This post contains spoilers for the third season finale of The White Lotus, “Amor Fati,” which is now streaming on Max.
The finale of The White Lotus Season Three begins with a montage of various characters getting ready for their final full day at the Thailand resort, including Piper and Lochlan waking up after their night at the monastery. The head monk greets all his guests with a speech about the elusive nature of life itself, acknowledging that it brings with it many questions when we want resolution. Life gets easier, he suggests, once we accept that there is no resolution.
As a mostly self-contained season of scripted television, The White Lotus does not allow itself to be as mysterious or unknowable as the monk argues that our own lives are. So “Amor Fati” offers resolution aplenty. But given how predictable, contrived, and/or outright silly these resolutions are, maybe it would have been better if there had been none at all?
This was already the bumpiest of the series’ three seasons. Expanding to eight episodes (after six in the first season and seven in the second) resulted not in more depth, but to certain ideas — Tim’s murder-suicide fantasies, the friends’ decades-old resentments — being repeated much too often. The stories of both Belinda and Gaitok felt badly underfed, as Lotus creator Mike White’s level of interest in the non-wealthy — and/or non-white — characters has dipped with each passing season. If not for the specter of the mass shooting teased in the season-opening flash-forward, the whole thing would have felt like a meandering tone poem, elevated by some good performances (especially by Walton Goggins, Aimee Lou Wood, and Carrie Coon), the occasional zinger (mostly from Parker Posey’s Victoria), and random bits of sexual experimentation (Lochlan giving his brother a hand, Frank’s monologue about his ladyboy fantasies).
But having seen the shooting in context, as well as all the other climaxes — or lack thereof — I wonder if maybe these deaths aren’t now the promotional cart driving the narrative horse. Or if White has simply run out of things to say about the terribleness of the idle rich, but has become too successful himself through this show to stop. The first (and still best) and second seasons reached their creative high points in their respective finales, where “Amor Fati” just summed up all the things that weren’t working about Season Three.
For the final time, let’s break it down character group by character group:
We have to start at the end regarding the trio of old friends. They are first-person witnesses to one murder, and are at least in the vicinity when four other people are shot and killed, and their reaction is… what? We have no idea, because we literally do not hear them speak in the aftermath of those five deaths. There is a brief glimpse of the pals cuddling up together on the boat taking them back to the mainland for their flights home. But if they are traumatized by the ordeal, or are simply using it as another reason to cast all their petty grudges aside and embrace their friendship, we have no idea.
As a whole, the finale doesn’t seem to know what to do with the idea of this huge and horrifying burst of violence happening in the middle of the resort, since Belinda, Zion, and the Ratliffs seem similarly untroubled to have been on the property at the time. (When Tanya shot up all the gays who were trying to murder her in the Season Two finale, that at least was on a yacht, and not at the hotel itself.) But the others get to talk about something in the season’s closing minutes, where the friends are all but ignored — a frustrating but somewhat fitting conclusion to a subplot that was buoyed much more by the three actors involved in it than by the material they were asked to play.
When you hand Coon — a.k.a. one of the greatest and most emotionally raw actors working today — a heartfelt monologue like the one that Laurie delivers at the friends’ final Thailand dinner, of course it’s going to be at least a little effective. But the words she was delivering with such force were wildly at odds with how the character was portrayed throughout the season. The idea that she was scared straight after her bad night with Aleksei, followed by the glimpse of the other two happily playing together in the pool, didn’t make sense after we had watched her so clearly hate both of them for the rest of the week. Maybe if they’d saved the speech for after, again, the three of them were witnesses to a mass shooting, it might have seemed more honest?
What a bummer! It’s not that Belinda is corrupted by the life-changing bribe she and Zion are able to negotiate with Greg. It’s that her corruption felt inevitable and unearned at the same time. Belinda felt like a rich and complicated person in the first season. Her relationship with Tanya had many layers, and wasn’t just about a rich woman emotionally leeching off of a poor one. Brought back for a new season, Natasha Rothwell didn’t have a lot to do, and Belinda was a much thinner sketch this time around. And compared to pretty much every other younger character in the show’s history — from the Mossbacher siblings in the first season to the Ratliffs here — Zion was granted zero depth. He was just a cartoon chasing after dollar signs.
That Belinda does to Pornchai what Tanya once did to her is ironic, but not in a particularly interesting way. The series’ worldview about what money does to people is so unwavering, and so relatively one-note, that of course she was going to abandon the guy once she had some cash in hand.
As with Belinda, White goes for some simplistic irony here. She’s the woman who thinks of herself as good, but who gladly accepts $5 million to look the other way about a murder, while he’s a Buddhist who doesn’t want to hurt anybody, yet gets rewarded — with both a promotion and the affection of the woman of his dreams (who’s in fact not that great and only going to corrupt him) — for fatally shooting an unarmed man in the back. And… that’s it. Maybe Lisa from Blackpink is such an inexperienced actor that White didn’t feel he could give her an actual three-dimensional character to play, or maybe he just didn’t care, but this was another subplot where there was no there there.
Well, if nothing else, we have found a brand that is about to be much more upset about being associated with Tim Ratliff than Duke University has proved to be. The second the camera offered a close-up of the logo on the blender that Tim tried to use to blend poisoned cocktails for everyone in the family but Lochlan, you can assume Bosch’s crisis PR department moved into high gear.
But Chekhov’s Blender just felt silly. Not just because it seemed as if the older Ratliffs all drank about as much of the concoction as poor Lochlan did after he watered down what was left in the blender with protein powder and water. And also not just because — 17-year-old prestige TV spoilers follow — Tim was attempting to pull the same terrible murder-suicide stunt that a Walton Goggins character did (in the finale of The Shield), on a show that also featured Walton Goggins. Primarily, it felt silly because the show had presented so many fake-out fantasies of Tim killing himself and/or his loved ones that by the time it happened, it was hard to watch either scene with the poisoned drinks and believe someone was actually going to die. The decision to cut between Lochlan seemingly dying by the side of the pool and him having a vision of drowning in the pool only leaned into the bait-and-switch quality, so that by the time his eyes flickered open in front of his grief-stricken father, it had all become a bad and ineffective joke.
And then White somehow backed even further from the ledge he had seemingly placed the family, by showing that Tim had somehow made it through this ordeal finally learning a lesson about the importance of family over material assets. It’s supposed to be a more bittersweet ending than, say, the Mossbachers being brought together by the bogus robbery attempt in Season One, since we know the Ratliffs are about to lose all their money and that Tim is going to prison for a bit. But the story up until now was played much darker than most anything in prior seasons, so to end on even a slightly upbeat note didn’t ring true to what had come before.
After teasing the idea, in Sam Rockwell’s memorable fifth episode monologue, that Frank experiments with gender whenever he drinks and does too many drugs, the finale backed off of that in favor of just showing him dancing manically in his underwear surrounded by (presumably hired) young women the morning after he fell off the wagon. But if that part of the story didn’t go where it seemingly should have, the Rick part went exactly where everyone knew it would, at least regarding the true nature of his relationship with Jim Hollinger. Jim didn’t kill his father, because of course Jim was his father.
And Rick killed him. And got Chelsea, and then himself, killed in the process.
To this subplot’s credit, Goggins and Wood were wonderful throughout the season, particularly both of them in the finale sequence where it seemed like Rick actually had finally let go of the grief he’d been carrying all his life, and Goggins at the climax when an utterly haunted and ruined Rick couldn’t stop himself from seeking vengeance. But if Tim Ratliff successfully pulling off a murder-suicide of most of his family would have played as incredibly dark for White Lotus, it also would have been at least somewhat in the series’ fundamentally comedic DNA. When Tanya began shooting up the yacht and then fell to her death from it, that was all played for laughs, after all. This was presented as straight drama (other than perhaps Fabian squealing and falling into the water), which badly disrupts the tone of the show, and invites a level of scrutiny it simply isn’t built for. If the true nature of Jim and Rick’s relationship was meant to be a surprise, it wasn’t. If Rick was meant to be a crack shot capable of taking out both of Jim’s bodyguards with relative ease, it would help to know literally anything about his past other than that his mother died when he was young and that he and Frank used to party together.
And if the resort was going to be host to such a horrific event — not so long after people died violently either on or near two other White Lotus properties over the last few years — then the show needs to be prepared to deal with the consequences of that. You can’t just put everyone on boats like everything is normal, and have Pornchai and the other staffers waving goodbye from shore, when everyone would be getting interviewed by the local police at this point.
It was simultaneously predictable and nonsensical. The finale was followed by clips of White talking about his goals for this season, while also teasing what’s to come with the upcoming fourth season. “There’s always room for more murders in the White Lotus hotels!” he promised. At a certain point, aren’t the TripAdvisor reviews alone going to ruin their business model?
From Rolling Stone US
