The second season of “The White Lotus” has concluded, but showrunner Mike White is already planning for the third.
White suggests that Season 3 will be set in Asia and will focus on “death and Eastern religion and spirituality” in the “Unpacking S2 E7” clip tagged at the end of the Season 2 finale.
“Money was kind of the focus of the first season and sex of the second,” White explained. To paraphrase one of the writers, “I imagine the third season will be a satirical and humorous look at death and Eastern religion and spirituality. Repeating my experience at White Lotus has the potential to yield a beautiful tapestry.
White stated to Deadline before Season 2’s premiere, “I think it’d be fun to maybe go to a whole different continent. We’ve already traveled across Europe; perhaps if we did something equally outlandish in Asia, we could have a good time.
A clue to the third season’s setting could be found in the second season’s climax. Cameron (Theo James), Daphne (Meghann Fahy), and Ethan (Will Sharpe) are eating their farewell dinner at the White Lotus in Sicily when Cameron proposes a toast to their friendship and Daphne adds, “Next year, the Maldives!”
White explained the shocking death of Tanya (Coolidge) at the end of the season, saying, “At the end of last season, Tanya is sitting with Greg in the final episode and he’s talking about his health issues. And she says, “I’ve tried every treatment over the years; death is the only total immersion experience I haven’t had.”
To continue, White said, “I was thinking, it’d be so fun to bring Tanya back because she’s such a great character, but maybe that’s the journey for her, a journey to death. Not that I wanted to get rid of Tanya because she’s a great character and Jennifer is awesome, but I figured since we were going to Italy and she’s such a diva (a larger-than-life female archetype), Jennifer and I could come up with our own operatic ending to Tanya’s life and story.
White said he didn’t want Tanya to die because “dying at the hands of someone else felt too tragic,” adding that Tanya “needed to give her best fight back and that she, in a way, had some kind of victory over whoever was conspiring to get rid of her.”
He said, “It made me laugh to think she would like take out this cabal of killers and after she successfully did that, she just dies this derpy death, and it just felt like that’s just so Tanya.”
White said, “It’s possible that Portia [Haley Lu Richardson] is scared enough just to leave it alone, but the fact that all those guys die on the boat, it feels like there’s gotta be somebody who’s going to track it down to Greg” in reference to the plot hatched by Greg (Jon Gries) and Quentin (Tom Hollander) to kill Tanya. The outcome, however, may be something you have to wait for.
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