Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for The White Lotus Season 3 finale.Things must be really heating up at the White Lotus headquarters. After all, the fictional hotel chain that lends its name to Mike White‘s HBO hit series has to be suffering with the number of deaths that have occurred at its idyllic locations over the past five years. Now, don’t get us wrong here. We don’t actually think White Lotus higher-ups are crying their eyes out over the untimely killings of guests and staff members alike, though we’re sure someone must have shed a tear or two over the loss of hotel owner Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn). What we mean is that the White Lotus brand must be suffering, and the chain’s marketing team is surely working day and night to revert all the bad press. Because, when push comes to shove, someone has to be worried about all the corpses piling up at White Lotus resorts, right?
Don’t roll over your eyes just yet. Of course, The White Lotus is a television series and there is a lot of suspension of disbelief involved in getting engaged with it. We just accept that the White Lotus is a very unlucky hotel chain, in which death is always lurking around the corner. Besides, it’s not like hotels in general enjoy a great reputation when it comes to keeping their guests alive. While there are no official statistics about how many people die in hotels each year, these places can be dens of crime, murder, and suicide. Hotels, even the most gorgeous and expensive, are hubs for shady negotiations, gambles, extramarital affairs, and a lot of other things that may end in death. And that’s not to mention the amount of hotels that are believed to be haunted. Still, one has to admit that things are getting a bit ridiculous for the White Lotus. Is it perhaps time for the show to do something about it?
The White Lotus’ Chain of Deaths Gets More Concerning the More It Grows
Granted, the first death — or, at least, the first that we know of — to take place inside a White Lotus was innocent enough, so to speak. When Shane (Jake Lacy) put a pineapple knife through Armond’s (Murray Bartlett) chest, it was nothing but an accident, even though some aggravating circumstances led up to that particularly horrid moment. Still, the White Lotus brand could easily defend itself by claiming Armond’s death was nothing but a freakish occurrence. (Though we have to imagine there was some trash-talking going on about the resort’s lack of security and poor staffing.) Even though he had his motives, Armond was breaking into a guest’s room to, uhm, defecate on his things, and all of that after a robbery had taken place. That is one hell of a PR nightmare!
Things probably got a little worse the following year, when a White Lotus in Italy was hit with the same curse as its Hawaiian counterpart. Okay, “the same” is kind of an understatement. There wasn’t just one death at the White Lotus in Sicily, but four. Fan-favorite character Tanya McQuoid-Hunt (Jennifer Coolidge) fell from a boat, hit her head, and drowned in the Mediterranean minutes after shooting the four men who were allegedly plotting her death on her husband’s behalf. Four bodies were thus found floating by the Sicilian resort, at least two of them belonging to paying guests. (The show never makes it clear whether Bruno Gouery‘s Didier is a guest or merely a friend of Tom Hollander‘s Quentin.)
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By itself, this incident is pretty horrifying but not all that damaging to the hotel’s brand. After all, the deceased did die outside the hotel. Tanya’s body merely floated to the beach, near the spot where one of the other guests was swimming. However, when we add that to Armond’s bizarre killing in Season 1, things start to get a little creepy. You can just picture the news stories going on and on about how this isn’t the first time someone has lost their life at a White Lotus, as well as the conspiracy theorists opening up numerous forum threads to discuss eerie similarities that aren’t even there, to begin with. And when we get to Season 3, things get even worse.
Maybe the White Lotus chain might have found a way to clean up its image after the three years that separate Season 1 from Season 3. Still, nothing could’ve prepared them for what was to come. The most recent finale ends with a body count of five, one of them being the very owner of the chain’s Thailand branch. Honestly, there is no coming back from that. At this point, the White Lotus’ public image is being dragged in the dirt, with op-eds being written about how they can’t even ensure the safety of their own big bosses. Not to mention the fact that it all took place in a very open shootout inside the hotel’s property.
It’s Time for ‘The White Lotus’ to Show the Consequences of this Bloodshed
After all this bloodshed, it is time for The White Lotus to show the consequences of these five years of carnage. Showrunner Mike White should really start considering a plotline that shows how these eerie deaths have affected the chain’s image. Maybe there could be something about the dwindling number of guests, or some scenes devoted to the people actually running the whole White Lotus brand. There could be an arc featuring a group of true crime aficionados going to a White Lotus resort in the hopes of witnessing something macabre. You know, the kind of people who stay at the Cecil Hotel for fun.
There is always the chance that White already has something cooking in his head. He has been scouting locations far from the beach, which might indicate a more urban setting. Perhaps Season 4 will take place at the White Lotus headquarters? Maybe we’ll get to see the mother hotel, where all the magic began. Or perhaps we’ll just get another murder story featuring a bunch of awful rich, white people, but this time somewhere in the Alps. That would be a loss of opportunity. There is a lot of social commentary that can be made through things like marketing and the true crime industry in a season of The White Lotus. And White won’t have to leave his awful rich, white guests behind.
