‘The White Lotus’ season 3, episode 8 finale recap: tragedy in paradise
The most tragic ending in the series so far, we break down the last day at the White Lotus in Thailand
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This story contains spoilers from this episode of The White Lotus.
IF YOU WERE the type of White Lotus viewer who’s in it for the death(s), you now have your answer to whose bodies Zion comes across in the pond. The victims of season three: Rick and Chelsea, plus Jim and his bodyguards. For that brief moment, Lochlan would’ve joined the death toll – courtesy of his father’s death smoothie – but our hearts can only bare one tragedy.
But for those who were in it for the plot, these honey dipped tangled webs, show creator Mike White had a lot of loose ends to tie up. Good thing, too, that the season finale was a whopping 90-minutes long, the lengthiest of the series so far.
It’s a new dawn when we meet up with the guests, some of whom are waking up to the last day of their stay. Like the episodes before, the guru’s teachings set the tone of the season finale: our anxieties lead us to seek quick fixes, which leads us to more suffering. This takes the form of the episode’s title, ‘Amor Fati’, as Chelsea says to Rick, which translates from Latin to accept fate, good or bad. As our guests head off for their last breakfasts, some resolutions are in order.
The White Lotus season 3 finale, explained
Piper is the biggest flop of the season
Besides using Buddhism as an excuse to run away from her family and forge her own path, Piper delivers her complaints with a hint of guilt that she is, indeed, not built for the simple life. Victoria Ratliff has succeeded: Piper can’t do without her creature comforts. The Ratliff matriarch has raised her children to be scared of poverty, as Piper lists out that she can’t eat the non-organic food or sleep in the cramped rooms with no AC at the monastery. “I can’t live like that,” she says. Victoria is touched to hear this. ‘Oh, sweety, you don’t have to prove anything.”
Piper’s problem now is that she’s too privileged. As Victoria delivers her ethical rationale that to not enjoy their comfort is an offence to those striving for it, it pats her daughter on the back. Perhaps Victoria also met this realisation a long time ago, and now Piper will surely deliver it again herself to her own daughter one day.
Tim didn’t read the correct dosage
Hearing that his daughter wasn’t up to the challenge disturbs Tim. He spent the last two episodes vetting his family to see if they can bare the brunt of financial ruin, and they all failed. He’s going to have to make another glass of his poison piña coladas for Piper. (Pam also didn’t help either, essentially handing him the instructions of how to draw out the seeds.) In the mind of the spiralling Ratliff patriarch, the murder suicide is the only way to save his family from suffering. Thankfully Pam didn’t give him the correct dosage; the family survives. (I mean, anything can be poisonous if left out for too long. Their few sips probably landed them on the toilet with a bad stomach.)
What is a recipe for disaster, though, is leaving coconut milk to out in the open. As Lochlan wakes up the next morning, a serving for one is sitting in the blender, the seed’s chunks no doubt fermenting at the bottom delivering maximum potency. He also mixes in a spoonful of his brother’s creatine powder; Saxon told him that to be a man, he has to make his own smoothies. Drinking every last drop was enough to send Lochlan into a mild coma. We get a vision of him drowning as four shadowy figures (presumably his family) stand over the water. His droplet has returned into the collective, as the guru taught.
Saxon leaves the White Lotus the most transformed
One tragedy is all we can take, and thankfully he wakes up in his father’s arms. “I think I saw God,” he tells his father. The near death experience might now set the young Ratliff on his god-loving path, something that would’ve landed him on the Ellen show. Tim momentarily reaps the seeds that he sowed until he comes to his own realisation, too: everything will be okay so long as his family is alive and well. The patriarch has accepted his amor fati, even as Victoria hands the family back their gadgets on the boat ride to the mainland presuming their creature comforts.
Out of all the guests this season, Saxon comes out on top with the most revelations. He spent the last night at the resort capaciously reading the books Chelsea gave him. Even as he tells this to her down at the beach, he comes face to face with his old self in Chloe (who is essentially the girl version of him) and the new him in Chelsea. He’s on the right path, Chelsea assures him. As Rick arrives on the beach after his Bangkok sojourn, Chelsea runs to him in a romantic lens flared moment, Saxon realising what he’s been missing all along.
Read Esquire’s recap of last week’s episode:
The White Lotus season 3, episode 7 recap: killer instincts
Laurie is the winner who takes it all
We head to the last supper, if you will, with the gal pals – a strong stench of animosity in the air. They assume familiar rhythms of lying through their teeth, how they had the very best time this week; cranking up the “victory tour” rhetoric machine they left back at episode three. Kate recycles a homily from her pastor about how her friends are her blooming flowers in her prosperous garden? Okay? Try as they might, Laurie came to her own resolve: she admits to her two longest friends just how unhappy she’s been with them.
The powerful admission of how trying out motherhood has failed to absolve Laurie cracks open this fake happy/honest dialectic between them all. Jaclyn gives a morsel of her own: her other friends dislike her for superficial reasons, whereas these two dislike her for their shared time and history together. The idea is both simple and inarguable: even without being bonded by similar goals, Laurie and her friends Jaclyn and Kate, who’s shared so much time, can still be anchors in each others’ lives. It is not a satisfying resolution, but it is still a way to find meaning in a relationship that has otherwise drifted apart.
The gal pals finally get to be themselves, leaving everything out in the open, admitting their profound flaws that were kept hidden under the veil of their perfect shared identity. Back at the villa, they revert back into their old selves, laughing together like the school kids they once were.
Pornchai gets Tanya’d
A son knows his mother’s worth. Zion, who has been studying for his MBA, turns out to be a pretty good business advisor to Belinda. Meeting Greg/Gary up on the hill, he negotiates that one per cent of Tanya’s half a billion would be enough to buy their silence. I’m glad Belinda got on board with it too; it was a joy to see a non-white character play at being cunning for once. They two succeed, seven digits show up in her bank account overnight. (Not to consider the logistics here, but can you just transfer five big ones without a tax cut? A bit would’ve been shaved off, surely, leaving Belinda with a realistic three and a half mill.)
Oh the wonders of what money will do to you, certainly more than any healing treatment at Belinda’s would-be wellness centre. Can’t she just enjoy her new riches for just one second? She tells her son. She unfortunately has to break the news to her Thailand fling Pornchai that she’ll be leaving tomorrow before Greg/Gary changes his mind. It’s impressive how Belinda pulls a Tanya on Pornchai verbatim. Money changes her posture and her caftans take on a renewed lightness as she and Zion sail off back to the mainland. It seems unlikely that Belinda will be returning for another season (Natasha Rothwell posted a farewell to the character), but Greg/Gary has bought her off for now. Maybe he will end up being the only character continuing in the series.
The first instinct is to write off Belinda’s moneyed development as the sour reality of what money can do. But it is indeed what this windfall can do for Belinda. She tells Pornchai that some things have changed; she has to re-evaluate what this type of money can do for her. She’s now wondering that opening up her own business is just one ceiling, the money has naturally made the world her oyster. How far the five mill will take her is to be seen. Maybe she’ll adopt an alias like Greg/Gary (go by her middle name? Or something similarly unimaginative as ‘Melinda’?) as she and Zion go into hiding.
Fly high my Aries queen
Rick and Chelsea reached their resolve too early in the episode, a sure sign that something was about to happen. After his Bangkok trip, leaving it all in the past, Rick told his soulmate that they would spend the rest of their lives together. The bliss is punctured when Jim and his entourage show up at the hotel to catch the Jaclyn Lemon before she leaves. Fabian wants to snap a photo of the actress for the hotel’s website. (I’ve spent this whole season speculating just what kind of actress Jaclyn is. Is she a soap actress or an Academy Award winner?)
As Rick snags a doughnut for Chelsea off the tree display (ha!), the old man confronts his attacker, revealing that he does in fact remember his mother as a “drunk and slut” who fed him a fairy tale of his absent father. Jim flashes his holster under his deconstructed suit. Sending Rick into a spiral, he seeks out Dr. Amrita for an emergency session to the tune of I need to talk to you or I will literally kill someone. Belinda unfortunately booked in Zion already; the two talk about his stressful MBA in the season’s cold open.
The first murder in The White Lotus
The White Lotus owners pose by the pond with Jaclyn. At this point it’s a matter of seconds before the events of the cold open unfold. Rick gets a hold of Jim’s gun and gets in a couple of bullets point blank. Hiding behind a massive gong, he also takes down the bodyguards. We breathe, Rick might just walk away from this scot-free. It all unfolds in a grand manner. Clutching her husband’s body, Sritala screams at Rick that Jim was his father, Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back style. Chelsea, however, is on the ground after taking a hit in the chest. Carrying her in his arms, Rick staggers across the bridge before a now widowed Sritala orders Gaitok to kill him. The intensity takes on the bloodbaths we’ve seen in other HBO projects, namely Game of Thrones.
But remember the guru’s teaching about finding resolve. The characters who did this episode have now boarded the boat with more or less a better sense of their identity and have broken free from their prisons. Rick instead decided to act further than his resolution, leading to more pain and suffering.
This will no doubt mark a new point for the series with this being to most tragic death so far. Though what did we expect from a season that tells us the Buddhist teaching that all pain and suffering is inevitable. (Revisit our first recap for the Four Truths debrief.) It’s at this point as well that Lochlan wakes up from his coma; Mike White didn’t want to let “accidents” mark all the deaths in The White Lotus.
Gaitok gets the girl, and a new look
To end these recaps on one of the lighter plot lines, Gaitok finally gets his girl. Though I wouldn’t easily forgive this courtship. We’ve spent the whole season with Mook coyly fending off Gaitok’s advancements because the gatekeeper doesn’t meet her standards of a confident, ambitious man. She’s been red pilling her sweet-eyed childhood friend into toxic displays of masculinity. It’s what led Gaitok to think about exposing the Russians as the robbers, but even that he forgave on account of the immigration entanglement Valentin and his friends find themselves in.
What does finally get him the girl is acting on Sritala’s order to kill Rick. He’s quickly promoted (Sritala’s two bodyguards are now dead) and gets a whole new all-black security guard outfit with sunglasses. The gatekeeper has it all, but what did it cost him? The season ends as he drives off in Sritala’s van, but shooting Rick will come to haunt him till the end of his days.
Who is the killer in White Lotus season 3?
That’s a tangled question: there is no real killer in The White Lotus season 3. In terms of who committed an act of murder, that would be Rick and Gaitok. Rick would eventually meet his demise, bookending the series’ most tragic ending yet. If anything, Gaitok is the principle killer.
Is episode 8 the finale of The White Lotus season 3?
The eighth episode is, indeed, the season three finale. There is yet to be an announcement on season four, its cast or location. We will have to bid adieu to the world’s most beautiful resort chain for now, which we guess by its fourth season is in PR panic mode.
Related:
‘The White Lotus’ season 3, episode 7 recap: killer instincts
