“Amor fati,” Chelsea says. “Embrace your fate. Good or bad. Whatever will be will be.” What did the fates have in store for the guests and staff of the White Lotus? Good, bad, and indifferent, over nearly ninety minutes of nauseatingly tense television, we find out.
The Ratliffs live. So that’s a relief, whether you were pulling for Lochlan, the family’s most pure-souled member, to survive, or whether you’re just opposed to family annihilation on principle. And it was touch and go there for a minute, that’s for sure. Taking advantage of suspiciously detailed information on the fruit of the so-called suicide tree from their hotel liaison Pam — it’s a bit like that Chris Farley scene in Wayne’s World — Tim mixes up a lethal batch of piña coladas. He plans to kill himself, his materialistic wife Victoria and son Saxon. And Piper, too, after she bails on her grand Buddhist experiment because the food isn’t good and the room is too small and she’s a “princess” after all. She whines that she sounds pathetic, and she does, but that probably shouldn’t be a capital offense.
In the end, Tim can’t go through with it, slapping the drink out of Saxon’s hand and yanking it away from the west. But he neglects to clean the blender in which he crushed the poisonous seeds, and so Lochlan nearly dies when he mixes himself one of Saxon’s protein shakes without cleaning the blender first. (Before you complain, take it from someone who was wone once: Eighteen year old men are absolutely this stupid and disgusting.) Fortunately the dose is not lethal, and Lochlan awakens in the arms his father, who weeps with joy that his son has not paid for his mistake.
Well, not this mistake. On the boat back from the resort, the family — who are surprisingly chill considering the resort just had a big shootout (more on that in a bit) and one of them nearly died of poison protein shake — are told by Tim that things are about to change, but they’ll get through it together. The baleful looks they shoot him once their phones finish booting up and they see the news of what he’s done indicates he may be on his own, but a final heroic shot of him standing on the deck looking into the sun says he’s at least at peace with himself. I doubt this will comfort his family as their lives collapse because of his malfeasance, but it’s something.
Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate — my notes always refer to them as either the Reunion Trio or the Three Ladies, capitalized — have a rapprochement over dinner. After the usual benevolent platitudes from Jaclyn and Kate, Laurie really lets her friends know how shitty their relative success and happiness in life makes her feel. Work, love, motherhood: None of these “religions” have filled the void in her life. But when she’s with them, her oldest friends, the people she started her life with, she feels something deep and real, even if all they’re doing is superficially sniping at each other. They tell each other “I love you,” and after the shooting (again, more on that in a bit) they’re seen comforting each other on the boat home. All is forgiven.
Should it be? I wonder. Not long ago, Jaclyn and Kate said Laurie was the author of her own problems, that she made bad choices and brought her disappointments and dissatisfactions on herself. It’s stealthily hidden by the most heart-on-sleeve writing in the show’s history and a body-and-soul performance by Carrie Coon, but what if that’s exactly what she’s doing right here and right now? Is it actually a good idea for her to patch things up with an attention-seeking narcissist who routinely disregards her feelings, and a prosperity gospel–following Trump voter?
We’re primed to be happy that characters who were friends remain so, and on a certain level I am, for sure. Laurie, at least, will be happier short-term if she builds something out of this moment instead of just throwing herself back into an unhappy work and home life. These women have been friends for decades at any rate, and there’s no reason to think that won’t continue. But vampires live a long time too, and they won’t go where they haven’t been invited. What did Laurie’s speech do, exactly?
Belinda and Zion drive a hard bargain with Greg. Zion pours on disgusting levels of MBA smarm, Belinda fronts as if she’s morally offended when she’s really just trying to play hardball, and voilà! Five million dollars in Belinda’s account (on top of the whopping $12K and change she already had in there). And as her sudden willingness to play-act moral outrage in order to extort more money might indicate, there’s no health clinic with poor Pornchai in her future. No, she’s off to put some distance between her and Gary and go be rich with her son, a Saxon-like asshole who quotes Langston Hughes during the negotiation and shouts “Yes We Can” when they decide just to say fuck it and be rich for a while.
So the circle is now complete. The Tanyanated has be come the Tanyanator. Mother and son ride off (once again, strangely unperturbed by the shooting, and yes, we’re getting to it finally) waving goodbye to a smiling but saddened Pornchai, as the hilariously incongruous “Nothing from Nothing” by Billy Preston plays on the soundtrack. (As for Greg, he’s now free to live out his oedipal cuckold fantasies with Chloe.) From a moral perspective, and from the perspective of someone who’d come to (I thought) know and like Belinda, and who even thought Zion was a decent dude based on the season’s cold open: Ewwwww.
So, the shooting. Rick returns to the White Lotus from his Bangkok sojourn, having successfully extricated himself from debauchery with his pantsless pal Frank. Why he chooses to go back to the hotel owned by the man he deceived and roughed up is beyond me — it’s one of a few moments in this finale where it feels like creator-writer Mike White kind of waved his hand at logic and logistic to move the pieces into their final places.
Similarly, Gaitok rather inexplicably hints heavily to Valentin that he’s sniffing around him and his Russian buddies as the potential culprits in the robbery. So Valentin approaches and doesn’t threaten but rather beg. If Gaitok rats him out, he and his friends will be deported back home, where they’ll die. Gaitok would rather quit his job than make these kinds of life and death decisions; with the Buddha as his guide, he only feels comfortable with himself if he’s not hurting people. But this would mean losing not only his hard-fought seniority at the hotel, but also the interest of Mook, who’s in the market for a go-getter and is comically unsubtle about it.
Things start falling apart when Jim, the owner, approaches Rick to throw him out of the hotel. He insults Rick’s mother and his late father, telling the younger man his mom was “a drunk and a slut” in addition to being a liar, because the dad she painted such a rosy portrait of to Rick “was no saint.” Now the guy has taken away even Rick’s memories and fantasies, not just the life he could have had if his father had lived.
Unable to see his resort therapist, he just so happens to notice Jim’s bodyguards wandering off as the old man and his wife pose for photos with Jaclyn and her friends, with which they can promote the hotel. Against the wishes of Chelsea — beautiful, braless, bucktoothed, loyal steadfast and true Chelsea, who’s too good for this world and whose love of this man should have been enough, dammit — he makes his move, grabbing Jim’s gun and killing him right in front of his wife and the Three Ladies, who flee.
When Stritala demands to know why Rick shot her husband, he goes straight-up Inigo Montoya: “He killed my father.” Her reply is straight-up Darth Vader: “He’s your father!” Rick has blown up his life and ended another for worse than nothing.
In the gunfight that ensues, Rick kills both Jim’s bodyguards.but then discovers Chelsea has been mortally wounded in the crossfire. He picks up her body and swears they’ll be together forever, just like she said they would. He’s committing suicide-by-Gaitok, who steadies himself and fires, taking Rick down and knocking both bodies into the water. He’s rewarded for this by being named the widow Stritala Hollinger’s new chief bodyguard, and Mook’s new boyfriend.
So the outcomes for our heroes and villains are decidedly mixed. Let’s take stock of the characters who went into this episode seeming like basically decent people, for example. Piper reveals herself to be as materialistic as the rest of her family; it’s up to you to decide if her theatrical performance of guilt makes her complicity better or worse. Lochlan, whom Tim recognizes as a breed apart from the rest of the family, survives his accidental poisoning, and tells Tim he saw God (in the form of the silhouettes of Buddhist monks standing above the ocean of consciousness) while he was out. One kid achieved enlightenment, the other ran from it. Draw what conclusions you will from that on how they’ll handle the scandal.
Belinda and Pornchai’s fairy-tale romance turns out to be just that, a fairy tale. Belinda jilts him the second she comes into money; without checking, I’m gonna guess that she says to him what Tanya said to her verbatim when she breaks the bad news. That takes a special kind of hypocrisy that strikes me as very American, a keen sense of injustice when it befalls you or even when you’re simply inconvenienced, coupled with a willful obliviousness to or enjoyment of injustice when it happens to someone else.
And Gaitok gets everything he wants: respect at work, a more senior position, the admiration and affection of Mook. The thing is, we know Gaitok’s a crack shot: Maybe I’m too movie-brained, but he could have simply wounded Rick and let the authorities take care of it from there, right? Instead he executes the guy by shooting him twice in the back while he’s carrying his dead girlfriend, because the hotel’s mega-rich owner Stritala is screeching “SHOOT HIM! KILL HIM!” at him the whole time. All it takes for Gaitok to come out on top in life is betraying his moral code, because it turns out he happens to be good at doing so.
Is that much different than the life Tim Ratliff lived up until this point? He’s a smart guy. He went to Duke, don’t know if you’d heard . And like many smart guys, he decided that the smart thing to do was steal, cheat, rip people off. What this behavior does is privatize reward and socialize risk: Tim and his family keep his ill-gotten gains, leaving the rest of us holding the bag whether he gets caught or not, whether his life collapses or not, whether he murders his whole family or not.
As Victoria puts it, it’s “offensive” not to enjoy what the world provides you. She’s right, but about the wrong things. In a ghastly speech that hits hard now that our maniac president is pulling the walls of the global economy down on top of our heads, Victoria crows about how they have it even better than the kings and queens of old. She’s about to learn how far that can get you, and again, the looks they shoot Tim indicate their love for each other will not last.
You know who really had it good, as corny as this is about to fucking sound? Rick. Since he quoted Inigo Montoya, I feel free to quote a different part of The Princess Bride: “You had love in your hands, and you gave it up.” Chelsea was a big goofball, but she was dead serious about loving Rick, in the face of constant temptation to stray. Rick was enough for her, but he was not enough for himself. He couldn’t embrace his fate, because fate had something good in store for him, and he only felt comfortable accepting the bad. If Gaitok is an echo of the Ratliffs, Rick is their opposite. While they can’t imagine a world in which they don’t come out on top, he can’t imagine one in which he does.
Past seasons of The White Lotus tended to max out the cynicism. Belinda selling out fits that bill; ditto Gaitok. But there’s never been enough tonal room before for things like Rick and Chelsea’s grand doomed love affair and its over-the-top demise, or for feeling the kind of relief we feel when Lochlan lives, or letting Tim face his comeuppance with his head held more or less high, or the strange is-it-or-isn’t-it-a-resolution between the Three Ladies.
It’s amazing how much this opens up the show as a drama, and now that the season is over you can feel how its effects filter back all the way to the first episode. For the first time, it feels like these characters weren’t all funneled into the same “haha rich people are scumbags” destination. They were allowed to go their own ways, embrace or reject their own fates, for all the good it did them. Mike White’s lavish direction and Cristobel Tapia de Veer’s magnificent score make the show feel big — big images, big sounds, big ideas, big questions. The White Lotus now feels as vibrant and alive as the shots of the ocean and the jungle that served as its connective tissue, and as threatening.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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