White Lotus Season 3 is a Masterpiece.

I don’t think many people out there understood the third season of “The White Lotus” and that really disappointed me, but the mere fact that a show centering on the spiritual and emotional quality of the characters rather than the plot devices swinging them about like puppets is very encouraging. I watched the previous two seasons of White Lotus as well; I loved the first, didn’t really connect at all to the second, but I was so sucked in to third. I cannot recall a show that more deeply affected me than this particular season. That actually made me not just contemplate—but feel as if I were in these characters’ positions. And when, if ever, do you get to be in the position of the mad agony of avenging your father’s death? Or realizing that the material conquests you based your life on ended up being the mere foil for your naked soul? This season was a complete masterpiece. There may have been some ‘slogging’ as people put it, but no, I won’t even admit that—each of the arcs touched me very deeply. I don’t think there ever existed a more Dostoevskian portrayal of the tragic and the comic as when Tim attempted to kill his whole family (except for the youngest) with Pina Coladas. I laughed out loud about that scene hours after I saw it. And finally—the emptiness of sex just to get at one’s pleasure was so well portrayed through the three women, and their coming together afterwards; that was incredibly healing for the collective to witness. I mean, hello! This show’s basis was redemption and Buddhism. Does anyone nowadays ever read outside of the thriller section? For God’s sake, did the Nobel Prize winning Yasunari Kawabata’s stories ‘go anywhere?’ No, they were incisive, about cutting to the throat of each living moment, about the emotional quality of the moment being what life is. There is much to contemplate here—the wheel of Buddhism, the endless cycle of despair, running from ‘pain’ to ‘pain.’ And how many actually choose to escape? Very few. I don’t need to rehash the plot here, it is done all over the internet and elsewhere, but what I felt when the boy Locki ‘saw God’ and his father finally understood how much deeper and weightier the soul than one’s material possessions, or even identity and social standing—I just can’t express to you. I can’t express. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it, and I feel sad for you if that ‘moment’ went over your head. And Chelsea was not blind or being used, I mean, people can throw out whatever thoughts they want which just reflect their own narrow comprehensions, but her devotion to her man—to the point that she was led to the steps of death with him is rarely so well conveyed. It is a kind of innocence that creates that road. The plot could have gone many different ways and that is what is so profound about this piece too, that these people felt to me so complex, so living that I could have believed so many pathways existed for them at once, as such pathways actually exist for all of us at any moment if we recognize that the binding of identity and status is actually imaginary. Then the ‘soulless’ characters, Gary, Chloe, Saxon—they, too, began to reveal themselves much deeper than the stereotypes. There were some pathways that felt to me hollow, but that was how they were supposed to feel, as any person might feel weighing their materialistic choices up against the feet of the Buddha, or the vision of God—I’m talking of Gaitok, Piper, and Belinda here. Essentially what this show spoke to me is that there is no one fate for any of us. There are so many roads, but there are elemental truths out there also, and that is the paradox of it. I don’t know what people were talking about. I was so riveted to this masterpiece of a work, and it is sad to me how little people had their hearts open enough to feel what this was. And I think Mike White should be considered a dream director for working actors out there—how much breadth he allows his characters. Bravo. Thank you.