*White Lotus Season 3, Episode 8 spoilers below*
If character actors — the backbencher workhouse type of performer White Lotus is full of — were a member of a band, they’d be the bass player. To those outside of the industry, they may come off as unimportant. But to those in the know, it’s completely obvious that the unselfish backbone is actually the most essential element.
This season, they’re the lifeline making White Lotus its most successful — ratings-wise — yet. There’s Jason Isaacs, the lesser-known name you’d recognize best as Lucius Malfoy from Harry Potter, here frantically looking for a way out of the unravelling money laundering scheme tearing his and his unsuspecting family’s lives apart back home. There’s Carrie Coon, the Fargo TV series sort-of star, floundering as the least successful member of her girls’ trip friend group, struggling to connect over the widening gulfs between their lives.
There’s Walton Goggins as the misanthropic Rick Hatchett, at Thailand’s White Lotus resort to uncover and confront the man he believes killed his father — for which he needs the help of his unhinged old friend Frank (played here by self-described character actor Sam Rockwell).
There’s Jon Gries as Greg (or is it Gary?). A returning face from the first two seasons, the veteran Lost and Napoleon Dynamite character actor is on the run from Italian officials after drawing suspicions of having killed his wife (character actress Jennifer Coolidge) last season. Now, he’s in a cold war of wits with Season 1’s Belinda (Natasha Rothwell, who wrote and starred in Insecure), the spa manager who unfortunately recognizes Greg, and how dangerous he can be.
And given the scenery chewing opportunities they’re all provided, if White Lotus‘s third season were a song, it would be a bass solo — that odd, alienating flight of fancy that either has the audience head-bobbing along to the most underappreciated instrument finally getting a chance to shine, or heading for the door long before the final note leads to a resolution.
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Sunday night’s finale was absolutely that resolution: an extended 90 minutes of shoot-outs and frantic plot tie-ups that did what many thought was impossible: bringing the notoriously slow-moving season to a satisfying end.
At least when we’re talking about foreshadowed payoff — something this season has been building up ever since its February premiere. After hours of Timothy Ratliff (Isaacs) looking for a way out of the coming legal fallout certain to destroy his wealth, we finally see him reach a sort of acceptance. And after the first season’s frustrating bait-and-switch that left Belinda without money for the spa she hoped to launch, we finally see her get the upper hand on the world — even if she has to sacrifice the potential future she had with love interest Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul).
And after seven episodes of waiting, we finally see what caused the shoot-out briefly shown in the first episode — and how it ties in with Rick’s ruinous obsession with vengeance, and betrayal of his bubbly, optimistic girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood).
The slapdash finale is by no means perfect — coming into Sunday’s episode, it was hard for many to fathom how the miles of plot could ever be resolved, even in an expanded last episode.
And some plot lines do give off the air of an afterthought: Timothy’s sons Lochlan (Sam Nivola) and particularly Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) had been suffering through the only partially blackout-obscured memory of an incestuous tryst. But instead of grappling with the implications of what they’d done, Schwarzenegger’s elder brother character essentially deals with it by not dealing with it: “Let’s just drop this. Like, forever — please. OK?”
After a season trying to sell himself as the romantic partner co-worker Mook (Blackpink’s Lisa) had been dreaming of, security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) gets the girl in a dialogue-free epilogue. And after two full seasons of moral wavering on the ethical emptiness of the rich white tourists she is forced to wait on, Belinda does a complete character 180 to become like them in the span of 30 minutes.
Satirical cynicism
But the cynicism and meaninglessness of White Lotus‘s character endings is something of the point. Broadcast all the way back in Sam Rockwell’s infamous speech on his confused identity and subsequent epiphany that he’s in the wrong body — that he wants to “be one of these Asian girls” he has been voraciously sleeping with — the theme of this season has been simple: know thyself.
The show’s usually bulls-eye skewering of classism and the self-deluding rationalization of ladder-climbers goes a bit sideways when it stretches beyond that scope; creator Mike White drew criticism for saying that speech was a depiction of “autogynephilia” — a theory that posits trans women are aroused by the idea of being women — and cutting a storyline about a trans child after Donald Trump’s ascension to the presidency.
But when it sticks closer to home, the message continues to land.
Each member of the Ratliff family is prodded by Timothy over whether they could live with nothing; one by one, with the exception of Lochlan, they reveal they cannot. There is Lochlan who — unlike his Season 1 counterpart, Quin — gives in to his desire to be like elder brother, Saxon, drinking his recently poisoned protein powder and almost dying because of it.
There is Rick, pulled by Chelsea and his stress manager Amrita (Shalini Peiris) to become the type of person who can forgive. It’s a battle Chelsea eventually loses — both die in the shoot-out, becoming the corpses shown in the season’s first episode. It’s also one Chelsea referenced in the previous episode:
“It’s like we’re in this yin and yang battle, and I’m hope and Rick is pain,” she told Saxon. “And eventually, one of us will win.”
There is Gaitok; perpetually questioned over his lack of ambition and killer instinct, he first tries to reject that role, before being rewarded for shooting Rick in the back.
And there is Laurie (Coon), given a monologue about the meaning she’s constructed for her life that worked as a sort of echo of the show’s main theme; a callback reinforcement of Rockwell’s half-formed theories.
The speech is wonderful — an equal-parts empowering and depressing call to arms for absurdism, the philosophical belief that nothing we do in life matters, and attempting to find external meaning only leads to heartache and disappointment.
It’s also a wonderful moment for Coon to shine: one of the many, many opportunities White Lotus gives to the often overlooked character actors.
And it’s a perfect encapsulation of what the show achieves — a sort of literary, roundabout fable whose meaning exists in the margins more than its plot. Coon’s character is not saved or vindicated, not really. Few are given satisfying endings, and even fewer still endings that are really deserved. But that’s not how life works, either. All we can do is try to come up with a meaning for ourselves.
