By packing in too many narrative beats, the latest season of Mike White’s anthology series lost sight of itself.
HBO
April 7, 2025, 4:12 PM ET
This article contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of The White Lotus.
On The White Lotus, misdirection abounds. Each installment of the writer-director Mike White’s acerbic satire opens with a guest at the titular hotel chain stumbling upon a dead body, before rewinding a week to introduce a motley crew of patrons and staff who might each end up being the deceased. As these characters and their complicated relationships come into view, the question of the corpse’s identity recedes into the background; the fatal arc rarely plays out as anticipated, and is not always relevant to each character’s story.
The White Lotus, which began as a COVID-era limited series filmed in Hawaii, has always been a closely observed study of wealth and its excesses, whether carnal or material. This season, filmed mostly on the Thai island of Ko Samui, used the new setting to nudge its characters toward pursuits beyond the flesh. Guests got a crash course in Buddhist principles, a reflection of White’s own interest in the religion and its philosophies. The pacing was slower, and the tone less raucous, than in seasons past, as characters served up meditations on life, death, and the things we do to survive in between. But last night’s Season 3 finale proved that the show isn’t above an obvious, anticlimactic ending—and hasn’t quite transcended its original formula.
Perhaps more than any other TV show airing now, The White Lotus has inspired fans to share their theories about the symbolism, pop-culture allusions, and real-world inspiration on view—and how that all might manifest in the finale’s on-screen deaths. In seven preceding episodes, Season 3 zoomed in on the insecurities, selfishness, and devious choices of a wide-ranging ensemble cast. Each narrative thread seemed to tease a potentially explosive ending, and the White Lotus team promised a shocking finale. The steady stream of online chatter helped propel this season to some of the show’s highest-ever ratings, but it also inadvertently revealed the trouble with this season’s writing. Instead of deepening the psychological and interpersonal inquiries of its character studies, The White Lotus simply bombarded viewers with more—more characters, more accents, more episodes, more dead bodies, more Easter eggs to scrutinize—only to end up with a predictable outcome.
The show has always been more invested in skewering its living hotel patrons than obsessing over the specifics of any one character’s demise. But the finale undermined—and wholly ignored—some of the season’s more interesting ideas. One of the season’s main stories has focused on Rick (played by Walton Goggins), a morose middle-aged man vacationing with his earnest, wide-eyed girlfriend, Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). Rick spent most of the season chasing Jim (Scott Glenn), the man he believed to be his father’s killer, before confronting him in the penultimate episode. Rick managed to walk away from the encounter without harming Jim, and the resulting calm he felt afterward marked a notable shift for a man whose entire understanding of himself was shaped by the death of his father. It also represented a heartening development in his relationship with Chelsea, who had constantly begged Rick not to choose violence.
Near the end of the finale, all of that progress was erased. A new encounter with Jim triggers Rick’s rage, leading to a wild shoot-out across the hotel grounds. And right after Rick does shoot Jim, he learns that Jim was actually his father—with no setup or follow-through. Just moments before, Chelsea had pleaded with Rick to “stop worrying about the love you didn’t get” and “think about the love you have.” Of course, Rick doesn’t, and his refusal leads to their deaths, too. The shootings played out in rapid succession, filling the final 20 minutes of the episode with a barrage of gunplay that felt like the rushed conclusion to an action film. Where the Season 2 finale imbued its important action scenes with a modicum of whimsy, last night’s episode presented little by way of humor, stylistic finesse, or emotional release. By the time Rick tells a dying Chelsea that they’ll be together forever, just like she’d said throughout the season, the words ring hollow.
Other plotlines stacked up the possibility of immense tragedy, only to pull back at the last minute. Earlier in the season, embattled father Tim Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) had become desperately suicidal after learning he was under investigation for financial crimes. Convinced that his family would not survive the loss of their wealth, he seemed prepared to poison not only himself but also his wife and two of his children. For a short stretch in the last episode, it seemed like his younger son, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), would inadvertently die instead. But after accidentally drinking a poisoned milkshake, Lochlan was … fine, and his family soon boarded a boat departing the island (with no acknowledgment of the shoot-out that had just killed multiple people). For a moment, Tim seems ready to tell his wife and children what will happen when they get back to the United States—but then the scene ends. After eight episodes of the show hinting at a possible murder-suicide, the finale sends them off with nothing worse than a stomachache.
Another scene struck a very different note, in a marked contrast to the plot-heavy proceedings. Throughout the season, a trio of childhood friends—Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), Kate (Leslie Bibb), and Laurie (Carrie Coon)—had navigated their middle-age ennui by gossiping about one another. Then, in a lovely monologue, Laurie admitted that their bond was one of the most important things in her life. “I don’t need religion or God to give my life meaning, because time gives it meaning,” she says tearfully. “We started this life together. I mean, we’re going through it apart, but we’re still together.” It’s a beautiful sentiment, bringing some welcome closure to a true-to-life dynamic. But sandwiched in between so much plot, the scene’s gravity was undercut. If the finale had stopped trying to do so much, perhaps it could have actually given us some emotional satisfaction.
Hannah Giorgis is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
