Season 3 was kind of a disappointment for me. The storyline with the three blonde women ate up lots of screentime and didn't go anywhere. The end result of their week at the resort is that they're frenemies just like when they arrived, except that now they've seen a man get shot right in front of them... Except any reaction to that happening is offscreen after the season ends.
The Ratliff storyline was slow, aimless, and didn't ultimately go anywhere. Especially annoying were the edgy cutaway sequences where Tim would kill himself/others that were obviously shown to try to shock the audience in a cheap way. The wife didn't react at all to not having her pills except occasionally complaining (a
criminal waste of expository potential imo. They should've shown her struggling with her unmedicated feelings and flying off the handle or something). Dealing with poverty was the biggest growth experience for any of them, and it was essentially reduced to a few seconds in the ending montage of Tim at a monastery. Like the blonde women, the big stuff happening to those characters is delayed until the show is already over.
The Russians being responsible for the breakin is also a complete loose end. Gaitok knows, and he and Valentin kind of discuss it, but the show never confirms that Gaitok does nothing or whatever. And the Mook/Gaitok relationship gets concluded by 5 seconds in the ending montage.
In all, S3 felt like they wrote the Rick revenge narrative first as some kind of "epic conclusion", and worked everything else around it to the detriment of the characters/narratives surrounding it. If I could change the show, I would cut the blonde women from the season entirely, and make the shootout happen an episode or two before the end so that all narrative loose ends that got put in the montage could be concluded properly.
Some other nitpicks:
- Belinda feels like a Mary Sue to me. There's no reason that Pornchai (who is out of her league) falls in love with her, and every detail of her story is pretty much her being an unambiguous good guy who wins.
- In the closing montage, Belinda and Zion seem totally unbothered by the shootout, and are just in "happy vacation time" mode despite Zion pretty clearly being shaken up in the opening scene.
- Piper's whole storyline felt more like exposition than plot to me.
- Rick and Chelsea don't feel very realistic to me. In particular, they talk about how the two of them used to have so much fun together or whatever, but Rick is never shown as anything but joyless and low energy. Chelsea is a manic pixie dream girl stereotype pretty much down to the letter.
- Frank falls back into drugs and debauchery, and the reason is... He had to flatter an old Thai lady for a few minutes? No clear reason is given for him breaking 10 months of celibacy/sobriety.
- Tim's contact in Brunei gets scooped up by the authorities, but they really can't get to Tim in Thailand?
- Tim is dopey and drugged out almost the whole time, and all that results in is the occasional comment that he seems out of it. (And maybe it made him more impressionable for the Buddhist monk, but him becoming Buddhist or whatever is, yet again, all offscreen.
- Saxon's development felt very unnatural to me.
- Nobody addresses or even mentions Lachlan's near death experience. Is he not even a little curious about why eating a protein shake randomly almost killed him?
- Similarly, the Ratliffs completely DGAF about being present for the shootout when they're on the boat at the end.
Really halfass season compared to S2 (haven't seen S1). Didn't help that half the fucking show was random footage of sloshing seawater or rustling trees.
