- Season three of ‘The White Lotus’ explores themes of identity and spirituality in Thailand.
- Creator Mike White is interested in Buddhist principles, which influenced the character’s arcs this season.
- Greg’s storyline continues from season two, hinting at karmic consequences for his past actions.
Identity is a prison. That’s the operating thesis of season three of Mike White’s hit HBO satire “The White Lotus.” To be on the nose for this season’s Thailand-set exploration of privilege and hijinks, the line is uttered by a Buddhist monk in the premiere episode.
White has used each season’s location and its meaning in the American consciousness to draw out the mess of interpersonal relationships among the hotel’s staff and guests. In the first season, the colonial afterlife of Hawaii set the scene for exploring wealthy, predominantly white tourists’ extractive relationships with the locals who serve them. The romance of Italy in season two formed the backdrop for the passions, affairs, familial and marital drama of the group who visited Sicily.
In season three, the spirituality of Thailand rattles the cages of identity The White Lotus’ Western tourists lock themselves in. It’s a location that allows the show to examine Eastern spirituality and satirize the way Western tourists appropriate it for their own self-help vacations.
“They’re all in some kind of hurt,” White said of his Thailand White Lotus visitors in an interview with Time. The dramatic irony is that the suffering they’ve come to cleanse themselves of is caused by the very thing that allowed them to be there in the first place — the exorbitant wealth and privilege they wield.
That irony likely isn’t lost on White, who takes special pleasure in making sure his characters — even the lovable ones — get what’s coming to them. You could call it karma, which just so happens to be a key principle of Buddhism, Thailand’s dominant religion.
So who’s due for some karmic repayment this season? Here’s how the major tenets of Buddhist philosophy could offer some clues.
Prisons of identity
White has personal experience with Thailand and Buddhism.
“I had a Buddhist self-help phase when I had a nervous breakdown in my 30s,” he told Time in January. “I use Buddhist concepts as a way to sort of organize my ideas.”
Time in Buddhist philosophy doesn’t work the same as time in Western philosophy. In the West, time is linear. Our lives have a fixed start date — birth — and end date — death.
In Buddhism, time is circular. Life is a cycle of death and rebirth. Identity isn’t as fixed within a cycle of reincarnation, since you could be reborn into a higher or lower caste in the next life, depending on the karma you make in this one.
To be caught up in the material circumstances of the present creates the “prison of identity” discussed on the show. Each group of Western tourists is struggling with the prisons of their own identities in some way or another.
For the Southern Ratliff family, particularly the parents, pill-popping Victoria (Parker Posey) and stressed Duke dad Tim (Jason Isaacs), their identities are defined by having good values and by being successful. All that is about to come crashing down, though, since Tim’s office is being scrutinized by the feds for a money laundering scheme he participated in years ago.
Fabio Lovino/HBO
Rick (Walton Goggins) is clearly tormented by the prison of his own identity, which has led him on a heavily implied revenge tour to Thailand to track down the person responsible for his father’s death. The fixation on his father, his origin story, and the emptiness it’s left him with is what the Buddhists would call attachment (derogatory) — the kind that only causes you suffering.
The trio of women on a girls’ trip are trapped by the competition they’ve built up with one another. They’re constantly vying for power over one another, to be seen as the most successful of the three. “It’s not a midlife crisis; it’s a victory lap,” Southern housewife Kate (Leslie Bibb) insists in episode one.
Karmic repayment
“The White Lotus” is ostensibly an anthology, but if you’ve seen more than one season, you know that isn’t exactly true. In Italy, Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) was the throughline from the first season in Hawaii, and you could say she met her karmic end in the Mediterranean for the false promises she made Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) in Hawaii.
In Thailand, Greg (Jon Gries) is the throughline from the previous season. When we encounter him on Koh Samui, he’s assumed an alias “Gary” and denies having ever been to the White Lotus in Hawaii, where he met Tanya and Belinda. If you think of each season as one cycle of reincarnation, then Thailand is Greg’s next life after the one he left in Italy, which effectively concluded with Tanya’s death.
Of course, the audience knows all about the bad karma Greg stirred up in Sicily by organizing his wife’s hit. Since the episode four teaser shows Belinda closing in on Greg with a little bit of internet sleuthing, it’s fair to expect his old life to come flooding back.
In Buddhism, you can’t enter a new life without balancing the karma, good and bad, that you’ve made in your previous one. Greg, responsible for the demise of Tanya at the end of last season, still managed to escape unscathed.
It’s fair to expect he’ll be getting some cosmic payback at the end of this one, whether it comes in the form of a snake bite, a poisoned seed, or a watery demise on the resort grounds. If Thailand has anything to teach him, it’s that you can’t start over without a little karmic justice.
