Welcome back blog readers! This week I’m going to discuss the season three finale of The White Lotus that premiered this last Sunday. I am a huge fan of the show, and I think season three was pretty polarizing so let’s go over it.

Like always, this really is a show about nothing. It’s for nosy people who like finding out what’s happening in other people’s lives. It’s pure slop and makes no sense for an HBO branded show. All that being said, I am a HUGE fan.  It’s masterful storytelling, and gets you re-invested in 10-15 new characters each season. They always hold your attention and create suspense around who is going to end up dead at the end of the season.

This season featured the White Lotus resort on an island outside of Bangkok. It features the affluent Ratliff family from North Carolina, a mismatched couple Rick and Chelsea, three middle aged women who have been friends since childhood, and a masseuse named Belinda who was in the first season as an employee of the Hawaii White Lotus resort. The North Carolina family is great, just five privileged dickheads who kind of lean into while feigning humility. Rick is 30 years older than Chelsea, he’s obviously a dark character but she’s a light of sunshine to help balance him. The three friends clearly resent each other, but I won’t pretend to know the inner workings of female friendships. We last saw Belinda getting her dreams crushed in season one when guest Tanya (RIP from season two) bailed on their business plan to run off an marry another guest name Greg, glad to see her at least getting a vacation. 

Right away you hear a gun shot and chaos, but then it flashes to the beginning of the season. I hate when shows do that, it makes me just look for the gun shot the whole season. The family from North Carolina is rocked right away when the father, Tim, gets a call that the authorities have raided his business and he will likely be indicted for fraud. His response is to take all the family phones for the week and steal his wife’s Lorazepam lmao. His wife, Victoria, is a stereotype of what you’d expect of an affluent southern housewife but she’s so funny I love it. Their daughter, Piper, organized this trip to visit a Buddhist monastery in hopes of moving there after college graduation – she tells the family she is there to do a thesis study. The two boys are such dickheads I also love it. The older son, a finance bro/Duke graduate named Saxon, is exactly what you think he would be. The younger son, Lachlan, is about to graduate high school and is probably the most normal of the bunch.

The three women traveling are their courtesy of the one named Jaclyn, a famous actress played by Michelle Monaghan, who has paid for the trip in effort to spend time with two of her childhood friends. There is SO MUCH tension between them. From politics to work to lifestyle, they honestly seem to agree on nothing and everything comes across duplicitous. 

Chelsea thought this would be a vacation with Rick, but he has other motives. They don’t disclose it, but he’s hiding something and won’t tell Chelseas why. Chelsea befriends a local named Chloe, the girlfriend of Tanya’s former husband who now goes by Gary. Belinda is there to chill, not much to her story yet. There’s also a plot with the security guard on the island losing the gun (stolen by Tim for suicide) and investigating a robbery that took place. Not really much here but it needs to be included for reference. 

Tim steals the security guards gun in a plan to kill himself before his family finds out about his business dealings. The whole season is him slamming Lorazepam and having visions of killing himself. When his wife, daughter, and Saxon say he could never be poor he even includes killing them in his fantasy. The weirdest shit that happens this season is when Lochlan and Saxon go to a festival with Chloe and Chelsea where they proceed to get plastered. Chelsea won’t hook up with Saxon, but Chloe hooks up with both brothers in the ultimate devil’s three-way. Lochlan even jerks Saxon off, gross! Piper and Lochlan later stay at the monastery where Piper realizes she doesn’t want to live there, much to the delight of Victoria.

The three friends finally hit the wall when Jaclyn hooks up with a local Russian that her friend Laurie wanted to hook up with. There’s fighting, hostility, and they kind of separate for the last three days. Laurie later hooks up with another Russian, who turns out to be looking for money. The three Russians were also the guys who committed the robberies. Leslie Bibb plays the third friend, Kate, and does such a good job of middle manning the conflicts between Laurie and Jaclyn. 

While that’s going on, Rick goes to Bangkok to meet a friend and confront his father’s killer. His friend, played by Sam Rockwell, is a freak to put it lightly. They end up confronting the killer, who owns the White Lotus they’re staying at, but it ends with them walking away. Belinda goes to a party and is confronted by Greg/Gary who wants to buy her silence. She and her son ask for 5 million to forget they saw him, which she eventually accepts and leaves the island rich.  The security guard recovers the gun from Tim’s room and also deduces the Russians are behind the robberies.

Final episode comes, and with no gun anymore Tim has to make a decision. He finds out about a local suicide plant and asks his family if they could live poor. Only Lachlan says yes, Tim decides to poison everyone else. He gets cold feet at the last minute, taking away his death drinks from everyone.  The next morning, Lachlan uses the blender to make a shake and accidentally poisons himself. Tim is beside himself, but eventually Lachlan wakes up. Tim realizes he has to own his decisions and tells the family on the way back home that their lives are going to change.

Now the gunshot. The owner of the hotel confronts Rick, telling him his mother was a drug addicted whore and his father was a bad man. Rick is livid, all the peace gone. He runs from security but eventually shoots and kills the hotel owner before finding out that he was his dad. Chelsea is sadly killed in the crossfire, and Rick is killed by the security guard while carrying Chelsea’s body. The security guard also lets the Russians go and lives happily ever after with his girlfriend. Belinda and her son leave the resort rich with Gary’s hush money, and the three girls all reconcile as friends when they leave.

So, what are the takeaways here? I really liked this season. I think it followed the same pattern as the first two and made for great primetime TV. This season had a lot more viewers than the first two, I think people were just used to binging, so the slow burn turned a lot of them off this season.  The cast was fantastic, every storyline was intriguing, and the actors did a great job. Jason Isaacs was incredible as Tim Ratliff; I have no idea how he can play a character like that while having played Lucious Malfoy and Col. Tavington. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s kid played Saxon, who also does an amazing job there. He has his dad’s smile but is a really good actor and I can’t wait to see what he does next.

I also love how the season ends with everyone going back about business as normal. It’s a great microcosm of life and a reminder of what I always tell myself: No one care about you like you care about you.  We spent two months in these people’s stories, and when it’s over nothing changes. There’s a beauty to the simplicity here. In an era where everyone is saving the world, it’s nice to see a small story done well. I can’t wait for season four, this has become one of my favorite shows on TV.