‘The White Lotus’ finale recap: “Together forever”
Every season of The White Lotus begins with the ending. A box of human remains is loaded into a plane, a body is found floating in the Mediterranean, and a peaceful meditation session is interrupted by gunshots. The rest of the season is an open question – can Mike White draw us so deeply into the characters and their stories that we forget about that explosive setup and are shocked all over again, this time with the weight of emotion, when we come back around to that ending? Last night’s episode, the final episode of season three, hit like a brick to the chest and is White’s greatest finale yet.
That doesn’t mean that the whole season was smooth sailing, though. On the contrary, it was the most uneven so far, featuring listless, wheel-spinning episodes like episode three and all-time episodes like episode four. Luckily, last night’s finale was much more in keeping with the latter. It begins with more wise words from the monk at the monastery where Piper and Lochlan have spent the night. “There is no resolution,” he says, setting the bar extremely low for the episode.
After their lacklustre date in the previous episode, the power imbalance between Mook and Gaitok sadly has not evened out. He wants to go on another date with her even after she made it clear that she does not respect him. She wants him to be a testosterone-fuelled bodyguard spoiling for a fight. He just wants to avoid violence.
Rick wakes up in the hotel in Bangkok, where Frank is still partying with sex workers. He leaves the city, with a new sense of calm emanating from him. He has confronted the man who killed his father. He didn’t need to resort to violence after all. That constant furrowed brow is smooth. He is, dare I say, at peace.
The Ratliffs are not. Lochlan and Piper are at odds because he wants to stay at the monastery, and she doesn’t want him to. Tim is still trying to kill himself and decides that it’s best if he murders his family while he’s at it. He digs through the suicide fruit conveniently hanging around the resort and squirrels away the seeds for later. Saxon is reading (yikes) and tells Lochlan in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t ever want to talk about that night ever again. Piper breaks down at breakfast, admitting what we’ve all known: she is a giant fraud. She could tell the food at the monastery wasn’t organic. She’s done with the whole Thailand thing and wants to go back home.
Zion convinces Belinda to ask Gary for more money. They go to his house, and Zion puts his as-yet-unfinished undergraduate business degree to good use by demanding $5million. In a wonderful display of growth, Belinda pretends to back out of the whole thing, saying her conscience won’t let her do it. After Zion joins her in the hallway, she tells him to close the damn deal. The next morning, she finds $5m in her bank account.
The whole season has been a push and pull between which of the three actors playing the childhood friends will win the Emmy. We got our answer last night when Carrie Coon delivered the speech that will be played just before her name is called at the awards ceremony. After seven episodes of betrayal, false intimacy, real intimacy, and the silent treatment, the women land somewhere unexpected: common ground.
Jaclyn and Kate begin their final dinner at the resort, breezing through platitudes about being on cloud nine literally the whole week (nice try) and comparing themselves to a blossoming garden or something. As usual, Laurie cuts through the bullshit. You think she’s about to drop a bomb into the friendship group again, but instead, she offers an olive branch. She’s been sad all week thinking about the choices she’s made in life. She’s lost belief in everything she tried to believe in – work, love, the life-saving power of being a mother. But what she has decided matters is time. And whatever else they lack as a group, they have shared time. Decades, in fact. And that has meaning.
Is this too neat a resolution for them? I don’t think it is. Anyone who has formed friendships in childhood knows that those people will always be part of you, even if, sometimes, you wish they weren’t. We can give these ladies their scarring, unequal, unbreakable friendship. It might not make them happier or healthier in the long run, but it endures.
So now we get to the excruciating, heartbreaking, beautiful piece of it all. Chelsea is on the beach with Chloe. Saxon joins her, wanting to talk about the book she gave him. He’s read all of it, he tells her. Just as she’s offering him the sort of patient encouragement he seems to crave from her, she spots Rick walking down the beach. She levitates to him, and he takes her into his arms. It’s the kind of all-consuming, no-one-else-exists tenderness that we’d hoped was there between them from the start. It’s lit in an almost hallowed way as if a soft ray of light straight from heaven has found them.
This is the moment we should all have realised where things are headed. At breakfast the next morning, Chelsea tells Rick that she thinks they’ll be together forever. “That’s the plan,” he responds easily. For once, she’s speechless, happiness radiates from every inch of her.
The end is Hollinger. He returns to the resort with Sritala to take a photo with Jaclyn (we should’ve known that the backstabber would be the cause of all pain in the end). Hollinger sees Rick at the buffet, shows him that he has a gun, and casually calls his mother a whore. His father wasn’t a saint either. He wasn’t missing much. This throws Rick off his equilibrium. He’d found resolution the night before, and now the wound is open again.
He frantically searches for Amrita, the meditation teacher who helped him recognise that he can build a new narrative for himself. She’s busy with Zion, who doesn’t even want to be there, and when Rick sees Hollinger laughing and having a great time with Jaclyn and Sritala, he loses it. He sees the Hollingers’ bodyguards wander off, strides up to the elderly man, grabs his gun, and shoots him.
In the ensuing chaos, Chelsea runs to Rick’s side, knowing instantly what he’s done and why, the recognition that she has lost the battle is written all over her face. “It’s like we’re in this yin and yang battle,” she told Saxon last week when explaining her relationship. “And I’m hope, and Rick is pain. And, eventually, one of us will win.”
Rick shoots both the bodyguards, but not before Chelsea is shot in the chest and not before finding out that Hollinger is his father. As he carries Chelsea’s body across the literal and symbolic bridge, he is shot in the back by a wavering Gaitok, and Rick and Chelsea fall into the water, lifeless.
This whole season has been about spirituality. The Ratliffs have gone through their cycle of enlightenment. Piper has fallen out of her Buddhist phase, Lochlan “saw God” when he nearly died after drinking that suicide fruit shake that Tim decided not to give his family after all, and Tim found glimpses of it when he spoke to the monk at the monastery. Saxon might just be the one member of the family who internalises any of it as they face their next phase of financial ruin together.
But all along, Chelsea has been the most mystical of the lot, ominously proclaiming doom in nearly every episode. She’s also spoken about the interconnectedness of it all. It’s the sort of new-agey, astrology-laden talking points that you’ll either find yourself nodding your head to or rolling your eyes over.
But maybe it doesn’t matter how you feel about that point of view because actually, the season has been more about belief than spirituality. Laurie finds a belief system in time. Tim ultimately finds a belief system in family. And Chelsea has always believed in her relationship with Rick, regardless of the darkness it might hold. Does it make that ending less tragic, knowing that she believed correctly that they would be together forever? Not in the slightest. But it does feel like resolution.
