'White Lotus' Recap Season 3 Episode 1: Greg Surprise Return ...

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “The White Lotus” Season 3, Episode 1, now streaming on Max.

Check-in has begun at “The White Lotus” in Thailand.

As is tradition, the third season of Mike White’s HBO dramedy opens with a mysterious dead body, shown in a flash forward that takes place one week after the vacationers arrive on the Thai island of Koh Samui.

A young man’s meditation session is interrupted by gunshots, some of which pierce the windows of the wellness center. He ducks for cover and then jumps into a pond, praying to a Buddha statue for the safety of his mother. (We piece together that his mom is Belinda, the Season 1 spa manager who traveled from Hawaii to learn the tricks of the trade in Thailand.) As hotel guests panic, he sees a dead body floating in the water, face down.

One week earlier, a boatful of American tourists heads toward the island. The parties are introduced one by one. There’s the young and bubbly Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) with her grumpy older boyfriend Rick (Walton Goggins), who is inexplicably miserable (and smoking). There’s the Ratliffs, a Southern family who traveled to Thailand so one of the kids can interview a monk for her college thesis paper. And there’s Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Laurie (Carrie Coon), childhood friends on a reunion trip.

Each group of travelers presents interesting dynamics and tensions that will surely be pried open, explored and — knowing White — taken to disturbing extremes in future episodes. For example, it’s not yet clear why Rick is so irritable, but he keeps inquiring about one of the owners of the resort. The owner’s wife, the glamorous Sritala (Lek Patravadi), is the face of the resort as her husband recovers from a stroke in Bangkok.

Over at the Ratliff suite, a pushy hotel staffer attempts to get the family to surrender their cell phones. It’s not going to happen. Daddy Timothy (Jason Isaacs) is a high-powered finance executive who also employs his douchey son Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger, with notes of Jake Lacy from Season 1). Screw the resort’s personalized wellness plans and emphasis on unplugging — the guys can’t afford to miss a work call, or hit the gym without music. Victoria (Parker Posey, doing a perfectly ridiculous Southern accent) can’t seem to overcome her jet lag, and Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) is planning to head down the beach to see a Buddhist temple for her research. Lochlan (Sam Nivola), the baby of the bunch, is stuck in the middle of his siblings. A high school senior, he’s deciding between Duke (where Timothy and Saxon went) and UNC Chapel Hill (where Victoria and Piper went). And, on a more existential level, he’s caught between the lifestyle of his older brother, who cares only about making money and getting women, and that of his sister, whose curiosity about the world at large has alienated her from a rather self-centered family. The sibling dynamic is already weird: late at night, Saxon asks Lochlan what type of porn he likes, then gets fully nude in front of him. Hey Lochlan, why aren’t you looking away? 

Meanwhile, the girls trip is already on a low simmer. Right away, Jaclyn and Kate gush over each others’ agelessness. “You look incredible.” No, “You look incredible.” Guys, Laurie is sitting right there! Jaclyn, a successful television actress, footed the bill for her two pals, who promise to cover their own treatments (and some of Jaclyn’s). Neither of them seem to be struggling — Kate is married to a prominent businessman, and Laurie has climbed the corporate ladder — but there are delicious social dynamics bubbling up beneath the surface. Jaclyn and Kate bond over their plastic surgeons and personal accomplishments, but neither of them can muster up real praise for Laurie except for “everything you do is just so hard.” After a long day of catching up over white wine, Laurie heads off to bed first. Peering out at her two friends, both presenting to be happier than her, she lets out a feral whimper. It’s going to be a long vacation.

There’s a tender love story (or one-sided heartbreak) brewing between a pair of the hotel staffers, health mentor Mook (Lalisa Manoban, better known as Lisa from the band Blackpink) and security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong). When her motorbike breaks down on the side of the road, he gives her a lift. He’s shooting his shot with her, but she’s more smitten by Sritala’s bodyguards, who make more money and get to travel the world. She playfully reduces Gaitok’s job to “watching cars driving in and out,” but he reminds her that he saved a drowning man two years ago.

The first hint of things going wrong — at the White Lotus, they always do — is when Timothy starts getting contacted by journalists. (I love my compatriots in the press, but it’s probably not a good sign to get several missed calls from one of us while on vacation.) Timothy is blindsided when a reporter tells him he’s writing an investigative piece on one of his former associates, Kenneth, with whom he started a fund in 2018. It sounds like there’s some shady stuff going on with the fund and the government of Brunei. Timothy tells the journalist that he hasn’t spoken to Kenny in four years, but once he’s off the phone he immediately leaves his old pal a message. We have no reason, yet, to believe Timothy is a bad guy, but there’s a look of guilt plastered on his face after Victoria, in bed, reminds him how great of a man he is.

Alone at the bar, Chelsea meets a young woman named Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon). She’s not staying at the resort, rather she lives at the top of the hill with her boyfriend, another grumpy, older guy. An “LBH,” as she says: Loser Back Home. She motions to her man, sitting alone at a table. This isn’t any old Loser Back Home. It’s Greg. Yes, that Greg, the Jon Gries character who started dating Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya McQuoid back at the White Lotus in Hawaii, then married her and plotted to have her murdered and inherit her fortune in Sicily. He collaborated with the “evil gays” in Season 2 to wine, dine and then whack his wife, but Tanya ended up killing them all on a yacht before falling to her death, knocking her head on a dinghy boat and wasting away in the Ionian Sea.

White had a trick up his sleeve, as Gries was not previously announced as a cast member for Season 3. He doesn’t say a word in the premiere episode, but his presence alone sets up interesting potential conflicts, specifically with Belinda. Will she recognize him from Maui? Does she even know Tanya is dead?

For now, the sun is down and the monkeys are howling. But there are plenty more days in paradise.