Many Unhappy Returns: The White Lotus Season 3
Mike White's surprise-hit-turned-HBO-stalwart returns with a darker, gloomier installment
Being a longtime fan of writer-director Mike White used to mean always supporting scrappy, beloved cult classics. After all, Enlightened, which might stand as his magnum opus when all is said and done, was watched by about 12 people and got cancelled after 2 seasons. Even with one of his popular previous works like School of Rock, it’s people like director Richard Linklater and star Jack Black who are seen more as the faces of its success. When White Lotus landed on our heads a year into the pandemic, its quality wasn’t a surprise so much as its overwhelming popularity. It was something you hope for with all well-liked auteurs, where their pet interests — in White’s case, his love of difficult characters and a willingness to probe them — align with the interests of the zeitgeist — in the case of White Lotus season 1, a gorgeous locale and splashy cast. Now, what started as a lark to circumvent the difficulties of production during a global shutdown has become one of its network’s most reliable hits, and we’ve arrived at the end of the third season with last night’s finale.
Same Spirits…
By now, you sort of know what to expect from a new batch of White Lotus episodes. It’s a show that functions almost like a procedural, except the formula repeats by season rather than by episode. And in true procedural fashion, the premiere is mostly devoted to establishing that formula again. You get the players coming to the hotel, the introduction of the staff, and the re-emergence of the show’s tone and themes. Even the first episode’s title points to the idea of familiarity and playing around with the same ideas.
So we find season 3 once again riffing on how we define happiness, the juxtaposition between the haves and the have less, and the “wherever you go, there you are” nature of vacationing. The show also always makes good use of its location, usually having it play a part in its story about the history and politics of the space contending with the outside forces of these tourists. This year adds an extra dimension with the Thailand resort, tangling the natural world (wildlife right on the premises), the spiritual world (all of the Buddhist imagery), and the modern world (the trappings of a five star hotel).
Stylistically, there’s alot of familiarity to ground yourself with as well. The most prominent element being Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s twitchy, lurching score, always pushing the momentum forward. It’s the not-so-secret weapon of the show, and will be missed when he doesn’t return next season. There’s also Mike White’s shot compositions, which always find unease in the peaceful: scenery refracted through water in a way that makes it look sickly, the haunting azure glow of the twilight scenes, the retina-singeing quality of the fire in the dinner performances, the sallow filter on daytime shots. For all the praise he gets as a writer, people tend to forget what a terrific filmmaker he is. There’s a moment in the finale where the camera switches to handheld that’s an excellent example of using form to guide the viewer’s emotions.
There are only a certain amount of character types you can find among the wealthy people who would inhabit a resort like The White Lotus, and the show finds ways to make those little variations insightful and entertaining year over year. With a show this dense and character-rich, it feels like the only way to give it due diligence is to tackle its character groupings individually.
The Ratliff Family
My favorite group of characters throughout the season was the Ratliffs, who are part Peterson family from The Staircase, part Southern Charm. There are so many things I like about the configuration of the family, such as little touches like all of the children having insane rich kid names like Saxon, Piper, and Lochlan. But there are also bigger thematic things that make the family compelling, like how Lochlan is positioned in the middle of a crossroads and each of his family members exist at the end of its 4 points, with his parents warring over his future of going to Duke or UNC and his two siblings warring over his personality.
The show has a simultaneous love and hatred of its characters that really makes them sing. Even its most odious creations have hidden nuances to them that make them feel real. The Ratliffs are the best example of that gift, especially matriarch Victoria. At first, I found Parker Posey’s performance a little too cartoonish, but something about the way the season begins to depict her crippling anxiety starts to feel emotional in its own weird way. The missing Lorazepam runner is funny, but it’s sad that she can’t seem to function without it. Victoria is the season’s biggest comic relief character, and yet she’s still imbued with a hidden depth of feeling. For all her faults and obliviousness, she really does worry about her children, wanting to ensure they have the right values and are going to live their best life (even if her idea of that may be warped).
The Tim end of the equation also sneaks some funny-sad into the mix. Every interaction involving him and his kids that seems genuine has an extra, unspoken layer to them. In episode 3, he compliments Saxon and tells him he’s proud of him, but it’s only to manipulate Saxon into giving up his phone so he can’t find out about the vague white collar crime his dad is going down for. Then there’s the scene on the yacht in episode 4 where Piper expresses her appreciation for Tim choosing to be present and giving up his phone, but really she’s just trying to soften him up for when she tells him about her decision to stay in Thailand, and he didn’t even give up his phone to be present. To top it all off, Tim is clearly going through a major crisis and yet for 6 straight episodes, none of his family think anything beyond “I guess Dad’s acting a little weird…” It would be bleak if it wasn’t so hilarious. Or maybe the other way around.
Of course, the most feverishly discussed element of the family was all the incestuous vibes going on with them. It was all over the first half of the season — Saxon calling his sister hot, all of the masturbation and porn talk Saxon has with Lochlan, Tim accidentally exposing his cock to Piper and then getting a little too touchy-feely with her on the boat, etc. Everyone thought the Ratliff incest was going to involve Piper in some way, but we forgot to consider the gay option, and the decision to have Lochlan give his brother a tug during the sort-of threesome they have was a wild and hilarious choice.
Even putting aside the incest, the Saxon-Piper-Lochlan trio was a rich vein for storytelling. It’s indicative of Mike White’s talent for cause-and-effect storytelling, where you see the whole process of what causes Lochlan to ping pong between the two siblings, like his sense of abandonment at learning that Piper wants to live in Thailand in episode 4 being what drives him to stay on the boat and party with Saxon later that night during the full moon. It also ends up being ironic how both Piper and Saxon want Lochlan to be more like them, only to then recoil at the moment he becomes too much so.
Patrick Schwarzenegger’s performance in particular felt perfectly rendered. Regardless of what you think of him as a person, the way he depicted how Saxon views every aspect of life through the lens of sex, the scary glint in his eyes, the waxy smile, and the boyish vulnerability when things start to break down for him was all great stuff.
Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie
Next up in terms of interest was the trio of childhood friends: Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie. I love the gradation of success that’s laid out in their dynamic, with Jaclyn being ultra successful and famous, Kate being successful but not necessarily famous, and Laurie apparently struggling, at least by White Lotus standards. Their scenes are where the show’s exquisite characterization gets to shine, because Mike White fills their interactions with surface niceties, but then there is so much jockeying underneath it, and unspoken disappointments from Laurie especially. Every moment comes with a backhanded compliment or a furtive eyeroll.
Though a little heightened, their relationship feels truthful in a specific way we don’t see on TV often, showing the consequences of getting older and not being able to hang out with longtime friends frequently. You only get the big moments in each other’s lives, which allows judgments and resentments to set in. There’s a memory of fondness, but maybe not the actual thing anymore — you’re held together by weathered strings tied long ago. As a result, when Jaclyn and Kate are alone together, they talk negatively about Laurie. When Laurie and Kate are alone together, they talk negatively about Jaclyn. It makes you wonder if maybe they weren’t so busy talking around each other, they could actually be real with one another and get through their struggles of loneliness together.
A highlight scene of the entire season is the one with Laurie, Jaclyn, and Kate at dinner where they talk about mysticism, religion, politics. The way their careful conversational dance plays out is just sublime, all steady buildup to the fact that Kate most likely voted for Trump. It’s hilarious and awkward in the exact manner it would be if you learned something distasteful about one of your friends, and it’s what leads to the final permutation of two of the ladies talking about the third behind their back when Laurie and Jaclyn dish about it later.
They say it’s bad when you can see the seams of a show’s writing, but this might be the one show where that works in its favor, because it allows you to be more impressed with the sheer engineering of it. With this storyline, it feels like so many of the little narrative avenues it goes down are specifically designed to trigger Jaclyn’s aging anxieties, particularly the trip their guide Valentin sends them on in episode 4. Jaclyn’s in an age-gap relationship with a younger actor and she feels insecure about not being able to get in touch with him — the last thing she needs is to be sent to lay poolside at a senior citizen’s resort. There’s also a moment later in the episode where the ladies go clubbing, and Kate mentions the last time they danced like that was “like a hundred years ago” and Jaclyn instantly tells her “shut up Kate!” All of that insecurity is what drives her to be in competition with Laurie, and have Kate serve as the fulcrum between the two.
If anything, this might be the storyline that’s the slowest burn to actual conflict. It’s not until episode 6 where the Jaclyn-Laurie passive aggression becomes full aggression, once Laurie finds out that Jaclyn hooked up with Valentin. Laurie confronts Jaclyn in the exact way that would irk her the most, and it’s another one of those cases where if she had come to her in a more open and honest way, maybe Jaclyn would have been honest back. Those kind of well-attuned layers are what make this storyline so rewarding.
Rick and Chelsea
There’s one plotline that benefits the most from giving it the wait-and-see approach, and that’s Rick and Chelsea. For a while, I wasn’t that interested in them because although I think Walton Goggins is one of the best actors working right now, Rick’s whole deal was far too vague to care about. Along with Tim’s work troubles, Rick’s backstory was a big offender of the first three episodes repeating the same information without really moving the story forward. One of the strengths of White Lotus is that we don’t need to know much about these characters outside of the context of the week that we see them, because the show is all about how vacations just draw out the essence of who you are even more. But Rick and Chelsea are the one case where the viewer could use more information about them, because it’s confusing to figure out how or why they’re even together in the first place.
But eventually their relationship began to work for me simply because Chelsea grew to be the beating heart of the season and my favorite character. At first, you’re trained to think that she’s merely an airhead child bride dating an older rich man, but it turns out she’s just a direct and earnest person who loves a wounded bird. She always makes these clear emotional statements, like “I’m your life partner” and “you’re my soulmate” to Rick, and she’s the kind of person who says “I love you” to Chloe after knowing her for less than 3 days. It’s the perfect diametric opposition to Rick’s inability to be vulnerable. Though it sounds crazy to say at first, she winds up being one of the most emotionally intelligent people we follow this season. (The White Lotus is also a show that loves to tell you about its characters through the books they read, so it’s a fitting bit of insight that while everybody else is reading things like Barbara Streisand’s biography or Emma Straub beach lit, Chelsea is the one reading Rumi.)
And amongst a stacked cast, Aimee Lou Wood emerges as the MVP with her performance. I, like most people, first noticed her in Sex Education, but that show was far too irritating for any one person’s good work to stand out. Here, she has endless facets. She’s so funny and sincere, it’s incredibly endearing.
You never really do get a sense of what Rick likes about Chelsea if he likes her at all, but it starts to matter less. Goggins plays him so tightly wound, constantly sweating and not even realizing that the snakes he frees early in the season are a big representation of how he feels about himself. It’s no coincidence that Chelsea references Inigo Montoya when he finally tells her about his reason for coming to Thailand — it sounds like something out of a movie. It really does feel like the story with his dad has defined him only because he let it.
The Staff
I’m grouping all of the non-guests together because they get shorter shrift than they have in previous years. Where Armond and Belinda in season one or Valentina and the sex workers in season two felt like essential pieces, the staff here feels less fleshed out. I mean, how much do we really learn about Gaitok and especially Mook as people compared to everybody else? Watching them was enjoyable, and Lisa from Blackpink is a surprisingly solid actress, but it’s pretty telling that they’re basically the only two who don’t have last names on the character sheet.
It doesn’t help that I was skeptical of the Belinda material for much of the season, though it does eventually land the plane in a very satisfying place. The murder mystery aspects are always the least interesting part of a season of White Lotus, and to have Tanya’s death from last season bleed into this season and turn into an arc that stretches over the course of the entire show feels like the most conventional bit of storytelling that it chooses to indulge in. Especially given that it requires turning Greg, a seemingly bumbling guy in season 1, into something of an opaque supervillain.
Oddly enough, the one staff member I latched on to the most was Fabian the hotel manager. His little subplot about wanting to sing during the nightly dinner performance felt like a classic Mike White touch, where even the smallest jokey thing is injected with feeling and character.
Something smart about the handling of the staff though was giving both Gaitok and Belinda these moral inflection points that they end up struggling with by the end of the season. At one point, Mook tells Gaitok, “It’s good you have strong morals. But you have to be a part of this world…” and I like that Gaitok’s struggle against his better nature hinges on the question of whether he’s willing to turn against his beliefs to further his career and be with Mook. The same goes for Belinda, who must decide whether taking blood money is justifiable as a karmic reward for all she’s been through.
…New Forms
Despite the show having so many scattered storylines, the characters and their situations are so richly drawn that you can find all sorts of parallels, intentional or not. One of the big unifying ideas in season 3 is the examination of masculinity. It’s most notable in Gaitok and Lochlan, two men who have the performance of traditional masculinity forced upon them. But Tim's storyline is a little bit about the prison of masculinity as well. One of his biggest worries about going to jail is the way it diminishes his role as the Ratliff provider — "What am I supposed to tell my family? That we're fucking poor?,” he says at one point — and what it’ll mean if he can no longer be that. Even Rick wanting to enact this very macho revenge plan feels like him doing it out of the obligation to follow an invisible playbook.
Another motif that kept popping up was the unknowability of the people you’re supposed to be closest to. Your father might be melting down from the nebulous financial crimes he was involved with under your nose. Your childhood best friend may be a secret Republican. Your supposed soulmate might have a dark past that they never told you about. No matter what you think, it’s hard to know the inside of somebody else’s head.
One new aspect to this White Lotus resort in Thailand is that it’s specifically devoted to healing and wellness, a framework that allows the story to dig even deeper into the psychic wounds of its ensemble. It’s a season about spirituality in many ways — lapsed, renewed, and ongoing. There’s a little bit of tourism as an attempt at healing too, both in the form of spiritual tourism (Piper’s Buddhist cosplay vs. the Buddhism of somebody like Gaitok) and sexual tourism (that wild Sam Rockwell monologue, where he also mentions “finding religion”). And all over these episodes, there are characters self-medicating to unwind, whether it be with weed, benzos, or molly that makes you jerk off your brother. All these elements scratch at the same thing, which is that everyone here is always searching for whatever they think will make them whole.
That the show has all of these grounding elements to tie everything together makes it all the more impactful when it breaks from its established patterns. Since the beginning, we’d been lulled into a set structure, where each episode takes place over the course of one day, and it had been a North Star for 2.5 seasons. The decision to abandon that midway through this season makes you feel out at sea in a good way. When episode 5 starts in the middle of the night and we’re not given the usual rhythm of the morning routine, it provides the whole hour a different, more wired energy. It’s all in keeping with season three’s main goal of discomforting you at every turn.
Amor Fati
Opinions were all over the map about season three up until the very end, and some of that feels like it’s because everything was so deliberately disorienting and decidedly unfun. The satire, the frothy escapism of before, those things were almost completely excised for the much more gloomy spirit coursing through these episodes. Even the fog of danger arrives faster and thicker than it did in previous years. Personally, I liked the darkness and brooding. Don’t get me wrong, it was definitely the weakest season throughout — only in the sense that it was a 4.5 star affair where I felt like previous ones were 5 stars — but I remained steadfast that you can’t judge a White Lotus season before its finale, when its aims and the mechanics of its storytelling usually snap into place.
And they sure did snap into place with last night’s moving, anxiety-inducing, amazingly cruel 90 minutes of television. One of my favorite things about Mike White is that he comes from the “deserve’s got nothing to do with it” school of writing. It’s never the worst character who has it coming the most who dies at the end, and this finale especially puts all of its purest characters through the wringer. Chief among them being my darling Chelsea, who only wants to give love and open her heart, and as a reward she gets shot straight through it. Then there’s Lochlan, the Ratliff so innocent that his dad excluded him from his Jonestown via piña colada plan, suffering a near death experience from accidentally consuming a smoothie with remnants of the poison fruit in it. (I’d argue that it would’ve been a better, more thematically resonant choice to let him die, but then again, I’m also a sadist.)
One of the most stomach churning turns involves no death at all. Given her fate at the end of season one, and the signals that she might die at the end of this one, Belinda was the character most people were unabashedly rooting for. And she does get a happy ending, but not without leaving Pornchai in the lurch in the same way Tanya did to her in the first season. That ability to be honest about its characters and their limitations, that good people are not wholly good all the time, is what makes this show elite.
Every victory feels pyrrhic here. Gaitok does get the promotion, but has to give up his pacifist Buddhist beliefs by killing Rick to do so. My favorite moment in this regard comes from the dinner scene with Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie. It’s one of those classic sequences that the show does where it just stops down for a minute to get startingly emotional, having the three women reaffirm their friendship after a week of catty gamesmanship. Yet there’s a very melancholy ambiguity to Laurie’s part in it. She’s the only one who really unloads the despair that she feels and then kind of accepts the status quo that these two women have more fulfilling lives than her, because she’s just happy to have a seat at the table with them. It’s a fascinating, knotty scene in an episode full of moments that juxtapose surface positivity with more complicated underpinnings.
The finale does alot of legwork to push season three much closer to the level of the previous two. Do I think that there were too many repeated story beats in the first three episodes? Sure. Was the reveal that Scott Glenn’s character didn’t kill Rick’s father but is his father stupid? Absolutely. But overall, season three reminded me that The White Lotus is fantastic, high-level television better than almost anything else out there. I’ll see you at the next resort.