The third season of The White Lotus ends with guests speeding away from the resort on a boat while the staff wave at them, placid and obliging. In Season 1, Natasha Rothwell’s Belinda was among the staff charged with sublimating their identities to avoid being “too specific as a presence,” as Murray Bartlett’s Armond explains in the pilot. “It’s a Japanese ethos where we are asked to disappear behind our masks as pleasant, interchangeable helpers.”
By the end of the third season, though, it’s Belinda who is on the boat, pockets newly deep, speeding away from a crew of waving staff members stranded on the beach.
It’s a visual that drives home the core theme of director and writer Mike White’s project over the last four years: Regardless of one’s intentions and stated values, wealth—and the power that accompanies it—is a universally corrupting force. After three seasons, I think he’s gotten the message across. It’s a perfect time to wind down the series, but unfortunately, it appears White has fallen prey to the same temptations that drive his characters to misery.
Belinda is one of the few characters who has carried over from previous seasons, in addition to Greg (Jon Gries), a mysterious and certainly dangerous man who may or may not have orchestrated Tanya’s (Jennifer Coolidge) death in Season 2.
Belinda is staying in the Thailand White Lotus as part of an employee exchange program, and she dances between the roles of worker and guest; she dresses for dinner and samples wellness treatments but also puts in uniformed hours next to Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul) at the front desk. Over the course of the season, the two begin talking about Belinda’s dream to start her own spa, and Pornchai offers to join her as a business partner. The conversations never get as far as Belinda’s plans with Tanya did (there are no written-up business plans), but the sense of tentative hope between the two is palpable. Perhaps these two, as equals, could make their dreams come true.
But when Greg realizes that Belinda knows who he is, and that he’s wanted for questioning for Tanya’s death, he offers to buy her silence with $100,000. Belinda and her college-aged son, Zion, negotiate that up. At first, Belinda is vehemently opposed to taking the money. Her morals absolutely prevent her from getting in bed with someone suspected of killing her friend. Never mind that Tanya treated her poorly—her loyalty is stronger than the sting of betrayal, and her sense of what is universally right is stronger than her self-interest. That holds true until the finale, when she storms out of a negotiation with Greg and Zion, apparently appalled at the conversation. But she’s only acting. Somewhere between $100,000 and $5 million, her center of gravity shifted.
“Tell him that your mother’s a very honest lady,” she tells Zion. “But he better come through. He wants us to be scared but we gotta make him scared, OK? Now go close it.”
The next morning, the money shows up in her bank account. Belinda says Greg called to make sure she lived up to her end of the bargain. “I said that I would,” she says, laughing in disbelief. She and Zion start making plans to leave Thailand, and he asks her about her spa, to which she responds, “Can’t I just be rich for five fucking minutes?”
Being rich, in this world, means acting without regard for others, and Belinda embraces that immediately. When Pornchai asks about their plan for the business she tells him, in Tanya-like fashion, “circumstances have changed for me, and I just can't commit to anything right now.”
The moral culpability of the wealthy is a theme White has reinforced over the seasons; Sydney Sweeney’s Red Scare princess Olivia in Season 1 rhymes with Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), a religion major and aspiring Buddhist who perceives her family’s wealth as shackling her to a shallow and materialistic life. She spends the season rolling her eyes in judgment of her family’s priorities while sitting at the same dinner table in increasingly gaudy cotton prairie dresses. The family is apparently in Thailand so Piper can interview a monk for her senior thesis, but the full extent of her entitlement becomes clear when it’s revealed that she lied about the thesis. She actually brought her family to this exorbitantly expensive resort so she could check out the monk’s monastery because she’s interested in moving there. In the end, Piper faces the reality that the food at the meditation center is too bland, the bedrooms lack air conditioning, and that perhaps she can’t actually bring herself to leave her privileged lifestyle behind.
At certain point, though, echoing just becomes repetition. The clueless wealthy parents, the skinny and slumped teen boy, the scrappy local who will do whatever it takes to get ahead—the characters and plots of the seasons begin to bleed together. One of The White Lotus’s other signatures, the identity of the first-episode dead body, was telegraphed perhaps more clearly than any other season; Chelsea, played by Aimee Lou Wood, repeats throughout the eight episodes that she has a bad feeling, and that bad things come in threes.
The three seasons of The White Lotus have followed dozens of characters on odysseys of self-delusion as they navigate a week’s stay at the luxury resorts. Their fatal flaw, always, is that what they have is not enough. These characters will stop at nothing in their pursuit of more: more money, more status, more power, more sex. It seems the same can be said for the show itself; The White Lotus has already been renewed for a fourth season, which is almost certainly a misguided decision. The best thing that White and company can do now is stop while they’re ahead, or at least still breaking even. Let this season’s legacy be Parker Posey’s lorazepam-inflected Southern drawl. Let Belinda’s completed arc from below stairs to above them sit as it is.
The White Lotus’s themes are consistent as a storybook: Money corrupts, the desire for more is corrosive, and we might all be better off if we stopped deluding ourselves that our excesses are justified. If only its creator could internalize them, too.
