The White Lotus Season-Premiere Recap: No Man Is an Island

For more on The White Lotus, sign up for The White Lotus Club, our subscriber-exclusive newsletter obsessing, dissecting, and debating everything about season three.

Sawatdee kha and welcome to paradise, provided your idea of paradise is a sound bath to drown out the din of the secrets you’re keeping.

For the third installment of The White Lotus, writer/director Mike White faintly tweaks his premise: instead of a boatload of wealthy (mostly) Americans disembarking on a foreign shoreline, we get a boatload of Americans plus Belinda. Day ones will brim with aloha to see Natasha Rothwell returning to the role that nabbed her an Emmy nom, though, of course, it means the downtrodden spa manager of the White Lotus Maui is imperiled again.

By now, we know what to expect from a stay at the White Lotus: class anxiety, a body count, and about a dozen recurring motifs to dissect. At some point, we’ll need to discuss how composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer followed up the season two theme that became a club banger with a song influenced by TikToks of people harmonizing with their cats. We’ll go long on how tongue-tied Fabian (an understated Christian Friedel from The Zone of Interest) stacks up against previous hotel managers, spiky Armand (R.I.P.) and spiky Valentina (still kicking).

For now, let us pause to acknowledge that the White Lotus Thailand’s hand-painted wood panels are the luxury chain’s most macabre wall treatments to date. There’s the ominous sense that the monkeys lurking around the resort might just be the same ones wielding swords in the frescoes. Living nightmares coming from inside the walls. The ferocity of the natural world was a season one trope that got dialed down when lush Hawai’i was traded for a sunny Sicilian villa in season two. That was a comparatively urban version of island life. But on Koh Samui, the menace has been ratcheted up to a squillion. The avian chorus of the jungle canopy. The lethal chop of the seas. The ceaseless chattering of monkeys. There’s no such thing as peace and quiet, not even in paradise.

Greeting us like an old acquaintance we’d rather not run into on vacation (him again) is this season’s frame story. At a wellness retreat, everyone has some reason for checking in that goes beyond the desire to down rum cha-yens by the infinity pool. Zion’s here, for instance, because his enlightened mother thought the stressed-out senior needed space to decompress. He’s actually in a meditation session when he hears the pops of a gun, muffled at first but coming closer. His spirit guide stays low and scrambles to safety, but Zion is young and brash and conspicuously hunky. And his mom is in the lobby where the shots are coming from! (If you have any sense of how few Black people live in Hawai’i and knew from the trailers that Belinda was returning, this would be the moment you go, “OH SHIT, THIS IS BELINDA’s HUNKY GROWN UP SON.”) Zion makes his way toward her, hesitating at a Buddha shrine to pray to Jesus for her safety.

Is Belinda dead? Could she be the gunman? On the one hand, she’s a career healer who comes to Thailand on a three-month work exchange to get even better at healing. On the other hand, to see the uber-rich this close-up day after day, year after year? Everyone has a breaking point.

Or perhaps those are defensive shots we hear? Belinda staring down the barrel of a gun she’s pointing at a monkey who has finally lost it. He, too, has seen the uber-rich this close-up. Does the wallpaper capture the violent essence of monkeys, or has living alongside that wallpaper made monkeys more violent? It’s season three, baby. There are no rules!

Zion’s still pondering his next move when a body floats by him in the hotel moat. By now, we know better than to press pause and scour the screen for any visual clues as to who’s dead. (JK, I paused. There are no clues.)

And then suddenly, it’s a week ago, and a meticulously restored junk-rigged sailboat is approaching the harbor. This, I think, is my favorite part of the White Lotus formula. Meeting a raft of strangers and trying to suss out which ones we’ll hate just because they’re entitled and which ones we’ll hate because they don’t realize how entitled they are. Which ones we’ll hate for being everything we object to and which ones we’ll hate because they remind us of ourselves.

Meet the Ratliffs, a Southern family with nice hair and okay manners. Dad is Timothy, and Timothy is a finance guy, a Blue Devil, the master of the house, and the king of the castle. His wife, Victoria, is played by Parker Posey, an actor whose unique selling point is that she’s equally believable as a person who would snap and kill and a person that someone else might snap and kill. They have three preppy, indifferent children— Saxon, Piper, and little Lochlan, the youngest at 18. While I’m sure they’re each detestable in their own way, Saxon is detestable in the most obvious way, so we may as well start with him.

Patrick Schwarzenegger (Arnie Jr) is flat-out terrific as a frat bro determined to prove he deserves to inherit the kingdom that he will inherit regardless. Saxon went to Duke like Dad, and now he’s in business with Dad, and he wants to be a Dad and marry Mom, and while I’m not saying he wants to fuck his little sister, he does spend a disturbing amount of time talking about whether or not his “hot” little sister fucks. Saxon wears sunglasses on Croakies, even on dryland, because it would be a shame if “these babies” earned a scratch. “These babies” is not a direct quote but something I could imagine Saxon saying in reference to his sunglasses or his biceps or his collection of protein powders or his slightly younger siblings. I’m not a watch person, but Saxon’s clunky bracelet looks like it’s loaded with complications that he doesn’t use. He just sleeps better knowing he’s armed with a chronograph and a tachymeter and the current time in Tokyo. You wanna know the phase of the moon? Saxon’s got a subdial for that. He’s not really dressed for the tropics, but he wouldn’t be out of place in a regatta.

His sister, Piper, is the outlier among her family because she’s a religious studies major and because she seems to understand that if you don’t have anything to say, it’s not necessary to be talking all of the time. Piper and Saxon are locked in battle for Lochy’s soul and Lochy has chosen appeasement. He’s going to bunk up with his brother, but he’ll walk with his sister to the nearby Buddhist temple. Unlike Saxon, he’s not going to try it on with every single female resort guest (“It’s a numbers game,” Saxon tells him, impervious to rejection). But unlike Piper (and me so far), he doesn’t find every facet of Saxon’s personality detestable.

The Ratliffs will be looked after by health mentor Pam (hilarious Morgana O’Reilly), whose job it is to black bag the family’s devices for a digital detox. But the Ratliffs did not read the brochures. Tim actually needs his phone because a journalist has been hounding him for comment on a story about a business associate with whom he almost certainly broke the law. Victoria, however, is free to hold onto her pill collection, and Posey manages to make her face look like it’s about to slide off her head for the entire episode — a small marvel of physical acting. Long story short: the Ratliffs will not be subjecting themselves to biomarker testing so that Pam can design bespoke wellness menus, and the Ratliffs will be checking their email and watching porn and listening to Buddhify until their last dying breath, so don’t even try to take the phones.

Next on the ship’s manifest are Rick and Chelsea. American Rick — Walton Goggins radiating the same excellent dirtbag energy he brought to Justified — exclusively wears designer bowling shirts that he only ever halfway buttons. He smokes cigarettes too close to the Ratliffs. He’s impossibly rude to his much younger girlfriend, who seems pretty cute to me! British Chelsea used to teach yoga but now she zips around the world with Rick, who “rarely works.” (She packs her yoga pants into those Floyd hardshell suitcases with the skateboard wheels, which also seem pretty cute to me.)

Like Tim Ratliff, Rick appears to have ended up at a wellness retreat by accident. He will not be eating “gluten-free rice and coconut balls,” enrolling in Stress Management, or having an oxygen facial. Chelsea, on the other hand, loves it at the White Lotus, but only in theory; she wants to get fucked up before the detoxing starts. Is she annoying? Yeah, sure, okay. Could Rick be bothered picking up a gun and killing her? Prob not. He seems much more interested in the absence of Jim Hollinger, one of the hotel’s owners, than in anyone else’s presence.

This May-December shambles will be looked after by Mook (LISA IN YOUR AREA), and it’s just as well that Mook won’t have much client work on this week, because she’s low-key involved in a barely percolating romance with Gaitok, a hotel security guard. Or is she keen on the brawny bodyguards who work for the hotels’ owners? At some future point, I will devote paragraphs to how naturally effervescent LISA is as a health mentor with a gentle hand and the pores of a newborn baby.

Belinda isn’t in Thailand on vacation, but now that she’s on Koh Samui, she’s suddenly feeling optimistic. She’s living in a five-star resort; her job is to get spa treatments; her son is visiting. She may have left Maui a burnt-out bitch, but now she’s taking her suppers at a white tablecloth restaurant each evening. And to top it all off, Belinda is being mentored by Pornchai, a stud who seems to find her fear of lizards charming.

The final group of holidaymakers is Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie, three childhood friends who don’t see each other much because they envy and detest each other to levels barely concealable. Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) is a TV actor with a modest level of celebrity cache. Khun Sritala, the grand dame of the White Lotus Thailand — herself an erstwhile Thai pop star — is smitten with her. (Khun Sritala is also Khun Jim Hollinger.). She even assigns her most-requested health mentor, Valentin, to Jaclyn’s group. (He gets requested because he’s hot.) Jaclyn, bless her, paid for the other girls to join the trip and so everyone is expected to say thank you a lot.

I am enamored of Leslie Bibb’s every mannerism as Kate, who kind of understands what it’s like to be famous because she lives in Austin and is married to Dave. Dave who? Who knows! He’s really big in Texas. Carrie Coon lets just enough of Laurie’s umbrage show that her friends can reasonably ignore it. And anyway, it’s all fine because these three ladies all look great! (It’s just tweakments — promise!) They’re all so lucky. Everyone misses each other so much. Everyone loves this! Or that! Or whatever the previous person said, can you repeat it, I wasn’t listening! Everyone says they should do this more! Everyone needs a drink or several! Everyone knows that the very second they leave the room they become the subject of the conversation.

Surprise! Just when we think all castaways are accounted for, jilted Chelsea makes a new friend at the bar. Chloe is a young and beautiful expat who dates a bald white guy or, as the locals call them, LBHs — a fun little acronym for “Losers Back Home.” It’s such a cliche that it wouldn’t be interesting except we’ve met this particular LBH before. He goes by Gary on Koh Samui, but he is none other than Mr. Tanya McQuoid, a.k.a. Gregory Hunt, from the Bureau of Land Management!

The sad-eyed con man and one-time cowboy who had his wife killed is now living off her money in beautiful Thailand with a beautiful young model who leaves him alone when he asks her to, which I suppose does sound a lot easier than living with Tanya. The White Lotus has always had killers, but now it has a supervillain. For his part, Greg coughs a lot less than he did on Maui — was he still coughing in Sicily? — but there’s something very old and sorry about him, too. At one point, he seems to lose control of his dinner napkin, like his dinner napkin could beat him up in a fight.

And that’s how one day in paradise falls off the calendar. Right now, our guests have their whole vacation ahead of them; in a week, they won’t be able to believe how fast it all went. What will they have for breakfast when no one’s around to bring them trays of pre-cut fruit? What if they feel like a green juice or a crystal bath?

Islands are uncanny places. Set apart from the rest of the world, they are worlds unto themselves, with their own rules, norms, and acronyms. And yet they couldn’t be more vulnerable. Add or subtract the wrong dozen people, and you can throw an entire community out of whack. Innocent people like Armand die. Good boys like Kai break bad. Really nice hookers like Lucia get life-altering windfalls.

Mike White populates his island resorts with rich and powerful guests who believe that they make their own fates. It’s a conception that couldn’t be more at odds with the principles of Buddhism that surround these castaways now. That karma is real; that there will be a next life in which you are judged for this one; that identity is a prison. That you can hide yourself beyond the tall walls of an exclusive resort on a small island on the opposite side of the world, but one needs community to truly take refuge.

That no matter how rich and powerful, no man is an island.