Despite the extended monologue by the monk at the beginning of Sunday night’s finale about how life has no resolutions, Season 3 of The White Lotus did, ultimately, come to a tidy ending—if a rather dark and, if you spent a lot of time reading theories on the Internet, somewhat predictable one. While the deaths in the first two seasons of The White Lotus were almost comical in nature—accidental affairs involving the stabbing of a man who just defecated in a suitcase and a ditzy heiress escaping a murder plot only to trip and fall off a boat—the deaths this season were violent and intentional.
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Here’s who died, who didn’t, who left Thailand a whole lot richer, and what it all means.
Lochlan Ratliff almost dies by poison fruit smoothie
We knew there would be gunshots in the finale: Zion hears crossfire and finds a body floating in the water in the first five minutes of the very first episode. But first came a feint. There was a brief moment in which it looked like Timothy Ratliff would poison his entire family save Lochlan—the only family member who told his dad he thought he could survive without a lot of money—by blending up the poisonous seeds of a fruit that’s been ominously hanging from the trees shading the family’s villa all season. (And that blender did seem to be getting louder and louder, prompting us to predict this very fate for at least one of the Ratliffs.) But Timothy, after barring the underage Lochlan from the special piña coladas, ultimately knocked the smoothie out of his eldest son Saxon’s hand, declaring that the coconut milk was off. He couldn’t follow through on the murder-suicide fantasies he’d had all season.
Later, Lochlan, a pampered teenager too lazy to even consider rinsing out the blender, uses it to make the protein shake his brother will no longer serve to him—earlier in the episode Saxon dismissively tells Lochy that nobody will make him a man, he has to do it himself. It seemed for part of the episode like Lochlan’s tainted smoothie would indeed take his life, especially as he had a vision of drowning as four silhouetted monks stood above him. But the youngest Ratliff child miraculously woke up. (In fairness, it’s not like his dad had a phone to Google the correct dosage of the poison fruit.)
So what have the Ratliffs learned? A little. Timothy has learned that losing his wealth sure beats losing a child. Victoria has hopefully learned to hide her lorazepam better. Piper has learned she can’t live without organic food and air conditioning. Lochy has learned that he’s a people-pleaser in a family full of narcissists (which is apparently why he wanted to help his brother whose only goal in life is to “get off”). And Saxon has learned there’s more to life than getting off—and also how to read a book.
On the boat to the resort, the Ratliff children were lined up in the “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” positions. On the boat departing the hotel, they sit in notably different poses. Instead of sunglasses over his eyes, Saxon is reading a book on spirituality that Chelsea gave him. Instead of headphones over her ears, Piper smiles into the sun. And instead of a drink covering his mouth, Lochlan has shoved his hands into his pockets. One would forgive him if he never took a sip of any drink ever again.
Chelsea and Rick die in the shootout he starts
In the end, Chelsea was right. Bad things do happen in threes. If you almost die twice on vacation from an armed robbery and a snake bite, you should probably leave the resort. She was also right that her fate and Rick’s were intertwined. Rick, who seemingly found closure last episode after confronting the man he believed killed his father, hotel owner Jim Hollinger, didn’t have the sense to leave the resort run by the man he just threatened with a gun.
Jim confronted Rick at breakfast, where he insulted Rick’s mother and told him his father was a bad man. Rick, overcome with anger and unable to bump Zion from his session with Amrita for some emergency counseling, shoots Jim Hollinger, only to be informed by Jim’s wife Sritala that Rick was his father. Jim’s bodyguards, it must be said, are awful at their job. I don’t know why they bullied Gaitok so much when they let Rick get away after threatening their boss with a gun in Bangkok and wandered away from Jim when they knew that same man was on the premises at the resort.
Anyway, they finally jump into action after Rick shoots Jim and Chelsea gets killed in the crossfire, and a couple of them end up taking what appear to be fatal gunshot wounds as well. (I wrote earlier this season that Rick and Chelsea were the healthiest couple we’d ever seen on The White Lotus. Admittedly, a low bar, but actors Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood were really playing up their true love for one another in the press. Mea culpa. Do not romanticize this relationship!)
Rick grabs a bleeding-out Chelsea and staggers toward help only for Gaitok, goaded on by Sritala and a week’s worth of negging from Mook, to shoot a defenseless Rick, clearly holding a wounded woman, in the back, killing him too. (More on Mook at Gaitok later.)
In our runup to the finale, my colleague Judy Berman and I made predictions about who would die and survive. And while I called the Darth Vader moment between Jim and Rick, Judy was the one to correctly predict Chelsea’s death. I must admit I had been skeptical. It all seemed so obvious. Chelsea said so many ominous things all season. She claimed bad things happened in threes, constantly repeated that she had a terrible feeling about what was going to happen, and (correctly) asserted multiple times that she had almost died on this vacation. Chloe fretted over Chelsea, telling her that all the girls she knew who were romantics wound up “heartbroken…or worse.” Chelsea and Rick insisting they would be together until the day they died repeatedly in the final episode made me worried that that day was coming sooner than either of them expected. Even the romantic lighting during Chelsea’s reunion with Rick read as ominous.
But Judy accurately observed that there were obvious signs pointing toward Tanya’s death in Season 2: A fortune teller basically saying to her Greg was playing her; the story she hears about a rich matriarch being killed for her house; the comparisons between her and tragic heroines in operas. Sometimes you just have to listen to what creator Mike White is telling you!
Innocence is sacrificed
The big takeaway from these murders and near-killings? When the powerful can’t find peace, they destroy the innocent in their orbit. Tim nearly kills his youngest child, the one struggling the most with his identity and arguably the most vulnerable, because he can’t make peace with the fact that he lost his family’s riches and therefore his own status among them. Rick directly causes the death of Chelsea, the bright light in his very dark life, because he cannot let go of his obsession with vengeance and his identity as a wronged man.
Other seemingly innocent or morally righteous characters become corrupted too. Gaitok, of course, in a quest to please his love interest and his boss, defies his “What Would the Buddha Do?” mantra and murders an unarmed man. He is rewarded with Mook’s approval, a promotion, and some cool sunglasses because this is White Lotus after all. Similarly, Belinda not only decides to take Greg/Gary’s “blood money” but manages to negotiate up to $5 million dollars, mainly thanks to Zion’s MBA-inspired confidence. White has previously talked about Belinda as the morally irreproachable character on the show—but this show has basically no ethical characters, so of course Belinda gets hers. In one sense, Zion is right and his mom should celebrate her much-deserved break. On the other hand…
Belinda gets rich and becomes Tanya, sort of
In a way, Gary also strips Belinda of her innocence because he cannot find peace after Tanya’s death: He pays Belinda off, fundamentally and immediately altering her character.
After Belinda makes bank, she goes to talk to her new lover, Pornchai. They had briefly discussed opening up a spa together in Thailand, fulfilling Belinda’s dream on a lower budget than it might cost in Hawaii. But Belinda’s new influx of cash immediately transforms her. She has a discussion with Pornchai telling him that her “circumstances have changed” and she can no longer go into business with him. The conversation is strikingly similar to the one that Tanya had with Belinda back in Season 1 after meeting Greg and deciding to leave Hawaii. So Belinda has become Tanya, kind of.
In fairness to Belinda, she always gave noncommittal answers to Ponchai’s questions about opening a spa together. (After all, she has a life and son in the U.S.) But the point stands: Belinda’s newfound wealth has had some kind of corrupting effect on her.
The blonde blob reconcile in a too-perfect moment
I am not sure what to make of Laurie’s tearful toast to her traveling companions, who Mike White dubbed “the blonde blob” in reference to their similar hairstyles. Jaclyn slept with the man she was crushing on, and both Jaclyn and Kate blamed Laurie for her own misfortune. Laurie says that while she’s unhappy with her job, love life, and motherhood, that having held onto this friendship with her two oldest (and probably cattiest) companions gives her fulfillment. And then they all cuddle on pool chairs.
Sure, I guess? I feel it’s more likely these women would either end their friendship after this blow up or return to their cold war soon after this faux makeup session. In the post-episode interview, White explains Laurie’s monologue in the sense that she needed to take some lesson from this terrible week in paradise. So perhaps her words were meant to ring a bit hollow.
Also, rewatch the shootout. When bullets start flying, Laurie books it leaving her friends in her wake. So maybe they don’t mean that much to her.
This season’s flat girlfriend problem
I found myself increasingly frustrated with how flat both Mook and Chelsea felt all season. Mook expressed a singular desire in all her conversations with Gaitok: That he be more aggressive. Why she was interested in such a sweet, innocent boy if that’s her main turn-on, I’m not sure. We know nothing about her background, or her other wants or desires.
Similarly, while Aimee Lou Wood gave a standout performance as the doe-eyed Chelsea, the character trended spiritual pixie dream girl by the end of the season. Almost every conversation she had in the show was either with Rick or about Rick. If you were on vacation with someone constantly leaving to call their boyfriend who never answers his phone, you would tell them to break up with that boyfriend.
Chelsea briefly alludes to a pain in her past. I would have loved to have heard about it. We know nothing about her except that she is desperately in love with Rick and wants to take care of the middle-aged man like he is her child. She’s a romantic, and Wood and Walton Goggins are so compelling together as Chelsea and Rick that you want to root for them. But she must have had a job at some point? Or a family? Or friends?
I really wanted more out of both of these women who ultimately seemed like props in a shootout—Chelsea the dead body to teach one man a lesson, and Mook a means of pushing another man to make a violent decision.
Seriously, where are the police?
Look, I was willing to forgive the fact that Shane got away with murder and was still able to make his flight back to New York in Season 1, presumably claiming a random accident. I accepted that Greg changed his name to Gary and moved directly next to the same chain of resorts where his wife was killed, spending hundreds of millions of his dead wife’s money on a house, a yacht, and who knows what else without raising any red flags with authorities.
But I will draw the line at the notion that the three friends who are witnesses to a murder in the morning make it onto their boat to leave the resort in the afternoon. I don’t care how famous Jaclyn is, they’re getting questioned by the police. (It also bears asking: Lochlan didn’t require a lick of medical attention after seeing God and nearly dying? Zion isn’t a bit more traumatized by seeing a dead body in the water?)
Plus, if this hotel didn’t have a PR problem after the first two seasons, it has one now. The murders at this resort chain must be mentioned in Season 4.
Nothing from nothing
Remember early in the season when Rick is in the counseling session with Amrita, and Rick insists that because his father died before he was born, he has no identity? “Nothing comes from nothing,” he says. Of course, Rick’s entire self-identity will turn out to be false. But the “nothing from nothing” assertion becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Chelsea tells Rick to concentrate on the love he has, not the love he was denied. But Rick can’t focus on his many blessings and, as a result, destroys the one thing he loves. Nothing comes from a relationship he puts nothing into.
Fittingly, Billy Preston’s “Nothing From Nothing” plays at the end of the show. Note the lyric, “You’ve got to have something, if you want to be with me.” That could apply to Rick and Chelsea—had he given her something spiritually, perhaps they would have survived together. But in a more cynical and capitalistic sense, that could also be Victoria’s motto (she needs wealth) or even Mook’s (she needs a macho guy).
Speaking of musical choices, a season rooted in eastern religion and spirituality plays what sounds like a church choir over the final moments of the show. The westerners who went to Thailand seeking some kind of spiritual enlightenment clearly didn’t find anything there that radically changed their previously-held worldviews. Though it would be interesting to check back in with Saxon in a few months and see how his eastern religion curriculum is progressing.