‘The White Lotus’ Season 3 Premiere Recap: Thai Up

Season 3, Episode 1: ‘Same Spirits, New Forms’

Take a moment. Focus on your breathing. Calm your mind. Let the sounds of the external world fade away. Did you just hear gunshots? Ignore them. Embrace the now. Find in your minds what is timeless. Pay no attention to the corpse floating by you.

If you watched either of the previous two seasons of the HBO hit “The White Lotus,” you probably were not surprised to see Season 3 kick off with a dead body. This show is effectively an anthology drama, with each new edition following a different set of rich tourists and well-meaning service industry employees at high-end international resorts. The writer-director Mike White has developed a sturdy blueprint for this series, combining beautiful locations, talented actors, dark social satire, gentle humanism and just a little bit of mystery. Think “Fantasy Island,” but with a TV-MA twist.

Because White takes his time establishing characters and telling their stories, he hooks the audience in the opening minutes of each season with a tease of where the plot is headed. Someone — as yet unidentified — is going to die. Please stay tuned.

In the Season 3 premiere at least, this formula retains plenty of pop. We begin in a sun-dappled Thailand jungle, where one of the White Lotus chain’s wellness-centered seaside getaways is nestled among thick groves of trees filled with monkeys and wild birds. There, a stress-management session is interrupted by some loud pops and a cadaver. And away we go, rewinding to the start of the story, one week earlier.

Once again, White has assembled a stellar cast, easily sorted into four different groups who will all, no doubt, interact before the season’s over.

The largest is the Ratliff family, North Carolina blue bloods led by Timothy (Jason Isaacs), a business bigwig with no interest in any of the resort’s spiritual healing exercises. Parker Posey plays Tim’s wife, Victoria, a brassy belle who thinks everything her children do is a hoot. Patrick Schwarzenegger plays the eldest son, Saxon, a beefy finance bro who works for Tim and is on a constant hunt for sexual partners. Sarah Catherine Hook is Piper, the daughter, a University of North Carolina student working on a thesis project about eastern religions (and who is the reason the other Ratliffs are, semi-reluctantly, in Thailand). And Sam Nivola is the youngest son, Lochlan, a high school senior who just got into Duke but isn’t sure he wants to follow in his father’s and brother’s heavy footsteps.