The White Lotus Season 3 Review – From Thailand to Tired

Jai Sibal

London, UK

Photo by nikldn on Unsplash

     HBO’s blockbuster satire, The White Lotus, is more popular now than ever. Fresh off the ending of its latest season, set in Thailand, the weekly rollout of episodes has sparked record-high viewership numbers – with 6.2 million tuning in to the season 3 finale – whilst contributing a number of instantly viral moments in pop culture, not least with Parker Posey’s brilliant Southern accent. Such popularity and cultural weight wouldn’t exist without the groundbreaking quality of the show’s first two instalments. Mike White’s brilliant writing of a group of rich, entitled hotel guests causing trouble in vacation paradises around the world created a farcical anthology with wit and intellect in equal parts, all the while skyrocketing the careers of actors like Jennifer Coolidge to international fame. Awards season tells a similar story; the first two seasons won five Emmys each! It is needless to say that, building upon a franchise lauded by critics and audiences as one of the best TV shows in recent history, season 3 had big shoes to fill. Before it aired, White called the show’s latest instalment “super-sized”, and I’d agree – it was a big swing, and a big miss.

                  Being a product of writer and director Mike White, the eight episodes (the most of any season thus far) unravel a thick web of sub-plots, and are steeped in references to relevant modern culture – think Kate’s confession to being a Republican, for instance – alongside a visceral and overbearing tension. There is, as ever, merit in the social commentary that follows. White’s depiction of three blonde women in their 40s on a group holiday was refreshingly banal. For instance, beginning as interchangeable friends, dressing and speaking identically, friction within the group soon becomes apparent as they speak about one another behind closed doors.  Leslie Bibb, Carrie Coon, and Michelle Monaghan all give excellent performances, blending expert control and nuance with humour, and the development of their friendships from bulletproof to destroyed over the course of the season is one of its greatest assets. On top of that, White gives us Rick and Chelsea, an unlikely couple of a jaded man searching for the murderer of his father and a young, astrology-obsessed girl from Manchester, played by Walter Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood respectively. Here, too, are performances worth writing home about. Goggins is at times brooding and self-destructive where Wood is airy, charming, and effervescent, and the two bounce off one another with striking chemistry; the lightness Wood brings to a scene is refreshing, with one-liners like “not to be rude, but could I have a little more wine please” and “you’re so pretty”. The organic growth of their relationship, the purity of their love, defined even on a spiritual plane, and the poetic tragedy of their ending with one another as yin and yang forever (all cleverly foreshadowed by White’s script by Chelsea’s allusion to bad things happening “in threes”) culminate in a beautifully convincing narrative of aging love. 

The star of the season, however, is, without doubt, Parker Posey’s Victoria Ratliff, the matriarch of a rich family hailing from North Carolina who laments about her inability to find her Lorazepam, a drug which has, like Posey’s acting career, now been brought to the world stage. Her Southern drawl is the comic relief the show so desperately needs. Dealing at times with homicide, death, and the consequences of unbeknownst-to-her incest in her nuclear family, Posey’s infallible comic timing as a rich Southern lady breathes life into what otherwise would be a dense and tedious sequence of ruminations on purpose and mortality. The show’s subject matter this season is spirituality, and whilst self-indulgent montages of Buddhist chanting and the afterlife run rampant in the season’s second half, it is Parker Posey’s Victoria who brings humanity to the show. I am sure that such a feat will earn her an Emmy. All considered, White’s script gives room for highly competent performances across the board – but with actors like these, it is difficult to assert that any script wouldn’t!

Nonetheless, the season falters in ways that its predecessors didn’t. Perhaps overambitious in its goal, the finale left several plot lines entirely ignored and unanswered, seemingly without purpose – indeed, this served not to increase intrigue but only to present the writing as sloppy and unfinished. The underbaked plot line of the Russians escaping from criminal responsibility, the brief interaction of Kate and Victoria perhaps knowing each other early in the season being made nothing of, and, most absurdly, the hotel guests looking virtually unfazed after witnessing a live shooting on the boat leaving the hotel, all demonstrate White’s lack of precision this time around. Not only this, but audiences also couldn’t help but notice the slow pace of the season, which, more than ever, focuses far more on dialogue than action. This often crosses the line of clever to mundane. There were sequences of clichéd writing, shown aptly by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Saxon telling his father, played by Jason Isaacs, that he would “be nothing” without his career as a finance mogul, and totally predictable plot twists borrowed straight from Star Wars (“he is your father!”) which directly contradict the innovation and spontaneity seasons one and two were notorious for. Storylines which had immense potential, be it Rick’s search for his father’s murderer or Piper’s dream of moving to a Buddhist monastery, end in mundane and dull conclusions. Could it be that the show has lost its bite? 

Great acting on the whole did not suffice to mask these flaws, which find themselves, fundamentally, in the script! For example, Carrie Coon’s cathartic monologue about “having a seat at the table” in the finale could have been explosive, but it instead felt unearned. This is no fault of hers as an actor: it was simply the inevitable result of the lack of sufficient buildup in the show’s previous seven episodes to warrant an emotional release on this scale. What could have been a universal tribute to adulthood became a trivial, laughably melodramatic footnote, a marked symptom of a show which felt at times like a constant cycle of the same conversations, excuses to fill more time in a series of episodes consistently bulging at the hour mark. When things do eventually happen, too, they are poorly considered. Most heinously, White’s use of incest as a mode of transgression is one that is provocative, indeed, but his choice to include it in the show has no meaning or use beyond being a spectacle. What prudent conversation could the depiction of incest really catalyse? To be frank, what was the point? The use of incest in the season was no more than a gimmick, a marketing ploy to attract attention beneath which, really, is the suggestion that perhaps, Mike White is running out of ideas after all. 

                  The White Lotus gives us an entertaining, if slow, third season, laden once again with great performances and interesting premises. These are no replacement for a good script, which was missing. One can only hope that season 4, with a slew of fresh faces in a new resort destination, will be a return to form.