“Crimson in the credits.” “Feet on the shore in blue water.” “Freeze on waves, dissolve to clouds.” “Golden sun.” “Upside-down swimming.” “Monkey.” “Lizard shadows.” “Orange robes against the sky.” “Floating, water, light, haze, music.” “Slow-motion fire.” “No one is there.” With just a little rearranging, a lot of my notes on this lovely and ominous episode of The White Lotus could be passed off for free-verse poetry, or even haiku. Most of the imagery described above doesn’t even factor into the plot, or of it does so it’s only to establish the emotional timbre of the characters. It’s just creator-writer-director Mike White creating a mood, using composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s distant-thunder score to convey a sense of wonder, or menace. None of it is “necessary,” and art resides in the unnecessary.

Case in point. The episode opens with a dream sequence, a strangely placid nightmare in which Victoria Ratliff, pill bottle in hand and wrapped by hotel staff in a white comforter, walks from her house — transported by dream logic to the shores of Thailand — and into the face of a coming tsunami. It’s immediately apparent something isn’t right here, because for the first time White has made the nighttime look like a True Detective Season 4–style blue haze instead of like, you know, nighttime. But here, it’s a signifier that we’re in the dream world, not that we’re overdoing it on the color grading.

So. Fast forward to later in the episode. As family patriarch Tim visibly decompensates after a torrent of phone calls alerting him to an FBI raid on his offices back home, the rest of the Ratliffs bum around the hotel room. Lochlan loads up footage of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands across the region, including right down the shore from where they’re all currently sitting. With a placid kind of “wow, neat” demeanor, he shows everyone a video of a man who didn’t run from the catastrophe, just standing on the shoreline and waiting for it to hit him like it’s just another day at the beach. 

Victoria, who can probably blame whatever emotions she’s keeping at bay with her pill habit as much as Lochlan’s morbid curiosity for her nightmare, asks him to turn it off, but not before we in the home audience get an eyeful of it. It’s the kind of image that burns into your retina for the rest of the episode. Again, is this necessary? No, not at all. Does it contribute to the overall work? Immeasurably.

This kind of extremely dark and unnerving shit keeps happening throughout the episode. With his mind blown off Thai stick, a cataclysmically stoned Rick attends a local venomous snake show, then races back into the cages to free all the reptiles, getting his girlfriend Chelsea bit in the bargain. (She gets better.) Belinda realizes she recognizes Chloe’s boyfriend “Gary” as Greg, the guy her would-be rich benefactor Tanya ran off with after her boss was murdered back in Season 1, but he stonewalls her when she asks if they’ve met, even though both parties know he’s lying. Fresh off a steamy flirtation with her trainer, Pornchai, Belinda hears strange noises in her room; when the camera cuts to where we last saw Pornchai, he’s now nowhere to be found. 

Rick confesses to his meditation coach Amrita that he’s done a lot of “bad things,” that he’s still grieving for the father he never knew, but that he may be able to get “satisfaction” — presumably by killing Jim, the White Lotus’s still-absent owner, in Bangkok the next day. Jim and his wife Sritala’s bodyguards bully Gaitok the security guard, who is likely going to be fired by milquetoast hotel manager Fabian for failing to stop the break-in the previous day, and who now has to wait until tomorrow to find out his fate. Kate horrifies her friends Jaclyn and Laurie by revealing herself to be what most people who are married to Republican men and who describe themselves as Christian and politically independent really mean, a supporter of Trumpian fascism; Kate in turn is horrified to find that her oldest friends actually think less of her for this. (Maybe she thinks less of herself; it’s unclear.) Lochlan’s pretty clearly trying not to come out of the closet. Almost everyone on the show positively radiates anxiety.

But only almost. Saxon Ratliff is still pretty much just a giant weird guy who thinks Patrick Bateman is cool; he flips out when Tim makes the family hand over their devices (to avoid learning he’s been raided) but calms himself down by flirting with Chloe, “Gary”/Greg’s very unsatisfied sex-worker girlfriend, and by promising to get Lochlan laid. Jaclyn and Kate push Laurie to have a “fling” with Valentin, their hunky energy chakra balancer or whatever he’s called; the chemistry is there, if only because Carrie Coon could have chemistry with a wet newspaper. Rick and Chelsea’s relationship is fascinating: He insults her constantly but clearly cares about her, while she clearly cares about him in spite of his constant insults, like an emotionally dysfunctional “Gift of the Magi” situation. 

Even in the happy places, though, there are notes of discordance. Valentin is made to answer awkward questions about the war in Ukraine. Piper, relentlessly bullied by Saxon, finds that the people she knows at the monastery aren’t there when she comes calling. Chelsea has now experienced her second “brush with death” in as many days, unsinkably optimistic (and endearingly portrayed by Aimee Lou Wood) as she may be. Everything feels off, like we’ve all been smoking that Rick pack.

The thing to understand about this season, it seems, is that it’s no longer a satire. It’s a drama with satirical elements. It’s darker. It’s weirder. It’s more serious. It does dream sequences about tsunamis. It’s not Succession anymore, it’s Mad Men. It may not seem like it, but the gulf between the effects of those styles of writing and directing is cavernous. It’s not that there’s no longer room for humor — watching the stars of Fallout and The Zone of Interest compete to properly pronounce Sritala’s last name is funny, I don’t care who ya are — but it’s not the focus. The focus is deeper.

I get the impression that what is at the very least a vocal minority of White Lotus fans feel, therefore, that the show is slipping. I don’t know what people used to see in it that I didn’t, and I don’t know what I’m seeing in it now that people aren’t, but if you’d hid the title of the show, changed the name of the hotel, and simply screened these first three episodes for me, the only way I’d be able to tell it’s the same series from the same filmmaker is the presence of Greg and Belinda. Otherwise I simply would not have believed you. I mean, that opening scene alone is more interesting than anything that happened in the first two seasons by a comfortable margin. Emotionally, tonally, visually, aurally, it feels like a different show. Maybe that’s why people who were happy with what they’d been getting have soured on it a bit, but it sure is sweet to me. The episode closes with Victoria asking a pilled-out Tim “Is something going on?” The answer, in every sense, is yes.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.