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“There is no resolution,” Luang Por Teera tells his faithful in the opening moments of the season finale. Anxiety is the human condition, and the only thing that we all reliably know how to make is trouble. Trouble for ourselves. Trouble for others. The White Lotus has never been subtle in its disdain for the rich, but it’s never been this bleak before, either. Money corrupts, and money cocoons. No one can afford enlightenment in this economy.
Just look at Belinda, our broken moral compass. How much does it cost to change what a good person believes is right? As of April 2025, we can estimate the price is somewhere around 5 million U.S. dollars (฿172,649,966.50). It doesn’t take much for Zion to convince his mom to put aside her conscience and go back up the hill to negotiate with Greg. Finding the perfect number is a delicate art: You don’t want to be more expensive alive than dead, but $100,000 isn’t going to buy that man the peace of mind he deserves. “My mom brought me up to speed on your initial offer,” Zion tells him, already fluent in the finance world’s most embarrassing idioms. 1% of Tanya’s net worth will get them back to the table.
Zion’s so proud of himself that it’s almost cute, but it’s Belinda who knows how to move the ball. It’s called brinkmanship, son. Look it up. She walks out. “He wants us to be scared but we got to make him scared,” Belinda explains to Zion when they sidebar. Then she sends the good cop back into the house to push the deal over the finish line. By dinner, though, there’s no money in her account. When she wakes up in the middle of the night? Nada. I was starting to worry that Belinda hadn’t raised a closer, but by morning, the bank confirms a life-altering, one-time deposit. Forget Thailand. Forget spas. Belinda just wants to be rich.
Before she takes off for Hawaii, though, she at least has the decency to tell Pornchai goodbye. Belinda’s circumstances have suddenly changed, and she simply can’t commit to him or Koh Samui or massaging another LBH’s hairy back ever again. If you close your eyes, you can hear Belinda’s lame excuses in Jennifer Coolidge’s wild inflections. “Anyway, about the business … I really need to think about it,” Tanya told Belinda in season one, just before ghosting her completely. “I mean, you’re so talented, and I so want to do this for you, but I’m realizing I’m getting back into this pattern again where I latch on to somebody…” Perhaps karma is finally being able to afford to treat people as carelessly as you’ve been treated.
If Belinda’s lightning-fast transformation is a cipher for Mike White’s thoughts on the corrosive power of money, then perhaps Laurie’s emotional speech comes closest to explaining how a good life could be oriented. After her wild night with Aleksei, Laurie can’t face breakfast, despite Jaclyn stopping by with a wholesome apology: “I want to be your friend.” Instead, Laurie spends the day on her own, boomeranging back to her friends for a soulful dinner. Kate’s relished this week in Thailand, she shares. That she can travel the world in luxury with her childhood friends proves to her that she’s been living in the direction of God — the seeds she planted are blooming. Jaclyn needed this trip, too. Hollywood is a tough place for a middle-aged actress; these ladies can hardly stand her, but they love her.
Predictably, Laurie confesses that she hasn’t enjoyed the resort, though her reasoning is more mature and compelling than we’re used to from our resident sad sack. These girls, who’ve known each other forever, are each other’s mirrors, and Laurie has been struggling with the reflection. Unlike Kate and Jaclyn, she didn’t find fulfillment in her career, marriage, or even motherhood. She doesn’t have religion. But over the course of a lonely, soul-searching day, she realizes that you can actively choose to derive meaning from your own life. Their imperfect friendship matters to her because it exists. She exists, and that’s meaningful. No ethical framework required.
Rick, too, experiences the balm of an epiphany. When he wakes up in Bangkok in a hotel tub chair, Frank is stabbing a headless mannequin, which is great news. He hasn’t been to bed, but at least this bender didn’t kill him! Though he tries, Frank can’t convince Rick to stay at the party. He boards the first plane to Koh Samui and seeks out Chelsea on the beach. “I got the monkey off the back,” Rick tells her, and he means it. He just looks different. When Chelsea tells him about the spiritual importance of embracing your own fate, for example, he doesn’t drag his hand down his face or make fun of her. She may have come by Nietzsche’s concept of amor fati by way of self-help books, but that doesn’t mean she’s wrong. And when Chelsea tells him that she believes they’ll be together forever, Rick doesn’t roll his eyes. He reciprocates her pledge.
Alas, if all it takes for you to heal your battered soul is to tip over an old man’s office chair, then perhaps the healing is an illusion. Rick, it turns out, wasn’t the only one to catch a flight out of Bangkok. The following day, he runs into Jim Hollinger, who threatens to shoot Rick with the pistol in his shoulder holster if Rick doesn’t check out of his hotel. He also mentions that — now that he’s had time to collect himself from the floor — he does, in fact, remember Rick’s mother and father. Gloria was a drunk and a slut and a liar. “Your father was no saint,” Jim adds. “You didn’t miss out on much.” Rick spent 40 years trying to figure out how to take revenge on this old man for killing his dad; it took Jim 24 hours to much more capably avenge Rick’s revenge. “Stop worrying about the love you didn’t get,” Chelsea calls after her tailspinning boyfriend, who runs in search of Dr. Amrita — the only person who has shown him another way out of his pain. I’m glad, at least, that Chelsea grabbed herself one last mini-donut on the dash out of breakfast.
Amor fati. If any one hotel guest needed to hear Chelsea wax spiritual about the importance of embracing fate — not stall it or run from it — it’s psychotic Tim Ratliff, who finally puts to action the familicidal fantasies that have been preoccupying him. He’s not even planning to spare Piper any longer. She returns from the monastery to report that the food wasn’t organic and the mattress on her cot was stained. Victoria is over the moon that her daughter has crashed out of Buddhism school so quickly. “No one in the history of the world has lived better than we have,” she tells her family. It’s actually offensive to the global poor not to take advantage of the fact that you can afford designer kaftans. Mom brings Pipes to the hotel boutique to buy something — anything at all! — just to remind her of the unique rush of late-stage capitalism. The more you have, the less you have.
Tim, though, is crestfallen at Piper’s spiritual wobble. She was the kid that he wasn’t going to worry about when it came time to pass around his poison piña coladas. Now, he’s gonna need enough pong-pong seed for four. See, earlier in the day, Tim quizzed Pam on how one might poison oneself with the toxic fruit that maybe shouldn’t be hanging around this five-star resort. He used Saxon’s blender to grind the pits into a lethal paste and left it in the bar all day to marinate. (Chekhov’s protein shake.) After dinner, Tim makes a cocktail for everyone in his family, save Lochlan. Confused Lochlan, who thoughtfully jerked off his older brother so that Saxon wouldn’t feel left out. Lochlan, who tells his dad he could live with nothing if he was forced. Lochlan, who was hoping to steal his sister’s bunk at the monastery anyway.
Tim is a complete monster. Before serving the tropical digestifs, he tells his wife and children that it’s his job to keep them safe, by which he means fully ensconced in the fiction of their perfect lives. It’s a sign of how much this man’s family loves him that they all seem willing to drink this rancid drink until it kills them. And it’s a sign of what a lunatic Tim is that he even lets them taste it before smashing a glass and pouring the remainder down the sink. But he doesn’t clean out his son’s blender.
It’s Lochlan who wakes up first on checkout day and decides to whip up a protein drink. “No one’s going to make you a man,” a jittery Saxon barked at his brother the day before. You have to make yourself a man. You have to jerk your own self off. You have to put the vanilla-bean whey powder in the blender because you want it. Lochlan unsuspectingly drinks the rancid drink because protein shakes are gross anyway. The White Lotus has been tragic before, but never this sad. As the poison takes effect, Lochlan imagines himself in the ocean. He sees four figures huddled just above the water’s mottled surface, who at first evoke the other members of his family but then resolve into four faceless monks. Somewhere else in this resort, this beautiful boy’s mother is eating papaya. His father is sleeping off the last of his Lorazepam. And Lochlan is out on the pool deck, embracing the briny slip of a spiritual homecoming. When Tim finds him, it appears it’s already too late.
It’s too late for Rick, too. With Dr. Amrita tied up in a meditation session with Zion, he explodes with the rage of a man who cannot figure out how to live with the monkey. He tears Jim’s pistol from the old man’s holster and shoots him twice. “He’s your father,” Sritala tells him tearfully. You didn’t miss out on much. In the ensuing shootout, Rick kills both of the Hollingers’ bodyguards, though not before Chelsea is shot, too. The entire hotel scurries for cover away from the violence. Everyone except Gaitok.
Oh, Gaitok. Yesterday, his plan was to quit his job because he abhors suffering. Valentin even convinces him not to tell Pee Lek that the Russians committed the hotel robbery because deporting them would only cause more suffering. When Mook finds out, she cancels their second date, but so be it. There is a cost to living a life aligned with your beliefs. But when the shootout begins, Gaitok is still mulling the situation over. He’s the man in the booth when duty calls. He grabs the gun and runs into the fray, where I thought he would surely die, though what happens is more depressing. At Sritala’s urging, he shoots Rick in the back as he carries a dying Chelsea across the wooden bridge that spans a ridiculous man-made water feature. The couple plunges into the pond and surfaces in an homage to Ophelia. No one makes it to the other side of suffering.
Even if you believe that death is a homecoming, this is too much. Which I think Mike White understands, because he brings young Lochlan back from the dead. He pukes a little in his dad’s lap but seems to recover from the episode without asking many questions. If I were Tim, I would have perhaps suggested a quick ER visit, but I suppose we already know his parenting is suspect. At the last possible second, on the charter back to the airport, Tim comes clean to his family about the crisis they’re about to face, but, listen, no one died. Basically, the richest people ended up okay.
As I was watching, I thought it would be dying Lochlan’s vision of God that haunted me, but in the few hours since the finale ended, the image I can’t shake is this: Gaitok — our lovely, principled Gaitok — as a bodyguard. He’s sitting behind the wheel of Sritala’s stupid SUV, wearing that stupid black polo shirt and stupid black sunglasses. The White Lotus has already been renewed for a fourth season, but, really, what more is there to say about life and death and money and suffering than this? There is no resolution.
