The ULTIMATE Betrayal: Inside the DEADLY Opening Scene of 'The White Lotus' Season 3 - SPOILER ALERT!

While the actors and location vary from season to season, all editions of The White Lotus share one constant theme: murder. For his third act, author Mike White has once again invited the grim reaper for a gratis stay at the resort, and he is bringing deadlier luggage than ever.

Leslie Bibb, Michelle Monaghan and Carrie Coon in season three.

HBO

Season three, set in a White Lotus resort on the Thai island of Koh Samui, begins with a wellness session between spirituality guru Amrita (Shalini Peiris) and Zion (Nicholas Duvernay), a guest whose mother Belinda (played by returning star Natasha Rothwell) also works at the hotel and has returned from her stint in the Hawaii-set first season. Amrita guides Zion through a meditation technique that helps him calm down and manage his breathing.

"Let us calm our chattering monkey minds," she tells him, "and find in the silence what is timeless."

It's nearly as comfortable for the spectator as it is for Zion in the moment — except that we already know what Zion is going to discover: someone is likely to die, as is customary at White Lotus premieres. This time, however, things take a more unexpected and hazardous turn than in previous White Lotus openings. Whereas season one began with a casket being carried into an airplane and season two with a drowned body arriving at beach, season three started with a literal boom. 

Then, another bang. And then another.

Bullets pierce Amrita's practice, prompting her to get up and flee, while Zion jumps into the shallow waters to hide from what he and the audience now realize is an active shooter scenario.

He ultimately finds himself in front of a Buddha statue, where he momentarily prays, "Please let my mother be OK. Please." As bullets continue to fly, Zion yells at the statue: "I said don't let anything happen to my mother, mother-fucker!" Zion is both furious and terrified as he witnesses an unidentifiable body drift by him... And that's where the action stops, as the rest of the show takes us back one week earlier, to the commencement of a new set of tourists' disastrous holidays.

"It was so exciting to read on the page," Aimee Lou Wood told The Hollywood Reporter of the tragic sequence in White's script. Wood plays Chelsea, the girlfriend and traveling companion of Walton Goggins' mysterious character, Rick. "You could read those scripts like a novel. They were so beautifully written. It was so clear immediately and so evocative. I feel like this opening is so heavy, because it's [centering] Zion, and he's so pure. It’s a really different opening than [previous seasons], because it instantly pulls on your heartstrings. Zion's thinking about his mom. He's thinking about her safety."

Michelle Monaghan, who plays Jaclyn, a renowned visitor enjoying a reunion with two pals (Carrie Coon and Leslie Bibb), added that the first scene "immediately taps you into the themes of what season three's all about: life and death." She continued, "There's a dualism between brightness and dark that you see and understand from the first moment. It's instantly evident what you're dealing with: spirituality is there in season three, and you're beginning to understand how it's expressed."

While just one body is visible in the opener, the multiple gunshots — likely a dozen or more — predict a greater body count by the season's conclusion than normal. At the very least, it has the potential to surpass season two's devastating ending, in which the late great Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) single-handedly shot out an entire boatload of bad men before her untimely demise. Right now, we can rule out Zion and Amrita as the shooter (or shooters, if there are others), and while one of them may be murdered when we return to the scene at the conclusion of the season, they're the only ones who won't be recognized as the floating cadaver. The remainder of the premiere does some work showcasing potential murder victims among the cast, including but not limited to:

• Timothy Ratliff, the troubled businessman played by Jason Isaacs, whose entire life appears to be at the mercy of an approaching Wall Street Journal piece;

• Rick Hatchett, played by Goggins, is an intriguing man with an apparent grudge against one of the White Lotus hotel managers.

• The aforementioned Monaghan played Jaclyn Lemon, a TV personality on a "victory tour" with her two childhood best friends;

• Belinda, Zion's mother, is the lone returning character from the White Lotus cast this season, or so we thought.

By the end of the premiere, THR reconnected with another old face: Greg (Jon Gries), Tanya McQuoid's widower, who orchestrated his wife's death last season and now seems to dwell in the White Lotus' Thailand location. 

White has not revealed much about the upcoming season, but has promised to investigate spirituality and provide more insight into Tanya's terrible ending and her husband's role. After her season two death, Coolidge told THR, "I think Greg should get it." This would undoubtedly please her. He should be held accountable for all of Tanya's anguish. He should certainly suffer his comeuppance.

In a post-season two interview, White said, "It would be easy to just be full-on anthology, but I think it's more fun to have little threads through the show... I don't believe it has to constantly be a corpse [starting the performance]. There are several ways we aim to reinvent the presentation each year. What is this program about, except people? People may expect a fresh mystery. But I don't feel restricted by expectations."

So, is season three developing a slow-burning retribution plan against Greg? Is he the next victim in the HBO drama? Only time will tell, with seven episodes remaining before the season three conclusion.