Spoiler warning: This article contains spoilers for Season 3 of “The White Lotus.”
If you’re anything like me, you were gripping the edge of your seat and screaming at the television with your friends as you watched the final episode of “The White Lotus” Season 3.
A culmination of an eight-week emotional rollercoaster, the show is a satire of wealthy tourists on luxury vacations who stay in a fancy hotel called The White Lotus. The show’s creator and former Survivor contestant, Mike White, wanted the show to be a satire on the corruption of the wealthy.
“The White Lotus” follows the intertwined lives of visitors and hotel employees while navigating complex themes like love, death, sexuality, religion and family with ease, leaving the viewers with genuinely valuable life lessons.
Each season, viewers become more well-acquainted with the characters, learning their secrets, wants and hidden dysfunctions as they eventually come to light.
In Season 3, the characters were even more realistic. Though the characters followed stereotypes and character tropes, even Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger), the handsome playboy, showed real feelings for Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), a free-spirited and hopeful young woman. Each character feels so real. I was mad at them, I pitied them, I was scared for them.
In the first episode of each season, there is a short scene that shows a character encountering a dead body after a shooting, though the body is never identified in the first episode. The rest of the show is full of clues and Easter eggs that guide the viewer to the conclusion.
Each episode felt less like an episode of a popular TV show and more like a documentary about a bunch of foolish, selfish rich people. But I couldn’t look away. The first seven episodes laid the foundation for the final episode that blows you away.
To be honest, I feel like I knew that it was Chelsea’s body floating in the water at the beginning of the show. In the first episode, she tells her much older and wealthier boyfriend Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins) that she’s going to help him find his meaning in life, even if it kills her.
Chelsea then said that everything comes in threes. First, she is in a jewelry store as it’s robbed with her friend Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon). Second, she is bitten by a snake. My personal theory was that there would be a third and final “thing” — I thought Chelsea was the body floating in the water, and I assumed that her undying love for her complicated, rugged and mysterious boyfriend would be her demise. I was right.
What the show does so well is never giving anything away explicitly, leaving the viewer guessing until the end of the show.
Season 1 actor Natasha Rothwell resumed her role as Belinda Lindsey, an employee of the Hawaii White Lotus hotel and resort who is in Thailand to learn new wellness practices.
In Season 3, Belinda becomes friends with her mentor, Pornchai, and they decide to open a wellness center together.
However, at the end of the season, we see Belinda make a lot of money in a shady deal and quickly back out of her deal with Pornchai, leaving Pornchai feeling cheated.
This is a direct echo of what happened between Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) and Belinda in Season 1, showing the effects of money on human behavior. It made her more willing to hurt others when she didn’t have to worry about making money or owning a business anymore.
The show also follows three adult women who have been friends since their youth: Jaclyn Lemon (Michelle Monaghan), a freshly married movie star, Kate Bohr (Leslie Bibb), a country club wife from Texas and Laurie Duffy (Carrie Coon), a divorced lawyer who doesn’t have as glamorous a life as her two friends.
The show watches Laurie hold her friends accountable while mitigating her emotions on her divorce and family. Each woman has a moment where she feels left out by the other two, but Laurie is the only one who calls it out.
Ultimately, Laurie delivers a monologue to her friends about how the whole trip made her feel slightly inadequate, like she didn’t quite fit in with her lifelong best friends. She admits that her friends’ perfection can be daunting, but that she’s just happy to be there with them, after all these years and all this change. She learns that external validation like her career, marriage and even motherhood aren’t what guided her values, but how she changed and grew over time.
Laurie’s honesty with her friends showed the power of friendship in a raw, real and honest way. They showed viewers the idea that passive-aggression is no way to hold friendships, but that honesty is.
Another group of characters is the Ratliff family, centering around a hilariously southern mother, Victoria (Parker Posey), and her three children: Saxon, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), a religious studies major interested in Buddhism and Lochlan (Sam Nivola), an awkward high school senior.
Their father, Timothy (Jason Isaacs), learns he and his colleagues are under investigation for some sort of fraud, which makes him consider ending his life. He steals his wife’s Lorazepam and a gun from a sweet-hearted security guard named Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong).
Victoria, meanwhile, is upset over Piper’s interest in Buddhism. She makes fun of it, praying to her Christian God that Piper and Lochlan hate the Buddhist temple.
When Lochlan almost dies from ingesting poisonous fruit, the last thing he sees are the Buddhist monks he visited with Piper. Lochlan says “I think I saw God” once he is revived. This challenges Victoria’s view on non-Western religion by validating Lochlan’s vision of the Buddhist monks.
For Season 4, Mike White said he wants to try something different from the first three seasons.
“For the fourth season, I want to get a little bit out of the crashing waves of rocks vernacular, but there’s always more room for more murders at the White Lotus hotels,” he said at the end of the finale episode.
I wonder if he’s going to embrace the drama and mystery of a snowier setting. It would be so cool to see a White Lotus hotel in a snowy, cozy location like Stockholm or Reykjavik. However, White could also go for a more expressive, nuanced city like Amsterdam that fits with the illicit nature of the show.
In any case, I’m sure that Season 4 will be just as incredible as Season 3. But for right now, I need a little bit of time to mourn Chelsea.
