The White Lotus season 3 finale was a violent end to a bad season

Independent

07-04-2025

So The White Lotus 's divisive third season went out with a bang. Then another one. And then a few dozen more. If the show's first two years treated their end-of-season deaths as cosmic jokes, methods to wipe the grin off a delusional hotel manager's face, or to have Jennifer Coolidge plunge into the depths of the ocean, this closer presented death as pure tragedy: no one in their right mind wants to see the wonderful Aimee Lou Wood, with her giant, hopeful eyes and toothy radiance, bleeding to death with a bullet hole in her chest. But I suppose it's appropriate for a season that everyone – even those who, like The Independent 's Nick Hilton, praised it as yet another 'exceptional' batch of episodes – can surely agree was The White Lotus at its most un-fun.
This was, after all, an often unpleasant eight episodes of television. At its best it has brimmed with a sticky, slightly suffocating unease, its characters complex, strange and fascinatingly loathsome. At its worst it has felt like being stuck in a traffic jam on the hottest day of the year. It remains unclear whether the show's sole writer and director Mike White intended for this season to be quite so narratively repetitive, with his players cycling through the same conversations for episodes on end. Perhaps that was the (agonising) point? But there's been enough suggestion in recent weeks of a fraught production – with confirmation of cast fallouts and creative clashes – that I'm convinced this season went a bit awry behind the scenes.
Why hire Zone of Interest 's Christian Friedel or the pop star Lisa and give them so little to do? How is it that Patrick Schwarzenegger's manosphere pin-up was such a significant part of the early season, yet he has his two subplots peter out abruptly here? And considering how important Rick and Chelsea proved to be to the show's final moments, why keep them separated for so much of this year's run? Certainly, a documentary about the making of season three would be more juicy than much of what was served up to us on a week-by-week basis.
Frustratingly, after eight long episodes, there was a sense here of the season's themes finally converging. White has been writing about man's search for spiritual meaning since his brilliant yet short-lived Laura Dern dramedy Enlightened in 2011, and I'm curious if he now believes it's largely doomed. Based on the evidence, he may think it's a waste of time. Piper's quest for religious salvation proves entirely vapid, as she confesses to her parents that she actually adores her riches and wants to head home with them rather than stay in Thailand. Rick tries desperately to avoid violence in his second interaction with the man he believed killed his father (and who, in a howler of a Darth Vader twist, turned out to actually be his father), but to no avail – it's Rick, we learn, who initiated the shootout teased in the season's opening scene. Chelsea, meanwhile, convinces herself that Rick is her soulmate, but where does that get her? She's caught in the crossfire of the shooting, and dies in her lover's arms. Gaitok gets the girl and the professional respect he's always wanted, but only after shooting Rick dead to prove himself. Was it really worth it?
Carrie Coon's spectacular monologue towards the end of the episode suggests it's probably safer to abandon all of this faith malarkey entirely: she tells Jaclyn and Kate that she's never found happiness or purpose in work, or love, or motherhood, but that 'time gives her meaning', that simply existing is on some level enough. It certainly comes off as the least stressful solution to life's ills. It also made for a strong resolution to the womens' plot. There was no fatal blow-up, no pledge by each party to go their separate ways. They leave the island a trio, most likely forever entwined as passive-aggressive nightmares who, whether it's healthy or not, desperately need one another.
The credibility of their ending, though, only exposed the strain of the Ratliff plot. Can we now admit that this set of characters has been a misfire from day one? Their personalities haven't given way to interesting social critique, the brothers' incestuous entanglement felt oddly timid despite appearances that it could go further, and the circumstances of Timothy's financial fraud were always so vague that absolutely everything he's done in the aftermath has strained believability. Here we see him attempting to murder his wife, daughter and eldest son via poisoned pina coladas, and it's so sloppily executed that it feels as if White tossed it together in a rush. Everything remotely interesting about the Ratliffs – from their impending poverty to the ramifications of the brothers' night together – is mostly left to be dealt with off-camera. What a phenomenal failure this storyline has been.
But perhaps there's a bigger problem at hand here. White used to say that the 'who ends up dead?' mystery of each White Lotus season was more of a trojan horse plot than an element he felt any real fondness for – something designed to lure in viewers who otherwise wouldn't watch a satirical character study. But season three seemed more driven by its own mystery than ever before, with too many death fakeouts, too many possible murderers, and more Chekhov's guns than the show knew what to do with. And it's ended up making people talk about The White Lotus as if it's Lost or Severance, or some other puzzle-box series riddled with Easter eggs and clues that require our solving. Some of these deep dives make sense, notably the discourse over the significance of the books our characters are reading. Others, including attempts to find hidden messages in the show's opening credit sequence, have been ludicrous. The White Lotus does leave trails of breadcrumbs here and there – Chelsea, who's survived a snake bite and an armed robbery and warned that bad luck comes in threes, had more or less been foreshadowing her own demise for weeks – but it's not the entirety of the show, and I wish that White didn't feel the need to lean into it so often.
It feels significant that the most compelling moments this season have been rooted in complex human behaviour – of a kind that made The White Lotus so addictive in the first place – rather than outlandish contrivance. Think of the subtle sniping between Laurie, Jaclyn and Kate at the dinner table, or Sam Rockwell's show-stopping monologue three weeks ago. None of the violence in this gunfire-riddled finale, for instance, packed quite as big a punch as Belinda's cool dismissal of poor, naive Pornchai once she found the $5m deposited in her bank account by Gary. 'Can't I just be rich for five f****** minutes?' she asks her son when talk turns to future plans. It's an obvious mirror image to Belinda's own dismissal by Jennifer Coolidge's Tanya in the show's first season, and what a ruthless plot twist to see one of the show's only truly virtuous characters corrupted with such speed…
When The White Lotus returns – rumours are that it'll be set in a colder, potentially Scandi climate – it should, for its own sake, go back to basics. White is a master when it comes to interpersonal dynamics and writing about our propensity for cruelty, arrogance and self-involvement. But after these draining eight episodes, he should avoid the mystery trap and stop there.