The Season Three finale of The White Lotus aired Sunday night, finally answering the season-long question: Who the heck dies in the end? Fans believed from Episode One that at least one character would die in a shooting, and as in Seasons One and Two, each episode slowly (this time, much more slowly) built to the anticipated climax, leaving breadcrumbs both real and sometimes intentionally misleading. Well, we finally got our answer — but only to that one specific plot point: who dies. Despite the finale’s 90-minute runtime, it left many fans (read: many here at Rolling Stone) with more questions than answers. For example, was a “Luke, I am your father” subplot really necessary? Especially without the “I am your father” reveal?
If you’re wondering if creator Mike White is bothered by anyone who has complaints about the finale, he’s not. “If you don’t want to go to bed with me, get out of my bed. I’m edging you! Enjoy the edging! If you don’t want to be edged, get out of my bed. Don’t be a bossy bottom,” White said in the White Lotus aftershow podcast after seeing some initial reactions to the finale.
Regardless, here are a few of our lingering questions from Season Three:
Early on in the season, Kate interrupts Victoria at breakfast and tries to find common ground when she reminds her that they share a mutual friend. Apparently, the two women even attended said friend’s weekend-long baby shower (yeah, apparently that’s a thing). The moment becomes incredibly awkward when Victoria refuses to match Kate’s excitement about the run-in, or even admit that they’d met before. Even when Lochlan asks his mom about her “standoffish” attitude, Victoria doesn’t give much of an explanation. It’s such a strange encounter that brought on a flurry of questions. What was Victoria hiding? What happened at this three-day baby shower? Who is the friend, Claire Popovich, really? None of these queries were answered. Some fans online want to argue the scene was included for “character development,” but the interaction certainly doesn’t square with the gauzily polite lorazepam queen known for her “good values” and Southern charm.
Tim Ratliff goes from upstanding businessman and dad to raging benzo addict over the course of approximately six days. Upon taking one (1) pill, he is instantly hooked, then proceeds to choke down several of his wife’s pills at a time, several times a day, all seemingly from the same pill bottle. Does Victoria’s doctor offer bottomless refills like a Dave & Buster’s for psychopharmacology? Also, Victoria, a known lorazepam dependent herself, handles the disappearance of a Scarface-drug-bust amount of pills by inquiring about them exactly… once. Then she seems to be fine, while Tim is wandering around the seventh circle of hell, mumbling and squishing suicide fruit with his bare hands in desperation. (Side note: Lorazepam manufacturers should probably take issue with the fact that this all suggests the drug doesn’t, like, work very well?) Hey buddy, reach into that bottle for a few more chill pills, would ya? Surely there are a few left.
We here at Rolling Stone do not claim to be medical doctors. Still, we assume that if you need to seek medical attention after suffering a mere allergic reaction, you most CERTAINLY need to seek medical attention after consuming actual poison. Not only is the pong pong tree a very real tree with poisonous fruit on it, but according to the trusty internet, even a small amount of the fruit can be fatal. The severity of one’s reaction can vary, but considering Lochlan drank an entire glass of the stuff and was literally puking and passed out by the pool, hallucinating drowning as his family and then a group of monks look on, his reaction seemed pretty darn severe. But cut to a few scenes later, and Lochlan is awake in his dad’s arms, declaring he’s just seen God. His dad, obviously happy that he didn’t accidentally murder his son, is in tears at Lochlan’s recovery, but at no point does he appear to call a doctor. (Also, it seems no one heard him scream “help” several times.) Mere hours later, Lochlan is on a boat with the rest of his family heading home, looking a little sweaty and tired, but otherwise fine. It’s a miracle! It’s also unclear if the rest of his family found out about the incident or if Lochlan ever thought to ask why some protein powder his brother had been using all week almost killed him. Maybe the family should have thought twice about why Tim was acting incredibly sketchy about those piña coladas in the first place, and that could have helped them piece together why, the next morning, Lochlan nearly dies from something he drank out of that blender. Oh, well!
We understand that two things here are possible. Either he really, really, really wanted a piña colada so badly that he was fine with the 12-hour-old leftovers in the pitcher from the night before, or he thought Saxon had made a protein shake earlier and was really just putting protein on top of protein, so who cares. We stand by one important point, though: Ew.
We’ve never had the good fortune to have someone wire us $5 million. Or even $5. But we have given our account and routing numbers to companies that take money from us. There are typically some security protections around those transactions, so that they can’t just, y’know, take all of your money. Of course, Greg/Gary is an honorable guy who would never bankrupt Belinda to teach her a lesson about greed and blackmail. Thus, as agreed upon, he deposits five million smackeroos into her… checking account?… all at once. We’re not sure what bank she uses, but ours would maybe give us a call to ask, “Hey, did you just win the lottery? Did you have a miserly but secretly wealthy spinster aunt who just died and left you her fortune like in a Dickensian novel? Are you being paid off by a psychopath who hired hit men to murder your friend?” After all, they call us for stuff like charging more than $400 at Target. But not Belinda’s bank. Mo’ money, no problem.
Ah, Rick, we hardly knew ye. After spending eight episodes with Walton Goggins’ forlorn and taciturn hero, we are sure of a few things: a) he has daddy issues; b) he seems quite annoyed by his astrology-loving girlfriend; c) he is pro-snake. What we do not know is anything else about his background — particularly why he might be so adept with a handgun that he can shoot and kill two trained security guards at not-close range. Was he in the military? Did he attempt to fill the void of masculine influence left by his “dead” father by getting into guns? Did he play a lot of Nintendo Duck Hunt in his day? Maybe he was just a natural, the way some people are at darts or pickleball.
Just before the fatal shooting, things weren’t looking great for Mook and Gaitok. After a season of “will they, won’t they?” Mook continued to openly frown at Gaitok’s strong moral compass, valid worries, and vulnerabilities. Let’s not forget that she only decided to go out with him when she (wrongly) thought he might be getting a promotion following the robbery. And when he admitted that being a guard might not be for him (something viewers could have told him from Episode One), she turned down a date with an obvious lie. But then, after he kills a man and lands the job as the Sritala’s personal security guard, it seems they’re back on. Is that all Gaitok had to do to win Mook’s heart back? Go against his Buddhist beliefs and commit murder? Well, that’s one of the most extreme cases of “if he wanted to, he would.”
In the space of a few minutes, five people are shot and killed at the resort: Jim, Jim’s bodyguards, Chelsea, and Rick. The first of those shootings happens while world-famous TV star Jaclyn is standing right next to him. Zion finds one of the corpses floating in the water. Lochlan nearly dies from being poisoned, and no one comes to help him because they are all busy dealing with the active shooter situation. And yet, within hours, all of the (surviving) guests are on boats headed back to the mainland to fly back to America, none of them acting as if they were anywhere in the vicinity of a shocking act of deadly violence. We don’t even hear Jaclyn’s group say a single word after the shooting. The Ratliffs, Zion, and Belinda don’t mention it. And several Lotus staffers gather at the beach to give Zion and Belinda the traditional farewell wave. No one seems to care that this happened, from the guests to the staff to the local police. (And this is all assuming that the Gaitok/Mook/Sritala scene was not also on that same day, because if Sritala was already serenely traveling on her own, while Gaitok was completely at peace with shooting an unarmed man in the back, then the finale has even more problems.) Jim Hollinger was a wealthy and celebrated businessman, and was married to a local celebrity. Why wasn’t this a massive crime scene? Why was anyone allowed to leave? Why was everyone acting like it was no big deal?
Guess we’ll never know! Until next season, White Lotus.
