'White Lotus' Report Card
Grading the big season 3 finale, storyline by storyline.
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With all due credit to my erstwhile colleague and roommate in a Brooklyn sweatbox circa 2010, Matt Ufford, I’m borrowing the format of his Game of Thrones Report Cards for my White Lotus season review. The format does seem to make more sense than a straight review. When it comes to TV, the only rubric that really matters these days is: did you watch it? Did you finish it?
There have been more otherwise promising, ambitious shows that I fell asleep during or watched some of and then forgot about than I can count (let alone remember). In light of that, a show that I watched every episode of, anticipated its new installments all week, and watched as quickly as I could so that I could talk about it with friends/not have it spoiled for me online is practically a miracle. White Lotus (plus Gemstones) is maybe the only genuine watercooler show we’ve had in the last… what, 18 months?
Mike White deserves his flowers for that. As does HBO, for giving us the ideal Walton Goggins double feature every week. I’ll probably regret it some day, but for right now I want to binge on Goggins doubles until I puke.
All in all, season three surpassed season two for me, while probably falling short of season one. It didn’t have anything like season one’s analingus scene or Fred Hechinger paddling off into the sunset (I’m thrilled that he has become our most ubiquitous young character actor), but it also didn’t have any storylines that I just wanted to fast-forward through like last season’s tech couple. I blame that mostly on the writing, since I’ve seen both Aubrey Plaza and Will Sharpe be great in other stuff.
Anyway, in light of all that, I thought we’d rate this season storyline by storyline. Shall we? (Yes, there are going to be spoilers in this, use your brain).
Gaitok and Mook
I wasn’t sure what to make of these two at first. Gaitok (played by the London-born Tayme Thapthimthong) didn’t have the immediate appeal of, say Murray Bartlett as the hotel manager from season 1. (But then again, who does? Certainly not Rocco and Valentina from season 2). And the conceit with the Thai script in grey behind the white subtitles for all of their scenes felt like an annoying affectation I could’ve done without. And then, little by little, Gaitok started to become one of my favorite character. He had layers of complexity, even if it was mostly driven by simplicity: just wanting to live his life and be a good guy, but also wanting to smash, and to smash with someone who maybe didn’t want him to be a good guy.
Okay, no “maybe,” Mook definitely didn’t care about Gaitok being a good guy. That could’ve easily become an age-old Evil Woman trope, and it wasn’t entirely not that, but Mook (played by Lalisa Manobal, who is apparently famous as a member of the K-pop girl group Blackpink) played it cute and subtle, rather than conniving and imperious. The iciness was there, but it wasn’t her dominant mode, and the way she could turn it on and off at will made it more unsettling in a way. Also there was an obvious logic to it: her callousness didn’t come out of nowhere, she was just doing realpolitik with her relationships! She wanted to live a nice life with a ruthless go-getter, not an impoverished one with a loving sweetheart. Sometimes it do be like that.
In the end, Mike White gave these two a nice ending that felt both momentous and open-ended at the same time. Gaitok became a man and nabbed that brass ring, especially in Mook’s eyes. But at what cost? Does he lose his innocence forever? Will she be as happy as she thought she’d be now that he’s on the up and up or will she miss being able to drag him around? It was arguably a stronger arc for him than for her, but compelling either way.
Grade: A-
The Cougars
I’ll admit, I groaned a little when “OMG, Leslie Bibb’s character is a Trump supporter” threatened to take over the three women’s storyline. That feels like something that’s exotic and provocative when you’ve been working in the entertainment industry for a long time and kind of banal for everyone else. Plus I reflexively disengage any time it feels like my social media timeline starts to infect my fiction.
At least White folded it into a bigger story about three old friends growing apart. Overall it seemed like this storyline suffered from Carrie Coon’s character being the only genuinely complex and interesting one (maybe could’ve done more with Michelle Monaghan’s pseudo-celebrity?). I also didn’t see Coon’s big teary monologue in the finale as the crescendo that other people seemed to. This seems like a thing people do, where they’re incapable of recognizing brilliant acting unless it shows up in the form of a big important speech. Carrie Coon been great. But if a big monologue is what it takes for people to notice, welcome to the party, I guess. If it gets us to “more Carrie Coon,” so much the better. I’m already dusting off my frilly hat for more Gilded Age.
“Time is what makes life meaningful to me” didn’t land for me as much as it seems to have for some, but the previous episode was so good that I didn’t mind. Coon’s character hooking up with the Russian, then immediately getting IRL Nigerian scammed and having to flee out a window from a screaming girlfriend was probably my second favorite sequence in the entire season (vaguely Russo-phobic though it may have been).
That aside, there were some missed opportunities in this storyline — not only Monaghan’s celebrity, but whatever happened with Leslie Bibb sort of knowing Parker Posey’s character? The storyline also maybe lacked the “button” of the others, but it was satisfying enough as it was.
Grade: B+
The Ratliffs
Acting-wise, this group knocked it out of the park (Parker Posey and Patrick Schwarzenegger especially) but writing-wise it was probably the most infuriating storyline. If you’re going to give Jason Isaacs a fraud-indictment storyline that takes an entire season to play out, don’t you owe us at least a feint towards a resolution? Either it’s a genuine, life-changing event or it’s much ado about nothing and he skates like white collar criminals usually do in the end. Choose one! Or do something different, but don’t just leave it unfinished.
Moreover, if this family of dickheads is going to get what seems to constitute a happy ending (albeit a slightly tainted one), shouldn’t that be established as a thematic choice? I came away with the odd sense that I was meant to have been rooting for them all along, like Jason Isaacs was 90s dramedy dad who learns an important lesson about paying attention to his kids and not being such a workaholic. What? Why?
White also built up this pervasive incestual vibe, heavily hinting that there was some fucked up Menendez Brothers-type shit happening in that household, only for us to find out that… uh… the dad was just a workaholic? And the youngest son was just a “people pleaser” and that’s why he jacked off his brother? Naaaahhhh, man. I didn’t really take the younger brother’s “people pleaser” justification at face value at the time, but we never got any additional information there, so…
Piper (played by Sarah Catherine Hook, who really does look like she could be Patrick Schwarzenegger’s sister) did get a great scene in the finale, as she comes to the realization that she’s too spoiled to live like a monk. There was more great work by Parker Posey in that scene, who was fantastic throughout. Yet it was hard to square that sort of mundane take with the sensationalist implied incest hanging over all of it. Seemed like maybe two stories that didn’t quite fit together. Is there such a thing as Chekhov’s Incest?
On a lighter note… you don’t clean a blender before you use it? When there’s a sink right there? I know Lochlan (played by Sam Nivola, son of Alessandro Nivola and Emily Mortimer) is supposed to be a college freshman, but he’s also a “people pleaser” who didn’t like the taste of protein shakes in episode one, so I’m calling bullshit on him using a dirty blender. I can suspend a little disbelief for a good story, but the kicker didn’t seem especially worth it here either.
All in all, way too much time spent on the question of whether Daddy Ratliff would actually unalive himself, which was probably the least interesting dilemma for this family.
Grade: D
Rick and Chelsea
Oh, Mike White, did you have to be so cruel? As one of the ten people who saw Beatriz At Dinner (which White wrote for Miguel Arteta), in which Salma Hayek plays a new age medicine practitioner stuck at dinner with one of her wealthy clients, which was basically a trial run for White Lotus with an infuriating non-ending, I appreciate that White went so big and cinematic for this one. He managed to tie in Rick and Chelsea with Gaitok and Mook.