The White Lotus finale is all bullet, no bang
As season three comes to a bloody end, so too is it one we’ve seen before. The White Lotus strives to ‘eat the rich’, only to cannibalise itself.
This review contains spoilers
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Well, we’ve arrived: the finale of the third instalment of Mike White’s sickeningly decadent universe, otherwise known as The White Lotus. Nestled in a luscious, verdant island of Thailand, the $US7m season has so far divided devoted fans. Some have called it a masterpiece, others have criticised the languid tropical pacing.
I’ve fluctuated between the two, hoping a plot line that revolves around a mass shooting, suspicious Russian activity and incest will eventually be thrilling. But the conclusion to the multi-award winning series, named “Amor Fati” – a Latin phrase meaning “love of fate” that encourages one to accept their journey, be it good or bad – is an apt title.
After a near 90-minute episode with as little substance or shock as this one boasts, I accept this is a spectator fate that is, ultimately, bad.
Strap in – we’ve just come off a Thai-hooker, drug-addled bender in Bangkok with the leopard thong-sporting Frank (Sam Rockwell), and things don’t get more interesting from here.
The show opens with its signature calming tableau, monks entering the temple, splintered among an enigmatic montage of the ensemble cast welcoming their final day at the resort, all while bathed in a sunrise sepia tone.
Rick (Walton Goggins) returns to the resort after refusing to kill the man he suspects to have murdered his father, into the loving arms of his whimsically devoted Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) mercilessly hits on Mook (Lalisa Manobal), luring her in with his knowledge of the Russian party posse daylighting as jewellery robbers, and two of the three Ratliff siblings return from the monastery to their dysfunctional Southern family, who individually grapple with the perils of their own self-obsession.
The finale continues to build up the long drawn-out tensions prevalent throughout the series. Where you’d assume there’d be more action after multiple episodes with mild thrills (an uncomfortable threesome here, a peculiar monologue delivered by an Oscar-winner there), it continues on its subtly sophisticated but largely dull unravelling of identity.
Ultimately, the moral tensions become the burden of three key characters: Timothy Ratliff, Gaitok and Belinda. Who will evolve in their perception of self? Who will become spiritually bankrupt? And the question on everyone’s lips – who is actually dead?
The Ratliff patriarch (Jason Isaacs) continues to stare vacantly into the distance, the storm of the FBI’s investigation into his money laundering back home brewing in his ocean eyes, while his wife Victoria (Parker Posey) examines him with the universal hallmark expression of a pissed-off wife.
Over breakfast, their daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) declares an end to her spiritual journey that prompted their family holiday, lamenting that she is, in fact, a “princess” – and one who can’t fathom a year in a monastery that doesn’t serve organic vegetarian meals.
So superficiality runs in the family? Not entirely, it seems, as the youngest member Lochlan (Sam Nivola) leans further into his absence of a personality and typical third child syndrome, providing an apt mirror among the family. He is both a soul-searching puppet of his sister and a hyper-sexualised spoof of his brother Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger).
It makes him the most interesting of the three, the only willing to do whatever it takes to “satisfy everyone” and when confronted with a dialogue about that happening literally, his disgusted elder brother rebukes him – telling him no one can teach him to be a man, as he forces him to make his own protein shake.
The audience until this point has possessed a unique observational role of the family, where it’s difficult to hate them because there’s hope their comeuppance is yet to come.
In yet another delusional fantasy of murder-suicide from the father, the bid to shelter them all from their pending poverty comes to a head with the very same blender Saxon fought so hard to have in the all-inclusive luxury villa.
In a terse conversation with our antipodean star Pam (Morgana O’Reilly), Timothy discovers the “suicide tree” – a fruit grown around the resort that will cause death if consumed. Cue him ravenously ploughing into the morsel, turning it into a final night smoothie for the whole family – with the exception of Lochlan, who confirms, sheepishly, he can live without money happily.
Standing together in a circle with the drink in hand, like a Jim Jones figure with significantly less self-assurance, Timothy invites them to scull, only to quickly spit it out and falsely proclaim the “COCONUT MILK IS OFF!”. Arguably the blender will become one of the most important characters in the final 30 minutes of this episode, but back to the rest of the hotel for now.
Laurie, Jaclyn and Kate’s presence (Carrie Coon, Michelle Monaghan and Leslie Bibb, respectively) continue to pose the question as to whether they’ll ever interact with anyone else in the hotel – or what their purpose is to the entire series. Perhaps they’re a commentary on superficiality, an allegory for political tensions between keys states in the American imagination, or a cheap trope of bitchy female friends that provided a smooth way to introduce the Russians.
Regardless, this episode confirms nothing about their relevance. They make up, and have a final dinner where Laurie, while personally miserable, looks to her two other ‘lucky’ friends and suggests some existences are hinged on merely being happy to sit at the table we call life. Yawn.
Fortunately, we have a character development on their strapping host Valentin (Arnas Fedaravicius), who’s caught onto the fact that Gaitok, while otherwise hopeless at his job, knows he and his friends are the jewellery thieves. He claims to admit to the crime will end in his deportation back to Vladivostok and subsequent death, posing a crisis of identity to Gaitok. He admits to Mook he may not have it in him to be a security guard – and suffers yet another immediate rejection as he takes a step further back from his strong man ambition.
And then we get to Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), our beloved hotel masseuse, softened by a love affair with Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul). Belinda becomes a symbol of the wider moral binary underpinning the entire series – will she, in all her virtue, accept blood money to attain the very life of the people she’s served for years in the microcosm of high society that is The White Lotus? Knowing the death of Tanya Quaid (Jennifer Coolidge) is inextricably linked to new-found billionaire Greg Hunt aka Gary (Jon Gries), she is offered the chance at wealth – something she believes could spark a business venture with Pornchai, but would require her silence in return.
When her son Zion (Nicholas Duvernay) picks up the offer first presented in the penultimate episode, he ups their fee: $5m for silence. The most shocking part of the episode is that we finally discover how much Tanya, in all her pink silk scarf glory and bumbling Golden Globe-winning one-liners, was worth – half a billion.
“Peace of mind is worth 1 per cent isn’t it?” Zion asks a bemused Greg, causing his mother to storm off and let the audience relax to the fact that Belinda is actually the only decent human being left. Only she’s not; as Zion physically turns the corner of the mansion to find her, she too, turns a moral one – where she instructs her son to close the deal and confirm to Greg, in doing so, that she is a “very honest lady” who will keep her end of the bargain.
And now we come to the final half hour, where the ominous music grows more intense as a flash of Belinda receiving the payment in shock is cut between monkeys screaming barbarically in the forest. It’s a naff scene, but among the most pivotal – the money doesn’t incite Belinda to start her business, pursue her dreams or even love. In a stark parallel to Tanya in the first season, she suggests she’ll dump all of it, in her words to merely be “rich for five f..king minutes”.
So with the death of morality in the series comes the death of characters. The blender enters stage right once again, as Lochlan makes a protein shake with the residue of the suicide fruit still in the container, gulping it down as his siblings and mother retire to brunch. Fortunately he is miraculously revived, by a newly doting and genuinely loving father.
Rick and Chelsea, while seemingly mutually in love for the first time, are interrupted by the presence of Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn), the man he refused to kill in Bangkok due to his frail frame and apparent memory loss of the murder of Rick’s father.
In a calculated and cruel exchange, Jim insults Rick, his “drunk” of a mother, and condemns the “fairytale” he was told about his father. Rick, whose entire construct of masculinity until this point has been formed on an image of a man he never knew but revered, is shattered, as is his psyche. And we finally learn who the shooter is.
Rick takes out his father’s killer and the two allegedly tough security guards onsite, only to learn from a grieving Sritala, whose powerful presence as the star-turned-hotel manager is reduced mostly to a benignly mute wife, that Jim was in fact his father all along. Shed a tear if you have time – because with the full intent to give the audience whiplash, Chelsea is shot dead in the crossfire, Rick mourns the death of the only love he was ever given but refused to accept and of all the saviours to come to the fore and prove themselves it is predictably … Gaitok.
Springing into action in the final five minutes, Gaitok shoots Rick dead at Sritala’s command, solidifying what seems to be the central justice of the series.
Other seasons have seen the rich prevail, while the poor suffer, but this time the servants come out on top, mimicking the savagery of their wealthier counterparts.
In a closing montage, Chelsea and Rick’s corpses bob face down among the moss and weeds, the Ratliffs stare off into the sunset, still unaware of the fate that awaits them at home, the Russians party, and Gaitok, now in a luxury car and a slick pair of black-tinted shades, wins the girl and the top security job.
In a way, the show finds a mild strength in a foreseeable ending. Where it’s become so known to throw a myriad of curveballs at viewers, in this season it has seemed to leverage red herrings while actually leading its audience straight to the fish itself.
Stereotypes play out prominently and The White Lotus keeps us guessing until the very last closing tableau of body bags being carted off, even if, in a way, we saw it coming.
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