How the HBO show ‘The White Lotus’ ran aground

Crashing waves and flying spray have been the most consistent visual motifs in Mike White's HBO hit The White Lotus, which just wrapped up its third (and by general agreement, weakest) season with a bloody denouement at the Thailand outpost of its titular resort.

- Ross Douthat

And midway through the season we received a direct interpretation of what that watery imagery is supposed to represent from the lips of Luang Por Teera, a Buddhist monk and an ajarn, or teacher, with whom the daughter of one of the wealthy hotel-going families hopes to study.

Queried by the young woman’s father, Tim Ratliff, a North Carolina businessman who is contemplating suicide — indeed, murder-suicide — after discovering that he may be ruined and even headed to prison, about what awaits us after death, the monk answers: “When you are born you are like a single drop of water, flying upward, separated from the one giant consciousness. You get older, you descend back down, you die, you land back into the water, become one with the ocean again. No more separated, no more suffering. One consciousness. Death is a happy return, like coming home”.

This theology doesn’t just neatly interpret the show’s repeated crashing-waves backdrop as human folly, it also makes sense of various specific watery moments and images (spoiler warning) throughout the show. A character in Season 1 taking a step toward enlightenment by ditching his upper-class existence to paddle an outrigger canoe into the deep Pacific after a healing scuba-diving trip with his dad. Another character scattering her mother's ashes into the surf. The deaths that punctuate the first two seasons — each more tragicomic than fully tragic, one ending with a character falling into a bathtub as he bleeds out from an accidental stabbing, the second ending with a character drowned and perhaps at peace in the depths of the Ionian Sea. Landing back into the water on The White Lotus can seem like the best and only escape from the tyranny of ego and desire.