Spoiler alert! This story contains plot details of HBO’s “The White Lotus” Season 3 finale.
The mystery of who dies in “The White Lotus” Season 3 is finally over.
The much-awaited finale showed that the gunshots, previewed in HBO’s Feb. 16 season premiere, were fired by the tragic Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins). Rick’s misguided actions led to five deaths in a gunfight at Thailand’s White Lotus Resort, including his own. There is heartbreaking tragedy in the finale (now streaming on Max), along with other tragedy blissfully avoided, joy, a Bosch blender and one hell of a of a satisfying $5 million payout for visiting White Lotus Maui spa manager Belinda Lindsey (Natasha Rothwell).
Here’s what happened:
Rick seemed to have exorcised his demons meeting with Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn), the hotel owner whom Rick thought had killed his saintly father decades ago (his body was never found). Rick threw Jim to the floor at their first meeting in Bangkok in last week’s episode, but ran off. In the finale, Rick happily embraces his beloved girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). But Jim spots Rick at the resort and informs him that his mother had lied. “She told you a fairytale, kid. Your father was no saint,” he snarls.
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Rick is enraged, and finds Jim happily taking a photograph with his wife, Sritala (Lek Patravadi), and the three galpals on vacation. Rick yanks the gun out of the holster hidden in Jim’s jacket and shoots him in the chest. It’s only after Jim is dead that Sritala screams at Rick, “He is your father! He told me.”
Without even having time to process that tragic whopper, Rick sees that Chelsea has been shot and is near death from the wound. He grabs Chelsea and runs to get help, holding her limp body in his arms. But Sritala yells at arriving security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) to shoot. After hesitating, Gaitok shoots Rick in the back. The dead lovers fall into the water.
The Ratliff family has a tragedy averted: No one died from the blender
Many “White Lotus” fans were sure the resort blender, beloved by Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger) would factor into the finale deaths. It did not. But it was close. Besieged businessman Timothy (Jason Isaacs) had planned to kill his entire family, except for son Lochlan (Sam Nivola), with a batch of pina coladas blended with the poisonous seeds of a Thai fruit. He wanted the family dead rather than have them live destitute and shamed for his financial scandal. Just as Saxon, daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) and wife Victoria (Parker Posey) start to sip, Timothy changes his mind and destroys the lethal cocktails.
But unknowingly, Lochlan uses the leftovers in the blender to make a smoothie the next day. Lochlan collapses next to the pool, but pulls out of going to the light, just as his horrified father runs to hold him. “I think I just saw God,” Lochlan tells his father.
Belinda gets her $5 million payout from guilty Gary in ‘White Lotus’
Belinda was wrecked when multi-millionaire heiress Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) pulled out of bankrolling her dream spa near the end of Season 1.
In Season 3, she discovers that Tanya died in a suspicious yacht incident (as seen in the Season 2 finale). Tanya’s husband Greg (Jon Greis), who goes by Gary in Thailand, is hiding from Italian police who want to question him about his rich wife’s suspicious death.
Gary/Greg offers Belinda $100,000 to keep quiet about his secret identity. She’s repulsed, at first. But visiting son Zion (Nicholas Duvernay) convinces his long-suffering mother to take the cash, perhaps to start her dream spa after all. Belinda and Zion negotiate to make the bank transfer a reality. The $5 million drops into her online account. Belinda uses virtually the same words to weasel out of opening a spa with her sort-of boyfriend Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul) that Tanya used to stiff Belinda in Hawaii.
Belinda and Zion are the subjects of the last, joyous image shown departing the island, very rich. As Gary/Greg tells her in their final talk, “It’s what Tanya would have wanted.”
