[Editor’s note: The following article contains spoilers for “The White Lotus” Season 3, Episode 8, “Amor Fati.”]
Mike White‘s characters aren’t just complicated; they’re contradictory.
Take Kate, whose every evocative smile is expressed by the luminous Leslie Bibb. Among her trio of old friends on a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, Kate is the polite peacekeeper. In the premiere, she gushes over how lucky they are to still be together after all these years, and in such a luxurious exotic locale at that. In the finale, she expresses sincere appreciation for the “blooming” garden that is her life, so bright with family, faith, and friendship.
In between, Kate partakes in the same private gossip her friends do whenever one of them is out of earshot (“And the vanity…. Did she sandblast her face or something? It’s very waxy,” she says about her TV-star bestie), but she doesn’t get off on stealing Laurie’s crush, like Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), or calling out Jaclyn’s adultery, like Laurie (Carrie Coon). “One person’s ‘fake’ is another person’s ‘good manners,’” Kate says when Laurie prods her to speak her mind.
It would be easy to see Kate as the most morally sound member of the group… save for one complication: She (very likely) voted for Donald Trump. Probably twice. Kate’s near-confession stands in stark opposition to how she treats those closest to her. We see how much she cares about her friends first-hand, and we hear, per her own account, how active she is in her church back home. But her vote is incompatible with that identity. Supporting a president and a party who perpetuate suffering — by putting kids in cages, tearing families apart, and, well, I can’t possibly list every example — doesn’t jibe with Kate’s consistent attempts to take care of everyone around her.
Perhaps that’s why when she’s asked if she voted for Trump, all she can muster is a smile. What she’s done is so misaligned with how she acts that she can’t speak it into existence, here, in front of her blooming garden. It’s a thorn caught in her throat.
In another show, with a lesser writer, such incongruities could be read as character inconsistencies, accidental oversights, mistakes. But with White, they’re the whole ballgame, and in “The White Lotus” Season 3, they help illustrate the spiritual malaise plaguing our crisis-ridden cast of characters. How they act and what they believe aren’t aligned. Their minds and bodies are out of sync. It’s a neverending struggle, thrust into conflict by animal urges — for sex, for revenge, for money — that demand immediate satisfaction over long-term health.
You can see it in Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) when his unabashed quest for pleasure at any cost catches up with him. You can see it in Rick (Walton Goggins) when the time he’s spent dwelling on a painful past overwhelms the fresh-faced happiness he’s found in the present. But perhaps my favorite example, and the one that had me doubled over in dark groans of laughter as the credits rolled on Season 3, is when Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), a soon-to-be convicted criminal who nearly murdered his entire family with poisoned piña coladas, sails into the sunset believing himself a hero.
You see, the rich man about to lose everything finally realized that people are more important than things. He may have ruined his family’s lives and forever tarnished his ancestral legacy — his grandfather was the governor — but he didn’t kill his wife and children on vacation, so he feels pretty good! He can go home and face the music, knowing he did the right thing. Well, at least one right thing. Kind of. Maybe.
Not all of White’s contradictions delivered the bleak humor or uncomfortable insights audiences have come to expect from “The White Lotus.” Despite IndieWire’s enthusiasm for Season 3, it was clear by the time the finale aired that the trip to Thailand may need more sorting out than previous journeys. So in addition to Proma Khosla’s weekly reviews, we’ve convened Executive Editor Ryan Lattanzio and myself, Ben Travers, for an emergency discussion about what worked, what didn’t, and what’s next for “The White Lotus.” Just don’t expect us to agree.
Ben Travers: Ryan, I suppose it was inevitable, yet I found myself surprised at just how polarizing “The White Lotus” became in Season 3. At first, complaints seemed to be rooted in over-familiarity: The characters are too similar to previous seasons, the structure feels too rigid, and the story may have moved to Thailand, but it isn’t going anywhere new. OK, fine. What some may refer to as repetitive, I consider to be comfortable. Television is built on repetition, and anthology series in particular rely on recognizable set-ups to keep audiences on the same wavelength, season after season, new cast after new cast.
But as the season progressed, the [shudders] discourse really went off the rails. Impatience breeds hostility, and the comparatively long, relatively tame road leading to Episode 5 set up an explosion of discontent — when incest once again popped up in HBO‘s Sunday night drama, and the takes turned truculent. The brotherly love was provocation for provocation’s sake, except, no, it made perfect sense for these two particular siblings. It’s a serious issue that should be taken seriously, but so long as you remember these are actors with no actual relation to each other, it was also kind of hot? Whoa, hold up, that’s too far. We can’t separate the artists from the art, not like this.
As someone who reviewed Season 3 based on six of the eight episodes, I wasn’t shocked to see so many viewers mirroring Chelsea’s (Aimee Lou Wood) stunned expressions over Lochlan (Sam Nivola) and Saxon’s taboo three-way. I was just surprised to see how much vitriol accompanied it for the show as a whole, as if people had been waiting for an excuse to vent their frustrations with Season 3 and incest was their tipping point. The same bewilderment struck me again today, the morning after the finale premiered, when so many fellow critics took White’s ending to task, if not everything that preceded it. Feeling pretty good about the finale (and season) myself, I have to ask: How were you feeling leading up to the finale, and how are you feeling now that you’ve seen it?
Ryan Lattanzio: This discourse over this season not only went off the rails, it also became really… dumb? While reflecting an audience that maybe has gotten dumber and that, between Seasons 3 and 2 of “The White Lotus” want to be told how to feel, to be pandered to more with more-of-the-same plot? To those who came away from episodes saying, “Nothing happened!,” that translated to “Nobody was fucking or dying.” Mike White, who proved himself something of a narrative edgelord in Season 2 with scenes designed almost expressly to make the gays gasp, sought this time to deliberately edge us — tease us with tantalizing moments of portent (like Leslie Bibb’s early, awkward run-in with Parker Posey or, to another extent, the red herring of an incest moment between Patrick Schwarzenegger and Sam Nivola) but then deny us their inevitable, plausible climax.
The discourse I’m referring to as dumb or dumbed-down has to do with the credulity-stretching interpretation, the too-close reading, that happens online, like this X user pointing out how Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Woods’ floating corpses form the yin and yang symbol. Do they? OK then. Or similarly, users pointing out that the Ratliff children, when seated three abreast, resemble the three wise monkeys of see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil. OK? The thing about patterns in the clouds is they’re there if you’re looking for them. I’m not sure how such readings help us understand White’s vision better — but also it may be because his vision was a little less fully cooked this time. The shootout in the finale felt ripped from another (lesser) series, Sarah Catherine Hook’s monologue as Piper, now wanting to wash Thailand off her, just a bit of a pat cheat (and a more cynical White on display).
Ben, where do you stack up Season 3 against the other seasons? Do you agree with other criticisms of the finale? Alan Sepinwall particularly took Mike White to task in his Rolling Stone review. Mainly what did not work for me this season was, of all things, the theme song, stripped of its usual jaunty mischief. (And we now know what happened there, or at least one side of the story.)
Ben: I tend to agree Season 3 is the least streamlined of White’s initial trilogy, but I don’t share my colleagues’ frustrations with the ending. And speaking of monologues, Carrie Coon’s surprising final sentiment has to be one of the finale’s pinnacles.
As Jaclyn and Kate wax poetic about a dream vacation that never happened, Laurie’s weary, silent glances seem to tee up an explosive confrontation. Their grudges and jealousies have been simmering just under the surface for seven episodes, and they can finally have it out! Not when Laurie is drunk and bitter. Not when Jaclyn is obstinate and over it. Not when Kate is receding into the background, like Homer Simpson into his hedge. Now, they’re sitting calmly around the dinner table, about to head home, with no knowledge of when they’ll ever see each other again. Their defenses are down, so let’s get into it!
Instead, Laurie tilts even further into vulnerability. “All week I’ve just been so… sad,” she says, surprising her rhapsodic dinner companions and deflating the expectant tension in the audience. During their time together, she’s looked back on the rest of her life and seen so little that lasts. Her devotion to work didn’t pan out. Her marriage didn’t either. But Jaclyn and Kate are still there. She’s still part of something. Sure, they have their differences, but what are a few foibles compared to a lifetime of friendship?
Earlier, Laurie watched Jaclyn and Kate taking photos together in the pool. Every other time she saw them isolated from her, they were slinging mud behind her back (or, at least, it seemed like they were). Now she sees them enjoying each other, appreciating each other, and being present with each other. Instead of feeling excluded, she remembers why she’s been included on this trip, in this trio, to begin with.
These kinds of reversals are White’s bread and butter. He’s created enough believable, human contradictions within his characters that’s it’s just as plausible to believe Laurie will express appreciation for her enduring friendships as it is to expect her to tear them each a new asshole. (And they, in turn, will tear her one, as well — Laurie ain’t no saint.) Knowing the scene could turn either way adds immediate tension to the percolating tension of the episode, and it’s a formula that works time and time again throughout the feature-length finale.
While we wait to find out who will die and why, we’re also on pins and needles waiting to see if Rick will follow his demons down to a dark end (as he did) or run off with the white light of love he’d so recently embraced. We’re waiting to see if Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) will stick to his beliefs or be enticed into violence for love and money. We’re waiting to see if Tim will confess what he’s done to his family or if he’ll avoid the awkward conversation by murdering them. (Seriously, that man’s a monster.)
My biggest disappointment was where the tension went slack because the situation didn’t make sense. I’m OK with Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) backing out of her plans with Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul) just like Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) backed out of her plans with Belinda — I mean, it’s a pretty awful thing to do, but I believe she’d do it, given what the show has to say about the wholly corruptible influence of affluence. I just didn’t buy how she got there. Season 3 worked overtime to make sure we saw how scared Belinda was of Gary/Greg (Jon Griess), but it didn’t work hard enough to show that she was willing to risk her life and her son’s life for a big payday. (When she allows Zion to take part in the negotiations, she must’ve known that if Gary/Greg decided not to pay up, her son would be a target, too.)
Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with the finale. For a moment, I felt robbed of seeing the Ratliffs learn of their ensuing bankruptcy, but leaving that discovery to our individual imaginations is even better: Do you really think a man of means like Timothy is going to prison and his family will lose everything? If so, congratulations on maintaining faith in America’s justice system despite ample evidence to the contrary. If not, it only makes Timothy’s Buddhist epiphany that much more amusing. (He’d probably consider his unexpected freedom a reward for doing the right thing — aka not murdering his family — and devote his life to Buddhism… before backsliding the second his golf buddies gave him a weird look.) Piper’s confession rang true to me, and Saxon reading a book — knowing it’s not because he might get to have sex with the person who lent it to him — is all the evidence I need of just how impactful this trip has been for our favorite “soulless” sicko.
But I’ve prattled on long enough. Ryan, do you think the reaction to Season 3 will have any affect on what Mike White plans for Season 4? Do you hope so?
Ryan: It can be to a show’s true creative detriment when writers (in this case, there’s just one of them) capitulate or bend a series too much toward the mercurial weather systems of online chatter; it can start to feel like narrative events in the show are no longer organically born from its universe but instead, indeed, from a room of people going by the internet. (Looking at you, “Yellowjackets.”) If anything, I think Mike White will continue to defy audience expectations, or at least the philistine ones’ demands. Each week of this season was nothing but action-packed — that is, if furtive glances and freighted dialogue are action enough for you.
This week’s finale hit a series high of 6.2 million viewers, up more than 2 million from the (very excellent and arguably even more viral) Season 2 finale. This only means more, more, more “White Lotus” will come to HBO (it’s been renewed for Season 4), but Mr. White ought to stop and smell the roses a bit before diving headfirst into another season — that’s when the best ideas happen.
I recognize that Greg (Jon Gries) is the established villain in “White Lotus” mythology, but I am almost ready for White to blow up the series and start with an entirely new ensemble. Greg’s just not that interesting a villain, and whatever Season 3 was doing with him didn’t satisfactorily pay off or, at worst, felt like an extended setup for a Season 4. “The White Lotus” might be ready to move on from his milieu, especially knowing that the show is probably never going to off him in some grand, climatically coalescing fashion. (The Walton Goggins shootout felt like a direct rebuke of anyone expecting that.) It’s chilling enough just knowing there’s a Greg out there in the world, living his life, so can’t that be that?
The potential successor to Jennifer Coolidge or Natasha Rothwell I’d love to see again? Parker Posey’s Victoria Ratliff, years down the line, her life perhaps blown to bits after her husband’s near-family annihilation and financial revelations, picking up the pieces, alone and boozing and pilling at another vacation destination.
One thing’s for sure by the end of this season: “The White Lotus” won’t be driving Lorazepam sales the way I thought with Episodes 2 and 3.
“The White Lotus” is available on HBO and Max. The series has already been renewed for Season 4.
