Review: White Lotus Season 3

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White Lotus has been very successful. Its first season, set in Hawaii, was a class satire, intended to be a one-off six-episode run about rich people at a nice hotel. It did well, so HBO ran it back and made another season. The second season, set at a resort in Italy, was a sex satire. It took the form of the first season and deepened it beyond just class. The second season did well, so the audience and social relevance of White Lotus grew even more, and it was renewed for a third season. With the continued success of the show, each season has expanded one episode longer than the season before. And more characters die in the finale with each successive season, with higher stakes and more drama.

Season 3, set in Thailand, is still a social satire about rich people at a nice hotel. It takes on class and sex, but also religion, purpose, and death. The episodes are beautifully plotted, especially episode 5, the full moon episode, where all the characters have late nights during full moon parties. But while the episodes are well-plotted together, each character group goes through their arcs mostly separately.

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Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate

These three are longtime female friends, now in their early forties, reuniting on a girls' trip to Thailand. Jaclyn is a celebrity actress, famous enough to be recognized by other guests at the hotel. Laurie is a successful businesswoman, who’s dedicated her life to her office job, sometimes to the detriment of her personal life. She’s divorced, struggling to raise her daughter. Kate has a traditionally happy life; she lives in Austin Texas, has kids and a successful husband.

The friendship between the three women seems supportive from the outside, but often times two of the women team up on one of the other:

• Jaclyn and Kate gossip about Laurie’s career, the drama of her divorce, and her struggles with her child.

• Jaclyn and Laurie unite against Kate when she implies she voted for Donald Trump.

• Throughout the season, Jaclyn encourages Laurie to have sex with a hot male hotel worker. When it nearly happens Jaclyn has sex with him instead. Kate and Laurie unite and gossip over it, but Laurie gets upset, which then causes Jaclyn and Kate to unite against her.

Despite the tension, the three of them are together at the end of the season. Laurie has sex with a different man, a friend of the hot hotel worker. It isn’t totally fulfilling because he asks her for money, but helps her feel more valid. Jaclyn apologizes to Laurie for taking the hot hotel worker from her. And then, to end their time at the hotel, Jaclyn and Kate both first give sincere but shallow toasts to their friendship, followed by an emotionally vulnerable toast to their friendship from Laurie. Laurie admits a lot of her own struggles, and forgives the other two women and affirms their importance to her.

I thought this plotline was very sweet and well-executed. Laurie is a strong character. She doesn’t develop as a person, or find an answer to her problems, but the archetype of a woman who’s successful on paper but lost in her career and personal life was so portrayed with a lot of empathy.

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Belinda and Greg

Belinda appeared in White Lotus S1, and Greg appeared in both prior seasons. Belinda is a hotel wellness worker at the White Lotus hotel chain’s Hawaii location, giving massages but aspiring to start her own business. In the first season, Belinda met a wealthy woman, Tania, who promised to give her money so she could start her own massage business. Tania forgot about that promise, Greg married Tania, and then Greg had Tania killed to inherit her money at the end of S2.

In S3, Belinda is visiting the Thailand White Lotus location to learn from a worker there, named Pornchai. Pornchai and Belinda have a brief romantic entanglement, spending the night together during the full moon episode. They clearly like each other, and discuss opening a wellness center together. While she’s in Thailand, Belinda recognizes Greg at the hotel. Greg has moved to Thailand, living in a mansion and going by a different name. Occasionally he comes down to the hotel to hang out. Greg is clearly in hiding because what happened with Tania, so he makes Belinda an offer for $100,000 to not tell authorities about him.

Belinda balks at the offer, calling it blood money. She can’t imagine taking money to hide the murder of her friend. But she’s pushed by her son Zion, who arrives at the hotel in the middle of the season. He tells her she should go back to Greg and ask for more money. They return to Greg together and ask for $5,000,000 instead of $100,000. Greg says no, but Belinda then turns her initial sincere “blood money” concerns into performatively storming out of the room as a negotiation tactic. Her son closes the deal. Greg sends her the money and she celebrates. Belinda immediately pays for her son to a wellness treatment, and decides to leave Thailand the next day. She’s not even thinking about her longheld aspiration to start a business, she just wants time to feel like she’s rich now. Once she has the money, she becomes cold to Pornchai, telling him “things have changed for me”. She doesn’t tell him about the money, and ends their relationship.

I thought this was another strong plotline. I couldn’t tell where it was going until the last episode, but the resolution ties it all together. It’s sad to see it so clearly, but there’s a price for everything. Belinda was a pure and kind person, but five million dollars would change her life, so she compromised her ethics. The way she treats Pornchai after shows how the money changes her, and makes the ending even more sinister.

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Rick and Chelsea

Rick is an older and emotionally troubled alcoholic. Chelsea is his much younger girlfriend. She’s naive and sweet, a spiritual girl who likes astrology. She's fond of Rick despite his flaws. She tries to engage Rick with the spiritualism that’s important to her, but he doesn’t care that much. He doesn’t try very hard at the meditation classes at the hotel. He ignores Chelsea often, he’s dismissive of what she says. At one point he lets poisonous snakes out of a cage, and one bites her, but through all this Chelsea remains loyal to him.

About halfway through the season Rick leaves the hotel to go to Bangkok. He reveals to Chelsea that the reason he brought them Thailand is so he could meet the man who killed his father. The man is named Jim, and he owns this White Lotus hotel. He’s a wealthy real estate developer, who killed Rick’s father as he did whatever he could to gain power in Thailand. Rick believes Jim took his happy childhood away from him, so he wants to meet him; maybe to kill him, maybe just to tell him how much emotional turmoil he’s caused him. When Rick meets Jim, he finds the man he built up in his head is old and frail. Rick tells Jim the story of how he ruined his life, and knocks him over in his chair, but doesn’t kill or hurt him.

After the confrontation, Rick returns to the hotel, and for a brief moment him and Chelsea are happily reunited. Rick tells her “the monkey is off my back”, that he’s free from the inner torment he’s had. For a minute the story acts like it believes him. Rick seems to actually engage with Chelsea, and tells her that the plan is for the two of them to be together forever. But Jim comes from Bangkok to the hotel. Jim walks up to Rick, calls Rick’s mother a slut, and says he wasn’t missing out on much with his father. Rick is consumed with rage again. He tries to calm down, tries to get a session with the spiritual therapist that he had previously ignored, but she’s busy and he can’t control himself. While waiting for his therapist, he accidentally runs into Jim, and this time he shoots him. As Jim dies, Jim’s wife tells Rick that Jim was Rick’s father. Jim dies, Rick shoots security guards and kills them, but his girlfriend Chelsea is hit by a bullet from a security guard and dies. Rick dramatically carries her body, and is shot and killed by another guard while he holds her.

I liked the concept here. Chelsea is faithful to Rick in a way that feels like love as pure commitment, and that’s touching. The way Rick almost gets the monkey off his back and then regresses feels central to the ideas the show is going for. But the bloodbath ending felt over-the-top, compared to the subdued social dynamics that White Lotus does well. I especially don’t think the explicit reveal that Jim was Rick’s dad was needed. It’s implied during their first confrontation, and it could have been left unstated.

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Gaitok and Mook

Gaitok is a security guard for the hotel, and Mook is a woman who works at the hotel. Gaitok likes Mook, but Mook doesn’t reciprocate. She encourages him to aspire for more and be successful at his job to earn her affection. Early in the season, there’s a robbery at the hotel, which Gaitok fails to stop, and that’s a small humiliation for him. Later, Gaitok learns information about who committed the robbery (it’s the hot hotel worker that Jaclyn had sex with), but he doesn’t act on the information. The hot hotel worker confronts him first, realizing Gaitok knows, and tells him it will ruin his life and maybe even get him killed. In the finale Gaitok is the guard who shoots Rick. The ending implies that it got him a promotion he wanted driving the hotel owner’s wife. Mook seems impressed.

I don’t have strong opinions on this plotline. It’s a little dark what Mook wants from Gaitok to earn her affection. And it’s a little dark the way Gaitok finds purpose pleasing the people around him; he does kill Rick but doesn’t report the robbers, and the main difference was that he was explicitly asked to kill Rick.

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Tim, Victoria, Saxon, Piper, and Lochlan

This is a family of five, visiting Thailand on vacation, staying at the White Lotus Hotel. The main purpose of the visit is because the daughter Piper is entering her senior year of college and wants to write a philosophy thesis on monks in Thailand.

• Piper is the middle daughter, shy and reserved, but idealistic. She’s resentful of her family’s wealth, and sees the Buddhist monk’s rejection of material possessions as a way to reject the emptiness of her family’s American consumerism.

• Saxon is the oldest son. He’s a former frat bro, obsessed with going to the gym, but also masturbation and sex. He accuses Piper of being a virgin. He masturbates with his brother in the next room. He drinks protein shakes out of the hotel room blender, and flirts with every attractive woman at the hotel.

• Lochlan is the youngest son. He’s a senior in college, so his identity isn’t set yet. He’s pulled between Piper and Saxon, at times wanting to be more masculine like Saxon, and at times wanting to be more spiritual like Piper.

Lochlan is an important part of Saxon’s plot. Saxon helps Lochlan talk to girls, to teach him to be a man, while not being fully competent at doing that himself. Lochlan sometimes looks at Saxon’s body in a way that seems homosexual, in parallel with admiration for Saxon’s masculinity. During the full moon episode, Saxon and Lochlan do drugs and have a threesome together. Lochlan has sex with the girl, while Saxon lays beside watching him. While he has sex, Lochlan gives a handjob to his brother so Saxon can participate too. After the drugs wear off, Saxon is humiliated, and refuses to talk to Lochlan about it. But in some ways he grows from the experience. He befriends Chelsea while Rick is away, and reads a spiritual book she gives him. He engages with her in a deeper way than pursuit of sex, although at times it still seems like that’s what he wants from her.

Lochlan is also an important part of Piper’s plot. When Piper reveals to her family that she wants to live in Thailand once she graduates, not just write a thesis, Lochlan is the first to support her. When Victoria asks Piper to spend the night in at the monk community in Thailand where she wants to live, Lochlan spends the night with her.

That night is the turning point for Piper’s character. Lochlan loves the monastery, and says that he wants to live there, beginning his own spiritual journey. But Piper doesn’t want to do that herself anymore. As Piper talks to her parents about the night she spent at the monastery she converts back to wanting material things. She complains about how the food wasn’t organic, how the room wasn’t air-conditioned. We see her shopping at the hotel’s jewelry store with her mom, and she wears a luxury printed dress on the boat home instead of plain white clothes.

During all this, the father of the children Tim is going through a ton of emotional stress, and tells no one, and no notices. Tim is a high-powered financial worker who made a lot of money and gave his family a good life. Early in the season, he learns that he’s under accusation for financial crimes. He and his family will lose everything. Because it’s a wellness resort, the rest of his family does not have their phones, so they don’t learn about this. Tim considers suicide. He has a series of conversations, first with Victoria, then with Saxon, then with Piper, that makes him believe that they’d be unable to live without the wealth he’d given them but has now lost. He spends more and more time thinking about suicide, not just for himself, but for his entire family.

While this is going on, Victoria, Tim’s wife and the mother of the three kids, doesn’t change much. She takes a lot of pills, and is of out of touch with reality. Tim starts doing those pills as he spirals. Narratively, Victoria serves as a way to make Tim’s character more clear. She lives an out-of-touch life as a consequence of the immense wealth Tim has given the family. Parker Posey’s performance of a pilled-out mom is memorable, but the character doesn’t grow much.

In the final episode, Tim takes poison fruit from a tree at the hotel and blends it into piña coladas to give everyone in his family, besides Lochlan. He thinks Lochlan could live without material things, but the rest of the family couldn’t. They all start to drink, and it tastes bad. Tim abruptly changes his mind, lying that there’s something wrong with the coconut milk so they stop drinking. He chooses for his family to live.

But, Tim doesn’t clean the blender. The next morning, Lochlan makes a protein shake in the blender, not Saxon. In their last conversation, Saxon had been embarrassed about the threesome, and told Lochlan he needed to become a man by himself. Lochlan drinks the remnants of the poison piña colada in his protein shake, thinking Saxon had already made a smoothie that morning. (The mechanics of this are unclear, because Lochlan was in the room when the piña coladas were made. All of them were in the room when the piña coladas were made, and it seems so unlikely that the blender wouldn’t have been cleaned, and that he would get confused like this. But anyways.) Lochlan, the one Tim didn’t want to kill, drinks the poison smoothie, vomits by the pool, and passes out. It’s briefly implied that he dies, but then he wakes up, in the arms of his father. Lochlan tells Tim that he “saw God”.

Finally, at the very end of the show, the whole family gets their phones back as they’re on the boat home. Tim knows that they’ll all find out about his financial crimes, so he tells them that “things are going to be different, and we’ll make it through as a family” as they reconnect to cellular service and learn about the financial crimes. We don’t see how any of them react to the news.

Like Rick and Chelsea, I think this ending felt a little over-the-top. The near death for Lochlan is very dramatic, but it also is irrelevant. The fact that Lochlan almost dies doesn’t impact any of the characters, or change Tim’s attitude.

But more importantly I think the ending was incomplete and rushed.

• Tim’s choice stop his family from drinking the poison piña coladas isn’t explained, or given any room to breath emotionally, so it feels like a death fakeout more than a character moment. He changes his mind about killing everyone for no apparent reason. I don’t think he should have killed his whole family, but it would have been nice to hear some words about why he now wanted to live.

• I don’t mind Piper’s regression to materialism. I think it’s thematically interesting and very funny, but it felt abrupt.

• Saxon’s ending felt ambiguous. In some ways he shows improvement, but in others he’s still very caught up in masculine shame. I don’t think we needed to know how he reacts to the loss of his family wealth, or how he reacts to the news of his friend Chelsea’s death, or how he reacted to Lochlan’s near-death, but the end of the show gave us none of those, or anything else for Saxon. His character basically ends at the full moon threesome in episode 5, when I thought that was an interesting setup for more.

• Even for Lochlan, who had less of a plot of his own, we don’t hear much about how his near-death experience impacted him. We don’t find out if he will go to the monastery; we don’t even see him tell his parents about that.

The ending felt more in service of the dramatic moments of the family and Lochlan nearly dying than it did finishing their arcs as characters. That’s sad, because this was a great set of characters who could have had a special ending.

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Frank

Frank only appears in Bangkok, but he’s a great character. He’s Rick’s friend, and he helps Rick get to Jim. When he first meets Rick, he delivers a monologue about how he came to Thailand to have sex with asian women and then realized he wanted to be one. This monologue is popular as a joke online, but I think it’s one of the best things in this season. It’s saying something really interesting things about desire, which tie into the larger goals of the show.

I moved here because, well, I had to leave the States, but I picked Thailand because I always had a thing for Asian girls, you know? And when I got here, oh I was like kid in a candy store. If you’ve got money, no attachments, nothing to do… I started partying, it got wild.

I was picking up girls every night, always different ones; petite ones, chubby ones, older ones, sometimes multiple ladies at night. I was out of control, I became insatiable, and, you know, after about a thousand nights like that, you start to lose it. I started to wonder: Where am I going with this? Why do I feel this need to fuck all these women? What is desire? The form of this cute Asian girl, why does it have such a grip on me? Because she's the opposite of me? Is she gonna complete me in some way? I realized I could fuck a million women, I'd still never be satisfied — maybe what I really want is to be one of these Asian girls.

So, one night, I took home some girl who turned out to be a ladyboy, which I’d done before, but this time, instead of fucking the ladyboy, the ladyboy fucked me, and It was kind of magical. And I got in my head, what I really wanted was to be one of these Asian girls getting fucked by me, and to feel that.

So, I put out an ad looking for a white guy my age to come over and fuck me, got a guy that looked a lot like me. Then, I put on some lingerie and perfume, made myself look like one of these girls — I thought: I look pretty hot. And then this guy came over and railed the shit out of me, then I got addicted to that — some nights, three, four guys would come over and rail the shit out of me. Some I even had to pay, and at the same time, I’d hire an Asian girl who’d just sit there and watch the whole thing. I’d look in her eyes while some guy is fucking me, and I’d think: “I am her and I'm fucking me.”

Where does it come from? Why are some of us attracted to the opposite form and some of us the same? Sex is a poetic act, it’s a metaphor; a metaphor for what? Are we are our forms? Am I a middle-aged white guy on the inside, too? Or inside, could I be an Asian girl? … I guess I was trying to fuck my way to the answer, then I realized, I gotta stop the drugs, the girls, trying to be a girl. I got into Buddhism, which is all about spirit versus form, detaching from self, getting off the never-ending carousel of lust and suffering. Being sober isn't so hard, being celibate, though, it’s… I still miss that pussy, man.

Frank is sober he meets up with Rick, but reverts to alcoholism with the stress of the plan to meet Jim. Once he starts drinking he immediately goes on a bender and does harder drugs. He calls up Asian strippers to their hotel in Bangkok. Rick doesn’t really care and leaves him there. In the ending montage of the show Frank is shown back a Buddhist temple, restarting his journey. He’s a small character, but he feels emblematic of the show’s larger thoughts on Americans in the East.

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Where the prior seasons were thematically united around class and sex, this season is broader. I don’t have any problem with that. Each character arc has interesting things to say about class and sex and purpose. The season portrays Western interaction with Thailand and Eastern spiritual wellness in an interesting way. It’s not entirely cynical; Chelsea’s spiritualism is faithful and endearing. But most of the other characters engage with Buddhism and yoga and the East in a way that feels incomplete, and that’s criticized in interesting ways. I will tune in for the next season of White Lotus because I expect it to continue to say interesting things.

What I worry is that White Lotus will have to keep upping the stakes. Each season of White Lotus has a death, which is revealed at the beginning and then hangs over the plot until the finale. But the deaths in the first two seasons felt thematically central, whereas in this season the deaths felt played for drama. And even deaths that don’t happen are milked for drama. The family’s near-death is milked for tension, and Belinda worries about death, thinking she might get killed by Greg if she doesn’t take his offer. Predicting “who will die in White Lotus” was a big conversation on social media, and I just don’t think that’s the best way for a satire with this great of characters to be viewed. But it leaned into that.

This season is still great. It’s one of the best shows on television. What White Lotus does better than any other show is create characters who feel contemporary and relevant. I hope it focuses on that, but even if it doesn’t, it’s still really inspiring as art. White Lotus has earned its large audience, but I think the audience is pushing it into being worse at what it does well.