Inside 'The White Lotus' Season 3 Premiere's Deadly Opening

(This story contains major spoilers from the season three premiere of HBO’s The White Lotus.)

While it changes cast and locale from season to season, all editions of The White Lotus have one common denominator: murder. For his third act, creator Mike White has once again invited the grim reaper for a complimentary stay at the resort, and he’s packing deadlier baggage than ever.

Season three, set in a White Lotus resort on the island of Koh Samui in Thailand, opens in the middle of a wellness session between spirituality guru Amrita (Shalini Peiris) and Zion (Nicholas Duvernay), a guest, whose mother Belinda (played by returning star Natasha Rothwell) also works at the hotel, having returned from her stint in the Hawaii-set first season. Amrita leads Zion through a meditation exercise, helping the young man slow and control his breathing.

“Let us calm our chattering monkey minds,” she tells him, “and find in the silence what is timeless.”

It’s almost as relaxing for the viewer as it is for Zion in the moment — except we already know what Zion’s about to find out: somebody’s about to die, as is White Lotus premiere tradition. This time, however, things take a sudden and more dangerous turn than any previous White Lotus openers. Whereas season one opened with a casket being loaded onto an airplane and season two featured a drowned body coming to shore, season three begins with a literal bang. 

Then another bang. And another, and another.

Bullets pierce Amrita’s practice, causing her to get up and run away, while Zion jumps into the shallow waters and hides from what he and viewers are now realizing is an active shooter situation.

He eventually finds himself in front of a Buddha statue, where he briefly prays: “Please let my mom be okay. Please.” As bullets continue to sound out, Zion angrily chides the statue: “I said don’t let anything happen to my mother, mother-fucker!” Furious and afraid in equal measure, Zion watches in horror as an unidentified body floats along past him… and that’s where the action ends, as the rest of the episode snaps back to one week earlier, at the start of a new group of travelers’ fateful vacations.

“It was so exciting to read on the page,” Aimee Lou Wood tells The Hollywood Reporter about reading the deadly scene in White’s script. Wood plays Chelsea, the girlfriend and traveling partner to Walton Goggins’ mysterious character, Rick. “You could read those scripts like a novel. They were so beautifully written. It was so clear immediately and so evocative. I feel like this opening is so heavy, because it’s [centering] Zion, and he’s so pure. It’s a really different opening than [previous seasons], because it instantly pulls on your heartstrings. Zion’s thinking about his mom. He’s thinking about her safety.”

Michelle Monaghan, who plays Jaclyn, a famous guest having a reunion with two girlfriends (played by Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb), explains that the opening scene “immediately taps you into the themes of what season three’s all about: life and death.” She explains, “There’s a duality between light and dark, which you see and know immediately from that first scene. It’s immediately clear what you’re dealing with: there’s a spirituality here in season three, and you’re starting to see some of how it’s represented.”

While the premiere features only one body floating into view, the numerous gunshots — easily a dozen or more — indicate a higher body count at the end of this season than usual. Or, at the very least, the potential to rival season two’s fatal finale, in which the late great Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) single-handedly gunned down an entire boat-full of bad guys before her own truly tragic death. Right now, we can only rule Zion and Amrita out as the shooter (or shooters, if there are multiple), and while either of them could be killed when we pick back up on the scene at the end of the season, they’re the only ones safe from being identified as that floating cadaver. The rest of the premiere does some work highlighting possible murder victims among the cast, including but not limited to:

• Timothy Ratliff, the embattled businessman played by Jason Isaacs, whose entire world seems to be at the mercy of an upcoming Wall Street Journal story;

• Rick Hatchett, played by Goggins, an enigmatic man with an apparent vendetta against one of the White Lotus hotel’s managers;

• Jaclyn Lemon, played by the aforementioned Monaghan, a TV star on a “victory tour” with her two best friends from childhood;

• Belinda, Zion’s mother, the only returning character on the White Lotus cast this season… or so we thought, at least.

By the end of the premiere, we’re reunited with another familiar face: Greg (Jon Gries), Tanya McQuoid’s widower who arranged his wife’s death last season, and now apparently lives at the White Lotus’ Thailand locale. 

White famously does not say much about what’s to come, but the creator did promise a darker season as he planned to explore spirituality, and he even said he would be open to giving viewers more answers around Tanya’s tragic ending and her husband’s involvement. That would be sure to delight Coolidge, who herself told THR after her season two death: “I think Greg should get it. He should definitely have to pay for all the misery he caused Tanya. He should definitely get his comeuppance.”

White, in a feature with THR after season two, said, “It would be easy to just be full-on anthology, but I think it’s more fun to have little threads through the show … I don’t think it needs to always be a body [opening the show]. There are so many ways that we want to reinvent the show each year. Like, what is this show — other than people? A fresh mystery, people maybe expect that. But I don’t feel constrained by expectation.”

So is season three cooking up a slow-simmering vengeance plot against Greg? Is he the HBO drama’s next victim? Only time will tell, with seven episodes still to go before the season three finale.

The White Lotus season three releases new episodes Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO and Max. Follow along with THR’s season coverage.