‘The White Lotus’ Season 3 Premiere Recap: A Whole Lot of Monkey Business

This post contains spoilers for “Same Spirits, New Forms,” the third-season premiere of The White Lotus, which is now streaming on Max. 

Three seasons in, we know The White Lotus has certain parts of its formula that it likes to repeat. Like the title of the season premiere says: “Same Spirits, New Forms.” So perhaps the best way to approach this first week of our new Thailand adventure is to look at how each of those parts is deployed here before things get moving in the coming installments. 

THE LOCATION

Welcome to beautiful Thailand, where there are monkeys. So many monkeys. Monkeys here, monkeys there, monkeys everywhere. And lizards, and wild animals that have free run of the resort. The weather in some ways feels as untamed as the local fauna; Walton Goggins, as new guest Rick Hatchett, enters every scene as if he’s just emerged from a bath filled entirely with sweat. 

The key difference from the White Lotus establishments in Hawaii and Sicily, though, is that this one has developed a reputation for its wellness program, focusing more on various body and mind treatments. So our first scene (which we’ll get back to in a moment) involves a meditation session were Lotus staffer Amrita (Shalini Peiris) is helping a new guest named Zion (Nicholas Duvernay) work through his anxiety about college finals and other issues. And Zion’s mother, our old Season One friend Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), has come from Hawaii specifically so she can study all these treatments and see what she can take with her back to the Maui resort. 

THE DEAD BODY

There always has to be at least one, doesn’t there? In this case, it seems like there could be many, though one is all we, and poor Zion, get a glimpse of in the now-traditional flash-forward to what will happen at the end of a not-so-fabulous week at the hotel. As usual, this year’s corpse is first seen floating in the resort’s waters, the better to conceal its identity. The key difference is that it appears in the midst of an active shooter situation that has guests and staffers scrambling to hide. (Amrita briefly tries to protect the younger Zion, but the moment a bullet shatters the window of her meditation studio, it’s every woman for herself.) 

Who is shooting who, and why? That will obviously have to wait for the end of the season. I will make one semi-bold guess, though, and that is that the victim will not be Belinda. Why not? 1) Zion spends the scene in a panic, heading toward the gunfire because he assumes his mother is in danger, so it seems too obvious if he’s right; 2) Belinda was so closely linked in the past to Tanya, who was the celebrity corpse of Season Two. Between that, and the reintroduction late in this episode of Tanya’s greedy and bitter husband Greg (Jonathan Gries), who arranged the failed hit on Tanya in order to get around their prenup agreement, it feels like Belinda dying would be too repetitive; and 3) While White Lotus gets dark at times, opening a season with a college-age young man discovering the floating corpse of his mother feels far bleaker than anything Mike White seems interested in doing with this show. 

THE GUESTS

As always, we have three groups, representing various ages and relationship types: 

Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie
Lifelong besties going back to public school, the three now live separate, very different lives that makes this trip as much a reunion as it is a break from their norms. Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) is a TV star who’s paying for most of the trip. Kate (Leslie Bibb) is married to a wealthy Texas businessman. Laurie (Carrie Coon) is a corporate lawyer. 

There is obvious love and affection among the three, just as there is some obvious, very old tension, particularly from Laurie’s corner of the friendship triangle. Just listen to the way that, after Jaclyn tells the resort’s co-owner Sritala (Lek Patravadi) that people mistook her and Laurie for one another when they were little, Laurie tries and fails to sound playful when she interjects, “But then Jaclyn got famous!” Or look at the way she tries to keep her expression neutral when Jaclyn clumsily attempts to praise her for living such a hard life and being tough; or, near the episode’s end, how she can’t stop herself from watching Jaclyn and Kate chatting without her — and assuming whatever they’re saying is about her. She seems to have had a literal lifetime of feeling like a third wheel to the other two, and it is the part of their relationship she least enjoys. 

It’s not a complete overlap with Coon’s other current HBO role, as Bertha on The Gilded Age, but it definitely feels as if White watched her spend a couple of seasons playing a woman who resents being looked down upon by women society holds in higher esteem and said, “Yeah, I can work with that.”  

Rick and Chelsea 
We don’t know much yet about what Rick does to pay for such an expensive trip, or why he wants to be at this particular resort, or, well, anything. He does not like to talk about himself, or any other subject. This either makes him a poor match for his much younger girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), or the perfect one. She’s exasperated that he won’t open up to her, and that he seems so resistant to having any fun. But his terse, walled-off demeanor also gives her license to talk to her heart’s content, which on some level is a dream for such an extrovert.  

Because so many of Goggins’ most famous roles (from Justified to The Righteous Gemstones to Fallout) involve him playing flamboyant, hyper-verbal men, it seems counterintuitive to have him playing a laconic misanthrope. But he’s such an arresting screen presence that he can get away with doing and saying very little, and still seem like the most fascinating guy in a room. Wood, so good on Sex Education, makes a perfectly upbeat foil to him, while also providing the excuse — through Chelsea’s new best friend, Quebecois model Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) — for us to be reintroduced to the extremely shady Greg, who has joined the growing population of mysteriously wealthy bald white men whom the Thai locals call LBHs, for “losers back home.”  

The Ratliffs
Dad Tim (Jason Isaacs) is in finance, but more importantly as far as he’s concerned, he went to Duke. So did eldest son Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger). Tim’s wife Victoria (Parker Posey) went to UNC, as did daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), who has dragged the entire family to Thailand so she can visit a local monastery as part of her senior thesis project. And youngest son Lochlan (Sam Nivola) is caught in the middle of various family issues, not least of which is deciding which of the two legacy schools he will attend after high school. The Ratliff’s are more or less this year’s equivalent of the Mossbacher family from Season One: spoiled, blinkered, and dysfunctional, but with one exception (Sydney Sweeney’s Olivia in Season One, Saxon here), not openly malevolent towards the staff, other guests, or members of their own family. 

They are a clan defined by their insularity, vibes that at times border on incestuous. Victoria finds the idea of speaking with other guests distasteful, and wishes that Piper had chosen to write about “her own religion” so they could have gone on a less exotic, distant vacation. When their assigned wellness counselor Pam (Morgana O’Reilly) sees Saxon engaging in overly physical horseplay with his mother and sister, he jokes, “We’re a normal family,” but there are several other moments where each Ratliff brother seems a bit too curious about the sex lives of one or more of his siblings. Saxon objects to the idea of Piper and Lochlan sharing a room because they both have “full-grown… genitals,” and later describes Piper to Lochlan as “pretty hot” and speculates that she’s still a virgin. Lochlan, meanwhile, can’t stop himself from staring at his beautiful naked brother while Saxon is preparing to watch porn. (Even Saxon, it seems, has limits, as he closes the bathroom door once he realizes Lochlan is looking at him.) 

Saxon is the breakout character of this group in the early going. Much like Jake Lacy in Season One, Patrick Schwarzenegger doesn’t so much lean into all the worst aspects of being a handsome, entitled, impossibly rich nepo baby(*) as he relaxes into it. Parker Posey is having an easier time with the North Carolina accent than Jason Isaacs is(**), though at the moment the biggest concern regarding Tim isn’t how he sounds, but the fact that he’s half a world away while the Wall Street Journal is preparing to publish an investigation into a shady deal he did with an ex-partner involving a fund they set up in Brunei — which is a lot closer to where Tim finds himself at the moment than the Duke campus.  

(*) To be fair, he does have some experience, at least in terms of being born into a rich and well-known family, as the son of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver.

(**) I played audio of Isaacs’ dialogue to two friends who are not North Carolina natives, but have lived in the state for many years, and asked if he sounded like a native to them. One gave him good marks, but the other replied, “If North Carolina was in Perth.” 

THE STAFF

Belinda, we already know well. And she is something of a cross between an employee and a guest, since she gets to stay in a spacious villa at this resort for several months, enjoy spa treatments, eat in the dining room, etc. But she also still feels like enough of an employee that she’s almost starstruck to spot a Black couple who are wealthy enough to be guests of the establishment. As for others of note: 

• Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) is a security guard who works the hotel gate. He has long nursed a crush on Mook (Lalisa Manobal), a wellness counselor who seems not to mind his obvious affections, even if it’s unclear whether she thinks of him as anything but an old friend.
• The aforementioned Sritala is a former actress who became obsessed with wellness after developing an autoimmune disease. Her wealthy husband Jim is not present, but is seen in photographs in the form of character actor Scott Glenn (like Coon, an alum of one of the greatest HBO shows of all time, The Leftovers) — and these photographs, like Sritala herself, seem to be of more than a little interest to Rick.
• Sritala is supported by Fabian (Christian Friedel), the supercilious resort manager who has done his best to go native, in spite of his German accent and generally foreign manner.
• Besides everyone else already mentioned, the most crucial wellness counselors seem to be Valentin (Arnas Fedaravičius), the extremely jacked, extremely shirtless Russian immigrant whom Sritala earmarked for the famous Jaclyn; and Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul), who has been assigned to work with Belinda on an exchange of ideas between the resorts.

The first season ended mostly with heartbreak, or worse, for the Maui staffers, while the lower-class Sicilian characters did surprisingly well. Season One’s corpse worked at the hotel, while Season Two’s was Tanya. Which side will come out of this adventure on better footing? The odds of the series, as in the real world, are stacked heavily in favor of the ones with all the money. But we’ve got seven more hours to see how it all plays out, now that most of the key figures are established. 

From Rolling Stone US.