‘The White Lotus’ Season 3 Finale Recap And Review: A Crushing Disappointment

I could walk across the sand of my imagination and dig up so many of words to describe the Season 3 finale of The White Lotus. Like seashells or bullet casings scattered across the dunes, like drops of water spraying up above the waves, they come to me. Like seeds from a suicide tree.

“Tragic” might be one of them, and certainly there was tragedy here. “Disappointing” might be another, and I am feeling terribly disappointed as I type this. “Indulgent,” also, because I’m afraid that the success of the first two seasons must have gone to Mike White’s head. What a mess. What a waste of time. It seems all the worries that I wrote about last week have come to fruition, and then some. Spoilers ahead.

All the various storylines were wrapped up in Episode 8, “Amor Fati,” though not as neat and tidy as some might have hoped. I suppose we’re meant to take the title on the nose and simply embrace our fate. Sadly, there was little that was particularly surprising and even less that was satisfying in this final chapter of a long, rambling story that mostly went nowhere. The story with any real arc or payoff made me feel terribly sad, and perhaps that was the one story this season worth telling if only because it made me feel something. Every other story slogged along and then stumbled across the finish line. I felt nothing for most of these characters by the time the curtains were called.

Perhaps the Buddhist monk’s quote at the beginning of the episode was a warning: Don’t expect resolution. That’s life. And sure, that’s life. But this is television. And I am far from pleased.

We’ll get right to the gutpunch. Rick (Walton Goggins) and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) are the bodies at the end of this grim tale. And I do mean grim in ways that the first two seasons were not. There was a certain liveliness to this show that is all but gone here, replaced with a sour sort of story that has all the darkness but none of the light that balanced it out in previous seasons.

The first gunshots fired come from a gun that was only introduced this episode, which is a nice little twist on Chekhov’s Gun. I’ve been tracking the firearms all season long, so of course it was Jim Holinger’s (Scott Glenn) that fired the first shots, just minutes after being introduced. Rick shoots Hollinger dead shortly after the old man tells him that his mother was a liar (among other things) and his father no saint, cracking Rick’s newfound sense of peace.

Shocking not a single person who follows this show, Rick learns moments later that Jim was his father all along. I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.

More shocking is the accidental shooting death of Chelsea, who happened to come across Rick just moments before he rushed up and took Jim’s gun and did not eff off when he told her to. If only Amrita (Shalini Peiris) had taken a moment to talk with Rick, perhaps he would have gone away with her and they could have lived happily ever after. Hell, Zion (Nicholas Duvernay) didn’t even want a meditation session, he would have happily given up his hour.

Either way, the one couple I was rooting for all season dies in the end. But what could have been a compelling tragic moment at the end of a brilliant story fell flat. Left me cold. And it’s not because the story of Rick taking vengeance on the man he thought killed his father isn’t compelling. It’s because it’s the only compelling story this season that went anywhere, and even then it ended in cliché. You might as well have had Jim, with his dying words, gasp “Rick, I am your father…aagghh…”

The Russians get away with their robbery. Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) never turns in Valentin (Arnas Fedaravicius) because he’s worried about harming people, and Valentin tells him that he and his friends will be executed if they’re sent back to Russia. But he does shoot an unarmed man in the back. A man carrying an innocent woman in his arms who, for all Gaitok knew, could have still been alive. He gets the promotion, though, and the girl, and drives Sritala (Lek Patravadi) off to the funeral with a smile. I guess . . . some of the characters get a happy ending?

The Gossip Girls stop gossiping for once, and have a heartfelt conversation at dinner where Laurie (Carrie Coon) cries about her disappointing life and confesses that being with her dear friends is what really matters. She doesn’t need god or religion because time is what defines her, or something. I guess when you’ve got a dead-end career, a failed marriage and a rebellious teenage daughter, the devils you know are better than nothing at all. Rationalization catches up with us all someday.

Again, the story of these three friends might have been interesting if it was given more room to breathe, but like most of the subplots this season, it spun its wheels and went nowhere fast. You could cut all three characters from the show entirely and lose nothing. Cut the Russians, too. And Gaitok and Mook (Lalisa Manobal) and I’m not sure what you’d really lose. Maybe a couple episodes worth of runtime. Maybe the show would have been tighter and better that way.

Then there are the Ratliffs. Timothy (Jason Isaacs) almost poisons his family, but like just about everything else this season, almost is the key word. He almost poisons Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) because his eldest son has confessed that he is utterly in his father’s shadow, that he has wed his life to his career and that he is nothing without it. He almost poisons his wife, Victoria (Parker Posey) because she confesses she would be nothing without wealth. He almost poisons his daughter, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) because she realizes she can’t live at the Buddhist retreat and eat bland food and sleep in a little box. She heeds her mother’s wisdom instead: It would be rude and ungrateful not to enjoy their enormous good fortune. They live better than kings and queens of old. They owe it to the huddled masses to live this way and enjoy it, don’t you see? Throw out your convictions, my dear. And so she does. Just like that. Perhaps the moral of the story is that convictions are what get us killed.

In any case, all that wealth is about to go up in smoke. The walls are tumbling down, they just don’t know it yet. But we don’t see the crumbling. Timothy admits, finally, that things are about to change, but he lets their notifications do the talking. His hand is finally forced, on the boat, when the cell phones are returned. The boat sails off into the sunset, Timothy smiling out over the waves, and we’re deprived any meaningful fallout. Parker Posey’s reaction is not forthcoming.

The one person Timothy doesn’t mean to poison ends up poisoning himself. Poor, stupid, dimwitted, empty-headed Lochlan (Sam Nivola) finds the blender in the morning, still goopy with the poison seeds and “bad coconut milk” and decides “Hey, instead of rinsing this out, I’ll make a protein shake and drink it.” Who does this? Who doesn’t rinse out (and ideally wash) a filthy blender filled with milky stuff?

His near-death experience is all very poetic, of course. That indulgence I spoke of up above is on full display. We see his soul underwater, Lochlan fighting to swim, drowning, and when he looks up he sees the dark silhouettes of old Buddhist monks staring down at him, and it’s this big, horrible, poetic moment . . . but I was just shaking my head. All I could think is, “The Darwin Award goes to Lochlan, quite possibly the most idiotic character ever written for this show.” Even Tanya’s death in Season 2 was less boneheaded. But Lochlan survives and nobody even talks about it or tries to figure out what happened.

“I think I saw God,” Lochlan tells his relieved father.

Maybe you did, Lochlan. But I’m not sure what I just watched. This was the least satisfying, least funny, least shocking, least impressive season of The White Lotus so far. Had it been the first, I’m not sure we’d ever have gotten a second, let alone a third.

The whole thing ends with a wink. A better show would have ended with Rick and Chelsea among the lily pads, Rick’s face finally at peace in death. There’s poetry in that moment, however cliche his story ended up being. Instead, we get Greg (Jon Gries) watching Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) as she hustles some new lover to help cuck her rich, old, wicked boyfriend. A wink and a ship sailing out to sea, and Belinda and Zion waving to poor Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul) who has become Belinda 2.0, though in a much less interesting story than the one Belinda first appeared in.

I’m not sure if I’m Jack’s broken heart or Jack’s raging bile duct right now. Whatever the case, while both Season 1 and 2 remain works of absolute genius, frenetic stories about love and betrayal and petty spite and madness, stories that I will return to many times over in the future, I think I’ll leave this one in the sand. Bury it deep and hope for something better in Season 4.