‘White Lotus’ season 3 episode 1 recap: Uneasy trios
Spoiler warning: White Lotus
Mike White is in it for the girlfriends. Partway through the premiere of season 3, two women in their early thirties sit together in the candlelit outdoor bar at the White Lotus resort in Thailand and discuss their bad-tempered older boyfriends. “You’ll notice a lot of bald white guys in Thailand,” one of them says, gesturing toward her partner some distance off. “The locals call them LBH’s. Losers back home.”
White has always favoured his female characters, none more so than the magnificent Jennifer Coolidge, whose shocking death last season felt like a precipitous gamble for the show. But in this season, there are more women than ever to clap your hands with glee about. There is Parker Posey, of course, playing a loopy Southerner married to the obscenely wealthy Jason Isaacs. The couple has three children, one of whom, a finance bro named Saxon, is even more soul-shiveringly grotesque than Jake Lacey’s character in the first season. Their daughter is writing her thesis on Buddhism and wants to interview a local monk, and their youngest son, Lochlan, appears to be a pawn for his older siblings to fight over.
Walton Goggins is so far a morose mystery man with an exhaustingly chipper British girlfriend (Aimee Lou Wood), who already seems destined to be this season’s fan favourite. Michelle Monaghan is a television star going on a girls’ trip with her two childhood besties (Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb), and Natasha Rothwell returns as the salon therapist at the Maui resort in season 1 who is visiting the Thailand branch to expand operations back home. The women are having a great time, and there is already tension between what they’re hoping to get out of the trip and the utter humourlessness of their male counterparts.
The season is already full of uneasy trios. Lochlan is torn between his older siblings, one of whom wants him to ‘get pussy’ and the other of whom wants to visit the monastery down the road. Mook (Lalisa Manobal), a therapist at the hotel, is caught in a burgeoning love triangle between a hunky bodyguard with a gun (ooh la la) and her friend who works as a hotel parking attendant. And Monaghan, Coon, and Bibb are definitely not the blissful childhood soulmates that they perform.
Are there any shocks in the first episode of White Lotus?
There were two main surprises about this season’s premiere. The first is that White Lotus is throwing daggers. You might be prepared to see a body getting loaded onto a plane or floating in the ocean in the first scene, but you probably weren’t prepared for a mass shooter. The opening is considerably more upsetting than any previous season, and it feels like a pointed attack on anyone who thought they could drift comfortably into escapism when they turn the show on.
The fact that this scene is centred on a character who we immediately like (we’re led to believe that he is Belinda’s son) makes it even more distressing. It’s a reminder that White hasn’t actually pulled his punches in the past, either. Remember in the first season when Sidney Sweeney’s friend had an incredibly sexy, sweet holiday romance with a hotel employee only to give him the code to the family’s safe and allow him to go to prison without saying a word? Absolutely savage. There is savagery afoot again.
The other main surprise is that Posey spends most of the episode so jet-lagged that it’s not immediately obvious whether she will, in fact, fill Jennifer Coolidge’s exquisitely campy shoes as everyone assumed she would when she was cast. I found myself gulping with concern when I heard her accent for the first time. Surely it’s too much? Instead of instantly falling under her spell as I was expecting, I found myself writing three words: ‘Carrie Fucking Coon.’ She is an actor who can do anything and is so quietly charismatic that I have a feeling she will be the sneaky emotional crux of the season. Stay tuned on that one.
Otherwise, how do we feel about that reworked theme song? Without the gasping vocals, I’m just not sure it has the same weird intensity and propulsiveness befitting the show. I am also curious to find out whether Sam Nivola as Lochlan will be more in the mould of Albie from last season or Quinn from the first season.
As a final side note, I haven’t mentioned Fabian, our new hotel manager who seems extremely nervous, or Patravadi Mejudhon as an actress-turned-hotel owner and the wife of a mystery American billionaire who Goggins’s character might be trying to murder. But I’m pretty sure they’ll have their time in the spotlight in due course. Oh, and a word to the wise: do not stick around after the end credits. Massive spoilers all ’round.
