This post contains spoilers for the Season 3 finale of The White Lotus.
Who dies on the White Lotus finale? The doomed lovers Rick (Walton Goggins) and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), for starters, as well as Rick’s estranged father, Jim (Scott Glenn), and a couple of unnamed security guards. But though the show’s third season, like the two before it, is built around the question of who would end up in a body bag, an even worse fate awaits the other characters: They live.
Rick and Chelsea, at least, get what they wanted, if in a glibly ironic way. Rick came to Thailand to kill the man who killed his father, only to learn, too late, that the shady American businessman he’d been raised to believe was his father’s murderer is actually the man himself—and so, by putting two bullets in Jim’s chest, Rick becomes, like a time traveler in a middle-school brain teaser, the person he had sought all along: his own father’s killer. Rick promised Chelsea they’d be together forever, but forever turns out to be a matter of minutes: She gets caught in the crossfire and dies in his arms, her eyes popped open in confusion. He scoops up her body and starts to walk away, knowing the security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) has a gun at his back. And so, Rick ensures his own death—the death of the man who killed his father—and fulfills Chelsea’s final pledge: “If something bad happens to you, it happens to me.”
Creator Mike White, who opened The White Lotus’ first season with a coffin and its second with a waterlogged corpse, had effectively promised more bloodshed in its third, upping the stakes with a volley of distant gunfire that took a leisurely eight hours to find its target. Over the course of the series, White has increasingly used his fatal flash-forwards to relieve himself of the obligations of plot, a tactic the third season indulges to a fault. Its last episode strains to remind viewers of what had happened in its first, like the introduction of a poisonous “suicide tree” whose fruit nearly becomes the instrument of an entire family’s annihilation. The symbolic macaques are back in force, howling in the jungle as a reminder of humanity’s primal urges—and in case that weren’t clear enough, Rick, who briefly thought he’d slaked his thirst for revenge, tells Chelsea that he’s gotten “the monkey off my back.” But bringing things full circle in the final episode only underlines the feeling that the show has largely been running in place, ending up with too many of its characters right back where they started.
Then again, perhaps that’s the point. While Piper Ratliff (Sarah Catherine Hook) dragged her entire family from North Carolina to Thailand so she could secretly join a Buddhist retreat, she doesn’t seem to have absorbed one of the religion’s most important tenets: that life without enlightenment is an endless cycle of suffering. The Ratliffs believe themselves to be part of a different kind of cycle, a generation-spanning wheel of fortune that always bears them upwards. Patriarch Timothy (Jason Isaacs) is the grandson of a North Carolina governor who’s inherited both his riches and his social capital, a prominent citizen who’d already made a killing in finance before opting into an associate’s money-laundering scheme, a bid for wealth he doesn’t need but couldn’t resist chasing. As the Ratliffs arrive for their luxury vacation, at a branch of the hotel devoted to physical and spiritual wellness, Timothy discovers he’s been caught out and is on the verge of losing everything—not just his money and his position but the reputation his family spent generations building, and that he intends to pass on to his children. He’s panicked about the idea of being destitute, but he seems more concerned about what the loss will do to the people who’ve come to depend on him, especially his pampered wife, Victoria (Parker Posey), and his eldest son, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), who’s already followed his father into the family business. After a week of concealing the news from his family with the help of the resort’s phone-free policy, Timothy spends their last night mixing up a batch of poisonous piña coladas, laced with the pulverized seeds of the pong-pong tree. Victoria has already volunteered that she’d rather be dead than destitute, Saxon would be helpless without the family name to rely on, and despite her intent to free herself from worldly attachments, it only takes one night in the monastery for Piper to realize she can’t live without organic vegetables and air conditioning. All of which brings Timothy, who’s been gobbling his wife’s lorazepam since he first got the bad news, to the conclusion that he’d sooner kill his entire family than be responsible for forcing them to life a life without extreme economic privilege.
Timothy exempts his youngest son, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), from his murder–suicide plans, because the boy tells his dad he’d be able to live with nothing. But—more irony!—it’s Lochlan who almost dies in the finale. As his family sips the fatal, fruity cocktails, Timothy has a change of heart and slaps the glasses from their hands, but he leaves the remnants of his concoction in the blender, and Lochlan, a spindly, soft-faced teen who both idolizes and lusts after his gym-rat brother, doesn’t bother to dump out the remnants before making himself one of Saxon’s muscle-building protein shakes. (Toxic masculinity has never been so literal.) The powdery sludge doesn’t make him a man, but it does almost kill him, bringing him near enough to death that, as he tells his father after his miraculous, and none-too-plausible, recovery, he thinks he saw God.
The season’s characters have all been searching for meaning, having achieved a level of material comfort that most people spend their entire lives striving for, and discover that it doesn’t make them any more fulfilled. Laurie (Carrie Coon), who’s come for the week with her childhood friends Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) and Kate (Leslie Bibb), says in a climatic and uncommonly introspective monologue that she tried making a religion of work, then love, then motherhood, but none of them filled the void inside her—nor it turns out, does her one-night stand with a hot Russian lowlife, who post-coitally hits her up for $10,000 and then coaxes her out the window when his enraged girlfriend shows up. But she’s realized that what gives her life meaning isn’t some external entity: It’s time, specifically the decades she’s known her oldest friends. The three women have spent much of the week sniping at one another, often gathering in pairs to talk about the absent third behind her back. But that criticism, Laurie realizes, can also be their strength, as long as it’s delivered to the person’s face. “People judge you for your superficial defects,” she tells Jacyln and Kate, “but you guys judge me for my profound defects.”
In a universe where so many people are striving to be something they’re not, there’s power in being seen, even if not so pleasantly, for what you really are. But it’s easier to live with your defects when you’ve got money to live on. Gaitok isn’t so lucky, and neither is Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the White Lotus spa manager who’s been struggling to launch her own business since the show’s first season. The naive, good-hearted Gaitok isn’t cut out to be a security guard—he lets a trio of gun-wielding thugs rob the hotel’s jewelry store without putting up a fight, and he hesitates when his boss suggests they should start carrying firearms of their own—but he’s got a crush on his co-worker Mook (Lalisa Manobal), who’s only interested in more aggressive men. His nonviolent leanings, rooted in religious faith, are righteous, but they’re an impediment to both his career and his love life, so he overrides them, and winds up shooting the defenseless Rick in the back—not out of vengeance or a desire for justice, but because his screaming boss tells him to. When we last see him in the season’s closing montage, he’s finally secured a coveted bodyguard job, but at the expense of his soul—the only thing he possessed that was worth anything. Belinda, meanwhile, takes a hefty bribe to cover up the fact that Greg (Jon Gries) has been hiding out in Thailand since arranging the murder of his wealthy ex-wife Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge)—the same Tanya who, in the show’s first season, reneged on a promise to help Belinda start her own business. Egged on by her son Zion (Nicholas Duvernay), a newly minted business major who’s emerged from school with the conviction that Langston Hughes’ “dream deferred” can be measured by the zeroes in your bank account, she takes Greg’s payout and practically squeals with joy—she’d called it “blood money,” but that was before she realized how much money it was.
Zion, trying to put his degree to work, turns the conversation to Belinda’s startup, but her first impulse is to luxuriate in her ill-gotten gains: “Can I just be rich for five fucking minutes?” she snaps. After all, as Victoria Ratliff argues when she’s trying to keep her daughter from renouncing earthly desires, the rich have an obligation to enjoy their privilege. “No one in the history of the world has lived better than we have,” Victoria says, and she’s right—the “old kings and queens” may have lived in castles, but they didn’t have central air. But that privilege can only be enjoyed in a self-imposed vacuum. Five minutes is all it takes Belinda to become the kind of casually cruel rich person who once capsized her dreams. Just as Tanya waved and withdrew her offer of financial backing, Belinda abruptly abandons her plan to start a business, and possibly a life, with a Thai colleague. Just hours before the direct deposit hits, the pair were beaming at each other like giddy schoolchildren, but as soon as she’s capable of making it on her own, she’s on the next boat out, bidding him adieu with all the intimacy of a form letter.
If Belinda’s life was disrupted by losing Tanya’s money in the first season, the show suggests it might have been ruined by finally getting it. Privilege, in The White Lotus’ world and in our own, is a test of character that most people fail, a freedom we’re meant to strive for, but one we’re given precious little guidance on how to exercise if we’re lucky enough to get it. Mike White hasn’t come up with anything more to say on the subject since his first attempt, but he’s grown more steadfast in his despair, and less willing to countenance the possibility that people can do good while doing well. His high-end hotels have started to feel less like exotic getaways than they are deathtraps, and not just for the people who end up getting shot. In the past, the occasional character might slip the noose, riding an outrigger into the sunset or just stealing away for a self-fulfilling tryst. But by the third go-round, there’s no real chance of escape for his pampered narcissists, which makes the season feel, in retrospect, like an extended Sisyphean gag. By the time they check in, it’s already too late—for them, and for us.
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