‘The White Lotus’ Season 3 Ending Explained – Enlightenment Is Out Of Reach

The White Lotus doesn’t do happy endings, which is by design. Each season begins with the promise of death and ends by delivering it. This is the agreement between show and audience; it will provide a menagerie of detestable wealthy eccentrics, and we will tolerate them, secure in the knowledge that they’ll meet their respective fates (or not). In this regard, the climax of Season 3 is nothing new. But Episode 8, “Amor Fati”, has an additional contour of hopelessness. The spiritualism underpinning our third stay at a White Lotus resort provides the ultimate gut punch – even for the willing, enlightenment sometimes remains frustratingly out of reach.

If you think about it – and we will, together – nobody gets what they wanted in this finale, even the people who think they do. The belief that things will be okay is misguided in every instance. The cost of peace, inner or otherwise, is higher than even these people can afford. It requires the most fundamental components to be sacrificed on the altar of perceived growth: our moral compass, our family unit, our self-respect. What is gleaned in return isn’t worth the investment.

Belinda’s Price

Belinda, for instance. Everyone has a price, and the finale of The White Lotus Season 3 reveals hers. It’s $5,000,000, which, to be fair, is a respectable amount. But that’s enough to make her abandon her sense of morality, to make peace with what she knows about Greg and what happened to his ex-wife. That’s what it takes to make her forget about Tanya, but also to become her, perhaps under her own nose. I wonder if she sees the irony.

And to think, if it weren’t for Zion, Belinda would have probably walked for a hundred grand. It’s all a matter of perspective. Zion is savvy enough to realize that peace of mind is worth 1% of a half-billion-dollar fortune, especially when Greg killed his wife to inherit it. But it’s Belinda who seals the deal by pretending she can’t square her conscience with the offer. She’s cosplaying the woman she was before the possibility of being rich emerged.

What does that mean for Pornchai? In essence, it means he becomes Belinda. Their planned business will have to wait. Belinda can’t stick around in Thailand, down the road from a man who at any moment might decide that only her silence can buy his peace of mind. Belinda, like Tanya, will have to think about it. In the meantime, she waves him goodbye as her boat leaves the island, and you can see in his eyes that he knows she isn’t coming back.

The Mean Girls Have An Epiphany

The only upside of Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie being so detached from the main plot is that none of them gets killed. They also experience the closest thing to a happy ending, a trio of mutual epiphanies that they’re all doing okay, and they’re better able to be okay together. But it rings hollow. They’re still not being honest with one another, at least not entirely. And their relationships are still transactional. Their respective lives are a mirror for the others, a way to gauge their own personal, financial, and familial progress.

Jaclyn is hot and rich and successful; Kate has a blossoming family and a connection with the spiritual; Laurie has… what? These other two? Her big personal revelation is that the fact this friendship has persevered despite its obvious inauthenticity is, in itself, meaningful. There’s an odd sort of love there, even though they can’t really stand each other. It’s continuity in a sea of uncertainty. In a world where a one-night stand can backfire as spectacularly as it did in the previous episode, she’ll always have her catty friends the next morning. But she won’t explain that. That’d be telling.

If this is the happiest things get, you can imagine how bad it is elsewhere.

Patrick Schwarzenegger in The White Lotus Season 3 | Image via WarnerMedia

I Am Your Father

Which brings us to Rick. This is the most tragic subplot of The White Lotus Season 3, I think, since it’s the one that came closest to a happy ending, and also the one that pulls in a truly undeserving victim. After finally meeting Jim Hollinger, the man Rick believed killed his father, he experienced a kind of peace in realizing he was just a pathetic old man. After waking up to find Frank surrounded by Asian girls, teaching them what I think were self-defence techniques, Rick knew where he needed to go, and who he needed to see – back to Koh Samui, with Chelsea.

And for a split second, we see a different Rick, one unburdened by the ghosts of his past and appreciative of his potential future. This is where all that early groundwork in his relationship with Chelsea pays off. When she offhandedly mentions them being together forever, Rick says, simply, “That’s the plan.” And he means it. Chelsea can see he means it, and so can we. And then he runs into Jim again.

Having collected himself and his pride from the floor, Jim takes great pleasure in telling Rick to leave the resort, lest he be forced to use the gun in a holster under his jacket. He also delights in telling Rick his mother was a lying slut and that he hasn’t missed much not having a relationship with his loser father. Rick runs to Dr. Amrita in the hope she can guide him away from the need for revenge that is bubbling up inside him. But she’s busy with Zion. She tells him to wait an hour. And he can’t.

Those gunshots we heard in the premiere were Rick firing Jim’s gun at point-blank range into his chest. The follow-up ones were Rick exchanging fire with Jim’s security team, seconds after Sritala had revealed the truth we figured out several episodes ago – that Jim was Rick’s father, that his quest led him to commit the very murder he thought he was avenging. In the crossfire, Chelsea catches a stray and dies in Rick’s arms. When Rick tries to carry her out of the resort, Gaitok, at Sritala’s urging, proves he has a killer instinct after all, shooting Rick in the back.

Walton Goggins in The White Lotus Season 3 | Image via WarnerMedia

The Ratliff Family Smoothie

Somewhat improbably, the above deaths are the only ones. But that isn’t for lack of trying as far as the Ratliffs are concerned. Tim finally decides to bring his dreams of familicide to life by serving them all a dose of poisoned fruit smoothie. Almost all, anyway. Lochlan is to be spared, since he had earlier expressed a capability to live without the fruits of Tim’s extrajudicial labour. I wonder if he’d have given Lochlan a glass if he knew about the incest.

The reason Piper is on the chopping block is because her spiritual retreat didn’t work out; she returns complaining about the facilities, which makes Tim think – erroneously, as it happens – that she’s just another Victoria-in-waiting. In truth, Piper was making things up because she didn’t have the heart to tell Lochlan, who had decided to stay with her, that she wanted to be alone. She couldn’t feel responsible for ruining his life as well as hers. Her kind gesture condemns her.

But Tim backs out at the last minute anyway, slapping the smoothie out of Saxon’s hands and claiming the coconut milk is off. But he doesn’t clean out the blender, which still contains remnants of the poisonous fruit pulp he’d used as a base. The next morning, Lochlan whips up a protein shake and collapses by the pool, spewing his guts up and imagining the hazy silhouettes of four monks as he sinks deeper and deeper into death’s watery embrace.

And then he wakes up. But I don’t think this is Mike White reneging on the contract. The Ratliffs surviving to face their impending ruin is probably a harsher punishment. On the boat out, they all get their phones back, and in an instant, it’s like they were never in Thailand; the headphones go on, the heads turn down to look at their screens, and their happiness is restored – they can ignore each other once again. But they can’t ignore the breaking news bulletins that flood their devices, revealing their father is a crook and the lives he gave them are about to collapse. Tim thinks that, as a family, they’re strong enough to endure what’s coming. But I wouldn’t count on it.