White lotus
White lotus It has returned for its third season and third location, this time in Thailand’s Verdant jungles. Backse again in shape, with an attractive premiere that sets the stage for the things to come, as tensions among all the leading characters increase, and mysterious are numerous. Spoilers forward.
The same souls, new forms
In both past seasons of White lotus, We find ourselves in a luxury hotel filled with rich, privileged and mostly unhappy guests and members of the charming staff in Beck and their call. There are archetypes, though each season they take slightly different forms.
There is the family. In season 1, this was a married couple and their two children plus their daughter’s friend. In season 2, a grandpa, a father and a boy all traveled to the white lotus of Sicily together. In season 3 we meet with Ratliffs, a southern family led by Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), a rich financier haunted by his past and withdrew from a Wall Street Journal reporter.
Timothy and Victoria
Timothy is married to Victoria (Parker Posey), a country club woman with a weakness for Jet-Lag and (apparently) Benzos. They have three children. The oldest is Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), a fragile young man whose only interests are money, power and following girls. The middle child is Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) whose religious studies of which and the desire to look for a Buddhist monk in a nearby temple precipitated family vacations. The youngest, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), is still in high school. I think he is gay, though the sisters’ dynamics here is. . . Strange, to say at least. There is a scene where Saxon goes to the bathroom to see pornography, and Lochlan’s eyes follow his naked body. These are moments as Saxon talks about how hot the pepper is. I’m nervous.
Saxon, Piper and Lachlan
Then it’s the couple. In season 1, it was a newlyweds, hopelessly inconsistent. Here, is Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins) and his girlfriend very, much younger, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). Goggins is probably crab and less charming that I have ever seen it in a role. Rick has a bone to choose with the world, though it is unclear why. He is clearly determined to meet the man of Sritala Holinger (Lek Patravadi) one of the owners of the white lotus, but we will have to find out why in a later episode. Chelsea deals with his crab quite well, though it is very clear that she enjoys traveling more than his company. At one point, she meets a woman in a bar that tells them what the locals have a term for all the white, white men in the resort: lbh, or “losers at home”.
Brandy
At this point, we must break an intervention before presenting other members of the cast. Because it is during this scene that we meet our first surprise guest. The young woman’s boyfriend is one of these lbh and when she tells Chelsea who she is, the camera turns into a familiar face: Greg (John Gries). I found this very shocking, as I was under the impression only Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) was returning from previous seasons. This is important for two reasons:
- First, Greg is now the only character who has appeared in all three seasons of White lotus. Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) was in the first and second, and Belinda in the first and third, but Greg is like a bad penny. He just keeps back.
- And what a bad penny is that! We learned in season 2 that he was very in the league with Quuentin (Tom Hollander) in trying to kill Tanya and get all her money. Tynna prevented Quentin’s plans and killed her husband, but she did not live long enough to stop Greg who, I assume, inherited all her money after her premature and unworthy dies. Which part will play this season remains to be seen.
Finally, we meet friends, a 40-way trio of women with holidays that make their best level to illustrate what the term “third wheel” means. Jaclyn Lemon (Michelle Monaghan) is a famous TV star who has paid for her friends Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Laurie (Carrie Coon) to join her in this extravagant holiday. Jaclyn and Kate trade endless compliments in a strange game of a lift that looks immediately fully superficial and malicious. Laurie is left out of the back and forth, only remembered as a mirror. At one point she leaves the table, blaming Jet-Lag and takes her summer bottle to her room, where she looks at two other fawn over each other. It bursts into tears. There is a great history here.
Laurie, Kate and Jaclyn
Of course, tensions begin to bubble elsewhere as well. When Rick lights a cigarette in the boat, the ratcliffes are significantly upset. Saxon faces Rick but he does not back down. All this scene plays silent, under the living song Thai playing over everything. Music is already as unbelievable as it was the two seasons. When Timothy and Rick move to the hotel, after the unpleasant call of Timothy with the WSJ reporter, they trade barbs. Some people just hate each other by getting.
We meet some of the staff as well. MOOK (Lalisa Manbal) is one of the health mentors for white lotus visitors. This property seems much more focused on health, which I suspect has to do with the role of Eastern medicine in Western tourism. That is why Belinda is here, to take some courses and learn some new things to bring them back to Maui. The health mentor for Ratcliffes informs them that there is no WiFi, and that they are encouraged to deposit all their mobile phones and laptops in a bag that will return at the end of the week, a suggestion met with disbelief and contempt.
Gunshots in paradise
Belinda
Everything about this episode is the stage setting. We meet our new (and return) characters of the characters and take a little look at their lives and relationships. Creator, writer and director Mike White gives us oodles with juicy dialogue, sharp to chew, making it easier for us to get a feeling of who we are dealing with and all small, delicate (and not so thin) the ways these people mark. But there is not much to continue in history. We know based on the past two seasons that things will escalate, and we can imagine in some of the ways that can happen, but it is very quickly to link our predictions for anything strong.
Every season is focused on a topic. The theme of season 1 was mostly wealth, season 2 was sex and season 3 is spiritual and death. Of course wealth, sex and death are topics we explore in every season, but each also attracts a little more in one direction.
Every season also follows a formula, starting with a death of one kind, then restoring a week to show us how everything unfolds. In season 1, it was just a casket at an airport. Season 2 had numerous bodies that washed on the beach. Season 3 opens with the most dramatic moment yet. A young man sits with a meditation guide near a smooth pond surrounded by green foliage. As she guides her in calm, he listens to something in the distance. A sound that appears. He is unresolved, but the guide does not seem to notice.
dipping
Then he listens again, closer now, and is clearly gunshots. He interrupts the guide, who tells him to stay calm. The gunshots grow out loud, they see people running. Then the glass breaks down. The bullets are flying close enough to hit. The guide goes and the young man crawls and covers, before slipping into the pond and goes to a Buddha statue. Here he prays and then asks the Buddha to keep his mother safe and that. Then a body swims next to the water.
Talk about the rise of ante! Suffice it to say, I was fixed from the moment this episode began and I remained engraved throughout the episode. Of course, after this moment of opening does not really happen much, and yet writing and production are so great, I cannot help but depend on every word. Eachdo scene, any interaction between the characters, is being shaken with tension. You know that the writing is at the point when all that is spoken is just the grassy surface in inexpressible depth. This is a rich land for telling stories.
Also also shot beautifully. Cinematography is spectacular. Season 2 made me want to go to Italy quite badly, but Season 3 Thailand is a great shocking. From opening credits (which I will have to look closely) to the founding shooting of this tropical paradise and its leafy tendons, filled with lizard and monkeys, is simply extremely vibrant. The way the camera lasts like in each face, in the last shoot of ratcliffes sitting in the bed as it magnifies and exit, out of the night, the window like a painting of these two strangers, strangers on strange land but Maybe just as strangers with each other.
There is a lot to think about and a lot to wait, as we wait for Episode 2 next Sunday. What did you think? Notify me further TwitterInstagram, Bluesky or Facebook. Also be sure to sign up on my YouTube channel and follow me here on this blog. Enroll in my newspaper for more comments and comments on entertainment and culture.
Check out my weekend broadcast guide for shows and more brilliant movies to see here.