind. Let the sounds of the external world fade away. Did you just hear gunshots? Ignore them. Embrace the now. Find in your minds what is timeless. Pay no attention to the corpse floating by you.
If you watched either of the previous two seasons of the HBO hit “The White Lotus,” you probably were not surprised to see Season 3 kick off with a dead body. This show is effectively an anthology drama, with each new edition following a different set of rich tourists and well-meaning service industry employees at high-end international resorts. The writer-director Mike White has developed a sturdy blueprint for this series, combining beautiful locations, talented actors, dark social satire, gentle humanism and just a little bit of mystery. Think “Fantasy Island,” but with a TV-MA twist.
Because White takes his time establishing characters and telling their stories, he hooks the audience in the opening minutes of each season with a tease of where the plot is headed. Someone — as yet unidentified — is going to die. Please stay tuned.
In the Season 3 premiere at least, this formula retains plenty of pop. We begin in a sun-dappled Thailand jungle, where one of the White Lotus chain’s wellness-centered seaside getaways is nestled among thick groves of trees filled with monkeys and wild birds. There, a stress-management session is interrupted by some loud pops and a cadaver. And away we go, rewinding to the start of the story, one week earlier.
Once again, White has assembled a stellar cast, easily sorted into four different groups who will all, no doubt, interact before the season’s over.
The largest is the Ratliff family, North Carolina blue bloods led by Timothy (Jason Isaacs), a business bigwig with no interest in any of the resort’s spiritual healing exercises. Parker Posey plays Tim’s wife, Victoria, a brassy belle who thinks everything her children do is a hoot. Patrick Schwarzenegger plays the eldest son, Saxon, a beefy finance bro who works for Tim and is on a constant hunt for sexual partners. Sarah Catherine Hook is Piper, the daughter, a University of North Carolina student working on a thesis project about eastern religions (and who is the reason the other Ratliffs are, semi-reluctantly, in Thailand). And Sam Nivola is the youngest son, Lochlan, a high school senior who just got into Duke but isn’t sure he wants to follow in his father’s and brother’s heavy footsteps.
The second-biggest group is a trio of “longtime friends” (don’t call them “old”), reconnecting after a long time apart for a “victory tour” (don’t call it a “midlife crisis trip”). Carrie Coon plays Laurie, a busy New York professional. Leslie Bibb is Kate, a Texas housewife apparently married to a tycoon. And Michelle Monaghan in Jaclyn, a famous TV actress recognized by the resort’s staff and guests.
Next up is a couple who do not seem at all compatible. Walton Goggins plays Rick Hatchett, an irritable man who seems shady (though we do not yet know why). Aimee Lou Wood is Chelsea, his much-younger girlfriend, an upbeat free spirit eager to indulge in whatever the resort has to offer.
Each set of guests have been provided with a “health mentor” to help them book spa treatments and activities. The lady-pals have Valentin (Arnas Fedaravicius), a hunky Russian whom one or more of them will surely take a run at before the season’s over. The Ratliffs have Pam (Morgana O’Reilly), whom they mostly ignore — especially when she tells them the resort has a “no cellphones in public areas” policy. Rick and Chelsea have Mook (Lalisa Manobal, better known as Lisa from Blackpink), who is in a flirty relationship with the security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong).
These employees barely register to our featured guests — save for one, Belinda Lindsey (Natasha Rothwell), a White Lotus masseuse previously seen in the show’s first season. Belinda is planning to spend three months in Thailand to relax, recharge and learn new techniques. Along with the other White Lotus employees, she fits into the fourth group of characters that this season follows — although she also stands alone.
Belinda does not have many scenes in the premiere, but she is central to one of the episode’s most memorable images as she watches, with satisfaction, a woman who looks a lot like herself enjoying a nice dinner out with her man. One of the recurring ideas in “The White Lotus” is how it feels to be permanently stationed in paradise, but as a servant. Spending your days pampering other people can foster a deep feeling of longing to be the one being fed and massaged.
The Rick and Chelsea story line also does not get much play in this episode. Chelsea does most of the talking, telling Mook that her boyfriend “barely works” and gushing to Rick that they should always be living this life of luxury. Rick though seems disgruntled — about the location and the food, and about the fact that the resort’s co-owner is convalescing from an illness in Bangkok and isn’t around.
Why is he looking for the owner? It’s unclear. But given that there are some parts of the world — like Australia — where Rick is apparently unwelcome, we can assume he is up to no good. (As for Chelsea, she just giggles at Rick’s irascibility and calls him “a victim of your own decisions.”)
As I mentioned, White does not seem to be a hurry to trot out all the season’s major story lines. Instead we get a lot of scene-setting as his actors scramble to make an immediate impression. They all hit their marks, but Coon, Bibb and Monaghan stand out.
Not much happens with their characters in the premiere. It’s mainly established that Kate and Jaclyn lead happy and fulfilling lives — on the surface anyway — while Laurie is struggling in some as-yet-unspecified way. For now, it is enough to watch these three ping energetically off each other, grinning wildly and swapping compliments … while slipping in passive-aggressive, cutting remarks.
The Ratliffs get the bulk of the screen time. Tim has the most potentially dramatic story line, as he handles an unexpected phone call from The Wall Street Journal about some dubious dealings involving one of his business associates in Brunei. But Saxon is the character who is the most perversely fascinating — the most “Mike White” in his combination of clueless egotism and sympathetic buffoonery. Saxon drops off-putting references to arousal into casual conversations, and is disturbingly focused on his siblings’ sex lives. He also seems to have adopted alpha male entitlement as an ethos, telling his brother, “It’s good to want things, if you can get them. That’s happiness, bro.”
Much of White’s work to date in film and television is about the many ways people convince themselves that their needs matter more than others’. What sets White apart from a lot of other satirists is that he tries to understand his characters’ self-centered delusions, rather than merely mocking them. He gets how anyone can succumb to desire, especially when visiting a place designed to cater to their appetites.
To get his audience to see this too, White this season is leaning even harder than usual into his exotic setting, emphasizing the intoxicating, hypnotic sounds of the wind and the animals moving through the swaying trees. He wants us to be lulled.
But he also wants us to pay heed to Belinda, who is trying to get into the spirit of being a White Lotus guest even though she knows too much about what it takes to keep Shangri-La running. Throughout this episode, she fluctuates between beatific and skittish, either smiling at all the pretty people around her or flinching at the lizards skittering across the pathways. At one point she mutters to herself that she is going to keep an eye out for any snakes that could fall from above. Given the nature of this show, she certainly should.
Concierge Service
-
Belinda notes that her college-aged son will be visiting. This, I assume, is Zion (Nicholas Duvernay), who is seen in the episode’s opening flash-forward, going from a stress-management session to dodging bullets. Zion and Belinda both talk about how they have been coping with “other stuff,” aside from work and school. Something to note, perhaps.
-
Something else that could matter later: Saxon idly gripes about spending the week eating fruit while holding the toxic product of what Pam calls “the mighty pong-pong tree.” Will that fruit’s poison seeds come into play this season?
-
While Rick smokes and stews alone, Chelsea makes a new friend in the bar: a jet-setting ex-model named Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon), who has a house near the resort with her husband. That man? Greg Hunt (Jon Gries), who wooed Jennifer Coolidge’s character, Tanya, in Season 1 and then turned heel in Season 2.
-
The Mike White touch, Part 1: Chloe points out to Chelsea how many bald white guys populate the bars in Thailand, saying the locals call them “LBHs … Losers Back Home.”
-
The Mike White touch, Part 2: When Pam asks Tim how the Ratliffs’ flight went, he simultaneously tries to be pleasant and to make sure everyone knows his suffering, grumbling, “Long layover in Doha, but it’s all forgotten now.”
