“The White Lotus” Overstays Its Welcome

Given the number of murders that have taken place at White Lotus resorts since the HBO series began, in 2021, one wonders why visitors continue to flock to them. It’s clear that at least some of the guests at their Thailand property—the setting of the third season, which premièred on February 16th—haven’t done their research: Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), a compulsively plugged-in finance guy, only learns of the hotel’s phone-free “digital detox” policy when he and his family arrive. But being at “the antipodal, opposite end of the Earth,” initially a torment to him, is exactly the appeal for other travellers. Some of them decide to stay forever. Faced with one of these long-term residents, Timothy recalls an ominous adage: “Anyone who moves to Thailand is either looking for something or hiding from something.”

This season of “The White Lotus” continues the tradition set by the previous two, opening with a dead body at a luxury destination, then flashing back a week, with the implicit promise of a murder mystery in reverse: who dies, and how? It also introduces fresh questions about what each guest is hiding or seeking. Not all of their motives are persuasive. Rick (Walton Goggins), a middle-aged man who spreads misery wherever he goes, at first simply clams up when pressed by his much younger girlfriend, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), about why they’ve come to the island; his decision is eventually explained via a tragic backstory so unconvincing that I thought he was messing with the hotel employee he disclosed it to. The most straightforward rationale is that of the Ratliff clan, a Southern family of five with only one functioning moral compass among them. The middle child, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), hopes to interview a renowned Buddhist monk for her college thesis, which becomes the occasion for their stay at the wellness-oriented White Lotus Thailand— though she herself derides the place as “a Disneyland for rich bohemians from Malibu in their Lululemon yoga pants.” Her comment is a dig at another group of guests: a trio of fortysomethings on a girls’ trip who seem into the resort’s carefully curated atmosphere of mindfulness until, suddenly, they’re not.

At this point in the show’s award-laden run, it almost goes without saying that its creator, Mike White, glamorizes the lodgings as avidly as his most grounded characters scorn them. One guest is led through a personalized meditation session by a hotel staffer in a glass-walled hut, behind which lies a sun-kissed tropical grove that evokes both the wildness of nature and how it can be tamed for the enjoyment of the über-rich. You can practically smell the bespoke scent that might have been spritzed into the lobbies of each of the international chain’s locations, a bouquet that’s soft, sophisticated, and unmistakably synthetic.

There’s something similar at work in the third season, a promiscuous application of the formula that yields diminishing returns. It isn’t just the characters who seem a bit lost in Thailand; White does, too. The showrunner has spoken of his interest in exploring spirituality tourism, a bout of which kicked off his previous HBO series, “Enlightened.” But the first six episodes of the season’s eight—the portion allotted for review—scarcely touch on Eastern religion, framing Piper’s interest therein predominantly as a threat to her mother, Victoria (Parker Posey), and her way of life. (The Ratliff matriarch, whose favorite pastimes are popping lorazepam and obsessively assessing the “decency” of those around her, tells her daughter that she can’t be a Buddhist: “Honey, you’re not from China.”) The only other theological commentary we get is from Victoria’s obnoxious firstborn, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), who declares that Buddhism is for cowards. “They’re afraid,” he says, summing up his view of their credo as “Don’t get attached, don’t have desires, don’t even try.”

Season 3 isn’t without its spiky observations, especially of the dynamics of Western jet-setters in Southeast Asia. Victoria exemplifies the kind of international traveller who’s utterly oblivious to her offensiveness, at one point confusing Thailand for Taiwan, and an early scene mocks so-called L.B.H.s—Losers Back Home—the unlovely, well-off white men who descend on the region to attract the kind of women who wouldn’t look at them twice in their native countries. Accordingly, the season is rife with transactional relationships. Chelsea, a gold-digger with a heart of gold, seems capable of charming everyone except her own foul-tempered partner. Her new friend Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) is a former model who’s convinced herself that she’s caught a good-enough prize in Greg (Jon Gries), the older man who married—and then murdered—the hapless heiress Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) in Season 2. (Why he feels comfortable setting foot inside a White Lotus property after that incident is another mystery; his paper-thin disguise is that he now goes by Gary.) When Chelsea complains that Rick’s chronic wretchedness has sucked the air out of their relationship, Chloe replies, with a smile, that she believes Gary could actually kill her if she stepped out of line.

The season as a whole feels trapped between tones: not quite dark enough to confront what happens in a country where foreigners can buy nearly anything they want for the right price, nor frothy enough to simply showcase the baroque weirdness of the wealthy. Rick has dragged Chelsea to Thailand for a preposterous act of personal vengeance, and seems to be in a completely different show than the three blond girlfriends, who’ve known each other since childhood but spend most of their time drinking in twos while gossiping cruelly about the absent third. All three—one a successful actress in L.A. (Michelle Monaghan), one a stressed-out lawyer in New York (Carrie Coon), one an increasingly conservative socialite in Austin (Leslie Bibb)—are written with a surprising shallowness, especially considering White’s other female creations. (It’s also disappointing that White, whose own friendships with Hollywood actresses are well known, offers so little insight into the effort that it takes to maintain relationships across differentials of fame and fortune.) He brings back Natasha Rothwell’s Belinda, a put-upon masseuse from Season 1 who was promised the opportunity of a lifetime by Tanya after a few rejuvenating sessions and discarded just as quickly. He also casts the Thai K-pop star Lisa as an aspirational hotel employee in a sweet, low-simmer romance with a fellow staff member (Tayme Thapthimthong). But they mostly serve as reminders that White is much better at writing nasty characters than nice ones.

By default, then, the Ratliffs emerge as the figures to follow. Victoria boasts early on that they are “a normal family,” and the most interesting thing about them is the repression necessary to appear so unremarkable. Though she’s surrounded by loved ones, Victoria seems just as vulnerable as the lonely Tanya was; her arrogance and knee-jerk contempt have made her blind to the actual dangers to her household and vicious to anyone outside it. (Posey makes her character painfully recognizable but no more sympathetic for it; predictably, she’s also an excellent vehicle for White’s withering one-liners.) While Victoria catastrophizes about her daughter’s search for an alternative value system, Saxon—an all too believable alt-right nightmare with an unhealthy interest in both of his siblings’ sex lives—tutors his younger brother, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), in a puerile, hookup-centric, empathy-free masculinity. When the pair are alone in their shared room, Saxon strips down and speculates about their sister. “She’s pretty hot,” he muses, “but I don’t think she’s ever been laid before.”

This repression is primed to be punctured as soon as they land, and it’s not Saxon or Victoria but the Ratliff paterfamilias who cracks first. On the verge of being exposed for his role in some substantial financial crimes, Timothy hands over all of his devices and begins to down his wife’s pills. No one is in more urgent need of the Buddha’s teachings—“Don’t get attached, don’t have desires, don’t even try”—than a man whose wants have doomed his family. But it doesn’t occur to him that the solution to his distress may be staring him in the face. What we get instead is rather Christian: a Boschian vision of nudity and woe. ♦