Well, that was a bloodbath. We now know who died during HBO’s feature-length finale of The White Lotus season 3—all five of them.
Series creator Mike White ultimately axed several parties from the luxury hotel’s Thailand outpost. Both Walton Goggins’ Rick and Aimee Lee Wood’s Chelsea died in a shootout that also wiped out White Lotus Thailand owner Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn) and his henchmen. First, Rick kills Jim in what he believes to be retribution for his own father’s murder. But it’s revealed moments later that Jim was his father all along. Rick kills both of Jim’s bodyguards, only to discover that a bullet from one of them has claimed Chelsea’s life. Finally, hotel security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) finally puts Rick out of his perpetual misery.
The episode’s first suggested death is a fakeout involving another father-son duo. Sam Nivola’s Lochlan appears to be inadvertently poisoned at the hands of Jason Isaacs’s Timothy, after Timothy attempts a murder-suicide of everyone in his family except for Lochlan. But it is only a near death experience. When he regains consciousness after it, Lochlan tells his father: “I think I just saw God.”
Earlier in the finale episode, titled “Amor Fati”—a Latin phrase meaning “love of fate”—Ratliff patriarch Timothy, who can’t bear the idea of his wife and children learning about his financial crimes, plans to poison his family with the lethal fruit he plucked off a “suicide tree” outside their villa. He gives his eldest son (Patrick Schwarzenegger’s Saxon), daughter (Sarah Catherine Hook’s Piper), and wife (Parker Posey’s Victoria) a trio of deadly piña coladas, and also plans to down one himself. But Timothy decides to spare his youngest son Lochlan, who told his father previously in the episode that he could hypothetically survive without money or a house.
White revealed his inspiration for this storyline in a brief interview that aired after the finale. “I had read stories about some aristocratic guy who basically killed his family because he had been blowing through all their money and didn’t have the guts to tell them,” he says in the “Unpacking Episode 8” segment that followed the episode. “The way Timothy’s family sees him is so crucial to his sense of self that when that’s at risk, he’d rather burn down the whole house than face the music.”
Although Timothy changes his mind about the mass murder—knocking the piña colada out of Saxon’s hand and announcing to everyone that the “coconut milk is off”—he fails to clean out the blender he used to make the deadly drinks. The next morning, Lochlan uses the mixture that remains in the blender to make himself a protein shake. His mother and siblings head off to breakfast, unaware that he’s in critical condition. Lochlan vomits, appears to choke, and hallucinates a vision of himself coming up to the surface of a body of water as four monks look down on him. But just as he is about to reach them, Lochlan sinks and appears to (metaphorically) drown. It’s only later that he awakens in his father’s arms.
Stefano Delia/HBO
