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Photo: Fabio Lovino/HBO

After two and a half years, we’re checking back in at our favorite luxury hotel, this time in Thailand, where, as usual, everything seems bent on going wrong. We already know where this is all leading: a shooting at the resort in broad daylight, with at least one body floating in the water. The constellation of potential victims and/or perpetrators is colorful and star-studded: the southern family, the cutie locals, the middle-age blonde friends, the unhappy age-gap couple, the healer from Maui. Foils in different groups presented themselves as possible friends or foes as tensions started to simmer and affinities began to sparkle. If previous seasons are any indication, all the threads of the central mystery are already laid out — along with a whole lot of red herrings. (Will those poisonous fruits matter?) Read the full recap here. 

By Emily Gould, features writer, the Cut

Photo: Fabio Lovino/HBO

Laurie (Carrie Coon), Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), and Kate (Leslie Bibb) are on their “victory tour” in Thailand, which is not a “midlife-crisis vacation,” noooo, not at all! They’ve been friends forever, but Jaclyn is the one funding their stay chez Lotus — she’s a successful actress who’s just met the love of her life. Kate has her kids and her beautiful homes and her rich husband. And Laurie, well, it’s just “so brave … what she does … in the corporate world,” Jaclyn says, attempting to follow her genuinely enthusiastic performance review of Kate’s life with, well, anything to say about Laurie. It’s fun to see Carrie Coon in a role that’s the exact opposite of tightly corseted, new-rich Gilded Ager Bertha Russell — her hair is frizzing in the humidity, she takes the bottle of white wine to bed, she bursts into an ugly cry when Kate and Jaclyn hang out without her. Of the three of them, Living Instagram Profile Kate seems like she’s the Winner this week. Even though Jaclyn is famous, she doesn’t have kids, and she’s IN HER 40S. The tabloids in this parallel universe have probably been running stories about her barrenness for at least a decade now. But as we know from having watched this show and indeed any show before, what goes up must come down, so expect these rankings to shift next week. 

By Jasmine Vojdani, newsletter editor, New York

Photo: Fabio Lovino/HBO

We recruited expert ear–slash–dialect coach Elisa Carlson to watch the Ratliffs’ introductory scenes. Here she explains what, exactly, is going on with Posey’s southern drawl. 

Tell me what you’re hearing. 

You may find it hard to believe, but I know people that talk like Parker Posey in this. I think she's doing very wealthy mid-southern North Carolina. She grew up in Louisiana and Mississippi and there's always a little bit of southern if you listen to her — at least I'll pick up little sounds here and there. Here she sounds very upper-crust, wealthy, very “I have nothing to worry about in my life but when my next nail appointment is.” And that oversharing, really wide mouth — we talk about how a fly could fly in and out. There's a flatness to the I’s, which is very North and South Carolina. She's definitely taking it to an extreme, but I would say, I know those people, y’all — when you do long vowels, you're oversharing emotion and things people don't really need to know. There’s a hard R in those mountainous, Appalachian kind of states, but it's also kind of a giveaway. The harder the R gets, it sneaks in that maybe she was a little working-class at one point. 

She's almost like on Valium, isn’t she? It's so relaxed and funny. My guess is we're going to find out further in the episodes why she sounds the way she does, because right now it does sound a little bit tipsy. But then again, there is that kind of “wealthy country club that never has had a worry in their life and they just take their time with what they say and they think everybody's interested in what they have to say.” She is nailing it, as we would expect. 

That's so good to know, because some of us were just like, “Is that a real accent?” 

It sounds very convincing to me, having known those people. We've never really seen Parker Posey do that before. But she grew up in the South and I’m sure has done her research and then pushed it on the dial two notches to camp — because this show allows for that. I would imagine most Americans don't know people that sound like that, but she exists! That lady's out there somewhere.

And you’re absolutely right, by the way. She is popping pills.

That’s what it sounded like to me. On pills or on any kind of medication; if she slows down, it’s just gonna get more syrupy. Like maple syrup everywhere. 

I just knew you would nail this.

Yeah, it's my people. And Jason Isaacs is doing fine. He’s believably in her world but not the same personality type. There are plenty of people that would just talk southern like that. Hard Ahs and the harder Rs. And the fact that their kids don’t sound like that is not unusual.

Is the internet to blame for that?

Some people think so. Some people think it isn't the internet, just a natural drift away. Some people think they're trying to sound like their peers or video games or whatever star they like. But for the parents to still be living in that really means they've never left their core nest. They still sound like they did when they were little. These kids may have had more of a dialect when they were little, but as they've grown up and maybe gone to a place where they mixed with a lot of people that weren't from the South, they switch that out.

I think Jason sounds a bit Australian at times in that scene with the Aussie hotel employee.

It would be very easy to get pulled into that. Parker Posey's obviously steeped in that culture and so skillful. If you're not used to it and you get put in a scene with an Australian and you're a Brit, it’s going to pull you right into that. 

By Cat Zhang, culture writer, the Cut

It’s not The White Lotus without a noxious alpha male who gives you the heebie-jeebies. This season, we get Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger), douchebag eldest son stepping into the power vacuum in his moneyed, dysfunctional North Carolina family. Mom is busy conking out on Lorazepam and Dad won’t get off his phone, so Saxon has taken it upon himself to meddle in his siblings’ business. He is a hornier Patrick Bateman, a hard-core gym bro obsessed with getting his pump in in more ways than one. He’s also a pest who seems a little too interested in his siblings in the wrong way. It's only been one episode, and the vibes are already rancid. 

For now, though, Saxon is just enjoying himself and getting his lifts in. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s probably blowing off steam to big-tent EDM, in true finance-bro fashion. (Fred again.. is almost too niche for him.) Maybe he’s thrown a few pop hits on his playlist, things he heard Ubering home from the office. He thinks old Kanye is still GOAT, and though he might have been a Drake guy before, of course he’s Team Kendrick. Makes sense: He definitely seems like the type of guy to shout “certified loverboy, certified pedophile” too loudly on the Stairmaster to see the irony.

See the full playlist here.

By Nicholas Quah

Photo: HBO

It’s White Lotus season once again, and you know what that means: sun, hospitality, death, and sexcapades — this time, in Thailand! As always, a buffet of delicious mysteries awaits us: What’s with the active shooter? Does the ultimate girls’ trip end in murder? Why is the vibe between those three siblings so weird? Why is Walton Goggins so sweaty? How do I feel the way Parker Posey feels all the time?

Such macabre bacchanalia is the stuff we’ve come to love and expect from our visits to the most cursed luxury-hotel chain of all time. But you know what is much less expected? That MCU-style reveal near the end of the premiere, when a scene-stealing Aimee Lou Wood, who plays Goggins’s significantly younger girlfriend, strikes up a conversation with a fellow age-gap paramour at the hotel bar. “Honestly, he’s so fucking boring I almost don’t even care,” says the new drinking buddy played by Charlotte Le Bon, bonding over their respective shitty older boyfriends. That’s when the camera cuts past her shoulder, and we see a familiar face …

… It’s Greg! Good ol’ Greg, staring off into the abyss. What’s his deal again? Great question. In case you didn’t spend the past week revisiting the last season in preparation for our Southeast Asian sojourn, click below for a little FAQ.

By Jessica M. Goldstein

Photo: Courtesy of HBO

The White Lotus Kill Or Be Killed Report is a weekly check-in with the guests and employees at this cursed hotel chain to speculate who’s most likely to murder, and/or end up murdered.

➽ Victoria Ratliff (Parker Posey)

Parker Posey being on The White Lotus feels … incredibly correct. Always a pleasure to see our favorite party girl doing a Big Accent™. Love the way she hits those vowels in “Aah wuz also a TAHR-heel.” I am aware that alumni of both Duke and UNC will have very strong feelings about the way they are being represented on this program, the former by a hard-driving white-collar-criminal father and the latter by a pill-popping, zonked-out, chill-with-sexism-because-her-family-is-so-gorgeous mom, and I look forward to seeing your respective defenses in the comments.

Will she kill or be killed? Hard to imagine someone on so much lorazepam rousing herself for a killing spree, but in her defense, she’s still jet-lagged. I wouldn’t count her out just yet.

➽ Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs)

Timothy does NOT want to be in a “digital-detox zone,” okay????? He is missing IMPORTANT calls from The Wall Street Journal. It’s probably nothing! Definitely nothing weird going on with his old business partner, Kenny, and their investments (?) in Brunei! On the boat — which is to say, like, .02 minutes into this vacation — he gets into some dumb aggro-dude fight with Rick, and their chemistry does not improve on land. The odds of one of them trying to kill the other before this week is out feel pretty high to me.

Will he kill or be killed? He for sure seems like someone who could kill. This, however, makes me think we are being set up to expect him to be a homicidal maniac when, actually, he is a victim of someone else’s homicidal mania.

We'll be back next Monday for episode two. In the meantime, send us your theories, questions, rants, and suggestions for what you'd like to see in this newsletter at thewhitelotusclub@nymag.com.

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