Now we can say it: After a short time spent at The White Lotus resort in Thailand, we know where those gun shots came from, and who was in the firing line. It wasn’t a pissed off monkey, after all. In a frenetic final showdown, we lost our girl Chelsea, then her boyfriend Rick was shot by Gaitok, but after Rick shot Jim, who, it turns out, is his real father. All this mania was sandwiched into the final 30 minutes of an extra-long, 90-minute season finale. RIP Chelsea. Fly high queen. Rick and Jim we’re less bothered about. (Sorry.) Now what’s the situ with all the rest of these fuckers?
Hating the main characters in The White Lotus is by design.. They’re the obnoxious and the wealthy who, in the case of Timothy Ratliff, would rather kill themselves and their family than find a way to survive with little cash. “I couldn’t ask for a more perfect family,” he says, as he prepares a toast of poison piña coladas. Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie are fine to sweep political beliefs to the side but manage to beef over a hot Russian guy. Piper, who we had so much hope for, quickly gives up on her dream of becoming a Buddhist when she realizes she didn’t really like what she’d have to eat for dinner.
White’s reputation as a showrunner favors his ability to leave breadcrumbs and red herrings throughout entire seasons that click together perfectly in a season finale. In the end, everyone who teetered on the edge of asshole status tipped into it fully by the time the show finished, and the few who clung onto goodness fell victim to it. Chelsea’s unwavering loyalty to her man, when double Ratcliff dick was on the table, ended up costing her her life. Meanwhile, Rick barely got any better at being a good guy, growing more aloof and sticky as he tried to pinpoint exactly who was responsible for his dad’s death, only for him and Chelsea to have their brief kiss-and-make-up moment in the finale. But we spent so long on that fence, waiting for the definitive action, that the show didn’t give itself much time to let us linger with the consequences of all that rumination.What will the Ratcliffs do now that they’ve lost it all? And did they even lose it all anyway? And did Tim fess up to poisoning everyone? Are the blonde blob actually besties again after witnessing a mass shooting? We don’t know because no one said anything on the boat. And did Rick even have a chance to have a moment of catharsis—or irony—about meeting, and then killing, his father?
“Has a girls trip that involved both a robbery and a shooting ever ended on such a pleasant note?”
The season finale ended on multiple cliffhangers, which would be fine if we knew we were going to get more from this cast of characters in future. But such is the way Mike White works (for the most part, he does have one or two recurring characters), it’s unlikely we’ll get to see what we were expecting to be some of its most tantalising conversations. The Ratliff family weren’t short on conflict, but perhaps their biggest secrets weren’t brought to light in a group setting: namely how they’d all react to the fact their father was now shit broke, and so they were too, but also the incest! Not that it’s the kind of conversation likely to be had round a dinner table, but there’s a number of people in that resort who know what happened. Either of these subjects would have put a bomb beneath the foundations of an upper class nuclear family. But that schadenfreude ended up being more campaigned than we anticipated, and the Ratliffs sailed off into the sunset without us getting to know more about their fate.
Existing on their own little island, seldom interacting with the others, were Jaclyn, Kate and Laurie. Their own peripheral figures crossed paths with other group’s peripheral figures, but for the most part their storyline felt like its own spin-off show. Not a bad thing, but their ending felt too tender after a few wrought days on the resort. While Jaclyn and Kate laden each other with girl power affirmations and praise, Laurie, the resident cynic, sat on the sidelines, immune to it, or rather rarely on the receiving end of it. She had much deeper ruminations going on, even before Valentin and Jaclyn’s illicit affair, and Laurie’s own with Valentin’s friend. This caused the biggest point of conflict for the group for the whole season, even bypassing Kate’s own MAGA stance. And yet, by the time they were ready to pack their bags and leave, everything had been forgotten. Amends were made. It all felt a little too straightforward. Has a girls trip ever ended on such a pleasant note? Especially one that involved both a robbery and a shooting?
There was a morsel of hope that we’d get to the twisted bottom of Rick’s daddy issues in a way that would allow him to contemplate them himself––alas, he was dead before that could ever happen. For The White Lotus’s longest season yet, and one that was hardly packed with jaw-dropping moments, there was space for these subjects to be teased out earlier. Instead, the show played out like a long-running sitcom in eight short episodes. Where we wanted gags plural, we got maybe a singular gag in the finale. He’s already told us off for wanting more throughout the season (“If you don’t want to be edged, then get out of my bed,” he told Variety) and while Mike White’s dedication to letting the rich be the subject of schadenfreude is unwavering, maybe this time he needed to take it a few steps further.