Death at the Resort
Every White Lotus season begins the same way: with body bags and a mystery.
I've become conditioned to spend the first minutes of each White Lotus season analyzing the body bags. How many? What size? Male or female? The show wants us obsessing over death before we've even met the characters.
Season 3 brought us to Thailand, where guests sought something more than luxury—they wanted transformation. Meditation retreats. Spiritual guides. Thai boxing lessons. The aesthetics of enlightenment without any of the actual work.
What Mike White understands, and what makes his show so uncomfortable, is that these people don't want to change. They want to feel like they've changed while remaining exactly who they are.
And when reality intrudes on that fantasy... someone dies.
The opening body bags of Season 3 promised the biggest death toll yet. And the finale delivered—though not in the way I expected. The who, how, and why of the White Lotus deaths always reflect the sins of the season. In Thailand, those sins involved colonialism, exploitation, and men who treated enlightenment like another commodity to consume.