The White Lotus Stares Into the Abyss in Season Three

It’s rather fitting, as we enter another terrible epoch (or continue one), that the third season of The White Lotus (February 16, HBO) should be so filled with dread and spiritual ache. The first two seasons of Mike White’s biting, often brilliant anthology series—all taking place at different properties of an ultra-luxury resort chain—certainly weren’t free of those themes, but they perhaps had other mortal concerns higher on their minds.

Season one, in Hawaii, was a class survey that pitted the blithe guests against the locals attending to their whims and subject to their predations. Season two, in Sicily, delved into the dark adventure and risk of sex and desire. Now, White has traveled to a gorgeous Thai island with a host of (mostly) new characters, friends and family members and lovers either brimming vessels of anxious energy or deadened voids in search of meaning.

The Thai White Lotus puts a heavy emphasis on wellness, encouraging its guests to seek physical purification and an easing of any psychic pain they’ve brought with them. But most of season three’s characters aren’t really capable of doing that—at least not in the six episodes I’ve seen. The season is, thus far, a slow burn, deliberately arranging its pieces into some kind of violent endgame. A gun passes hands, shifty men move through the sea of vacationers like sharks, word of a faraway crisis laps at the shore. White is not setting up any sort of good vs. evil conflict, I don’t think, but rather examining various strata of already-lost people. This round of episodes is gloomier than seasons one and two, though still sharp and intriguing where it counts.

As is White Lotus tradition, White arrays various pods of people, some of whom will commingle, others who remain atomized from the rest. Jason Isaacs and Parker Posey play Timothy and Victoria, wealthy (and no doubt Republican) North Carolinians on vacation with their mostly grown children: fratty finance bro Saxton (Patrick Schwarzenegger), Buddhism-curious college student Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), and virginal high school senior Lochlan (Sam Nivola). The parents are vulgar Americans of the more sophisticated variety, while the kids are all coddled by their upbringing in one way or another. There is decency in them, more overtly in Lochlan and Piper, but they all share the same basic ailment, somehow allergic to a world they nonetheless control.

An unhappy couple, older American Rick (Walton Goggins) and younger Brit Chelsea (Aime Lee Wood), have arrived at the resort seemingly in the midst of one endless argument, he testy and withdrawn, she pleading with him to open up, to let her in, to enjoy the beauty and possibility surrounding them. But Rick stays brooding, only unburdening himself, in existentially mournful fashion, with the resort’s resident spiritual advisor (Shalini Peiris). This plotline grows a bit tedious—it’s hard to understand why Aimee sticks around—until White finally peels back a layer and shows us more of what’s animating this lonely couple.

Entering with much more gusto is a trio of three childhood friends, now in slightly discontented middle-age. Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) is a famous-enough TV actress who’s financed the travel of her two oldest gal pals, Austin society lady Kate (Leslie Bibb) and embittered New Yorker Laurie (Carrie Coon). A happy reunion soon gives way to private conversations in which two of the friends gossip about the third, a familiar configuration to anyone who’s found themselves in a fractured, if still loving, friend group. Here White is his dishiest and most fun, writing shiveringly credible dialogue delivered with natural flair by the actors. There is some drama, too, a quieter kind about being stuck in old social patterns, of life’s amassing of worries and disappointments. I wish only that this narrative had a stronger tether to the rest.

There is also the hotel staff to be considered. A potential romance between security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) and lifestyle butler Mook (Lalisa Manobal) seems threatened by Gaitok’s belief that he is not tough or manly enough for Mook, who has caught the eyes of the burly men who protect the hotel’s owner, grand dame Sritala (Lek Patravadi). Given that this is White Lotus, we can probably expect doom looms on the horizon of this story, though I’m hoping White will find a less expected conclusion. I hope the same for Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the masseuse whom we last saw jilted by the dearly departed Tanya in season one. Belinda has traveled to the resort for a corporate exchange program, there to learn some new tips and techniques from her Thai counterparts. Belinda’s plotline grows more complicated than that, but I won’t spoil how.

Thus, White has assembled all the necessary moving parts. But just as this season’s theme song is more muted than the last, this round of stories feels a bit slacker than what’s come before. It’s all interesting, but the sense of tight control and inventiveness that made the previous two seasons such wonders is not quite there. White seems more tired, relying on perhaps a few too many clichés as he struggles to come up with new things for curdled rich people to do.

At least that’s true of the first few episodes. Gradually, the furnace is lit and the season grows more compelling. The actors settle into their performances, the narrative grows more complex. White pushes the envelope toward the seriously taboo in a way he’s never done before. He also makes effective use of ominous dreams and portents, letting the spiritual murmur in the air of this lavish jungle compound eerily inform the story.

The season is about a sickness of the soul—or, perhaps, the sickness of not having a soul at all. One character describes themself as empty, as nothing. Another bluntly, cruelly, but accurately identifies that lack in a would-be suitor. Perhaps the rot of the world that was creeping up on the characters in seasons one and two has finally, truly arrived. Tanya’s death does not seem to have delivered humankind out of its dire condition.

After Lochlan somewhat insensitively shows Victoria videos of the 2004 tsunami that decimated so much of coastal Thailand, she has nightmares about an approaching wave, which her daughter thinks is a warning. In the aftermath of two strange and scary incidents, Chelsea becomes convinced that something bad is slouching its way toward her. White shakes his head at all this mounting apprehension with a sigh, regarding these sorry people who don’t know that the ruin is already here. The best they can hope for, maybe, is the peace of an afterlife—or, if you believe the Buddhists, the chance to do it all better next time.