'The White Lotus' Season 3 Finale Deaths Explained: All the Beauty & the Bloodshed

Spoilers ahead for The White Lotus season three finale

The season three finale of the White Lotus was the series’ longest and perhaps saddest episode yet, clocking in at an hour and a half and finally wrapping up (nearly) all of the loose ends nagging at us. Mike White saved the drama for the end, and as a result, this finale packed a punch almost as intense as the suicide smoothies Timothy Ratliff served his family (more on that below).

“We want resolution, solid earth under our feet. So we take life into our own hands,” Piper’s monk mentor says in the episode’s opening narration. “Our solutions are temporary. They create more anxiety, more suffering...It is easier to be patient once we finally accept there is no resolution.” Given the title of this episode is Amor Fati, or “love of one’s fate,” it’s a fitting warning for what’s to come. We know that at least one person will die by the end of the episode, and several others will have to face their darkest fears. So let’s get into it.

It’s the last full day of vacation, and Timothy Ratliff is still popping Lorazepams—a temporary solution indeed, both figuratively and literally, as he reaches the end of the bottle. Piper and Lochlan leave their monastic trial sleepover, and though Lochlan tells his sister that he still wants to come to Thailand with her, she rebuffs him. “Lochlan, I don’t want to be responsible for fucking up your life. Just let me fuck up my own life, alright?” she says.

At breakfast, though, Piper tearfully admits to her parents that she’s realized she’s “spoiled” and can’t bring herself to stay at the monastery after all. The food wasn’t organic, and the room had no air conditioning. “I know I’m not supposed to be attached to this kind of stuff…but I think I am,” she tells Victoria, who is over the moon to have her “princess” back. When Piper says she feels guilty for her family’s affluence, Victoria says, “No one in the history of the world has lived better than we have—even the old kings and queens. The least we can do is enjoy it. If we don’t...it’s an offense to all the billions of people who can only dream they can live like we do.” She says this last sentence with a self-satisfied smirk, and Timothy looks absolutely horrified. That’s three family members now, if you’re counting, who have admitted they would be physically and mentally unable to survive if they were to lose their cushy lifestyle, as Timothy knows they are about to.

Still on a quest to evolve spiritually, Saxon is surreptitiously reading the book Chelsea gave him (When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron, for the curious), when Lochlan asks him to share his protein smoothie. The awkwardness between them is even thicker than the sexual tension from a few episodes ago. “No one’s gonna make you a man,” Saxon dismissively tells his little brother. “You gotta do it yourself.” When Lochlan asks Saxon if he’s mad at him, Saxon tells him that it’s okay “to worship me, but don’t like, worship me,” gesturing at his body and referencing their hook up. A bit pathetically, Lochlan tells Saxon that all he wanted to do was make him happy. “All you care about is getting off, and I saw you lying there, and I thought you looked a little left out,” Lochlan says. “I’m a people pleaser…in a family full of narcissists.” Like Timothy with his entitled family, Saxon realizes he has created a monster in his little brother, and tells him to never speak of the situation again.

Rick, meanwhile, wakes up in Bangkok, having completed his mission of confronting Jim Hollinger for allegedly murdering his father. Frank is still high as a kite partying with a bevy of sex workers, but Rick leaves him in the hotel hallway in his underwear. He’s heading back to see Chelsea, whom he greets on the beach with the warmest embrace. Saxon, who had been trying once again to convince Chelsea that he’s deeper than her appears, looks on at their reunion with tears in his eyes, longing for that kind of true love. Is this growth we see? Maybe some characters will make it out of the resort having learned something, after all.

Our blonde trio certainly seems to be heading that way. It can’t be overstated how much White owes this season to the Bravo universe, from the Southern Charm-inspired Ratliffs to the mini Housewives storyline playing out with these three women. Like any great girls' trip, this one ends with redemption, following the fissure and revelation of truths that Jaclyn sleeping with Valentin sparked. After the women brutally read each other’s flaws at dinner the night before—and Laurie stormed off to impulsively sleep with Aleksai, to get her dignity back (which she promptly lost when he asked her for money)—Jaclyn and Kate want to make peace. Jaclyn makes the first move, apologizing to Laurie for sleeping with Valentin, saying she didn’t really think she’d care. Later at dinner, Carrie Coon delivers a beautiful monologue as Laurie about how much her two friends mean to her, not in spite of, but because of their flaws.

After Kate and Jaclyn share their over-the-top reviews of the week—Jaclyn says she’s been “on cloud nine” every single day, Laurie offers a clear counter perspective. “If I’m being honest, all week, I’ve been so sad,” she says. “As you get older, you have to justify your life and your choices, and when I’m with you guys, it’s so transparent what my choices were, and my mistakes.” She goes on to say that though she has no belief system—love, work, and motherhood all having failed to save her—she realizes now that she doesn’t need religion, or God, to give her life meaning. “Time gives it meaning,” she says, specifically, the decades of friendship the three share. Even just sitting by the pool talking shit with them feels deep. “I’m glad that you have a beautiful face,” she says to Jaclyn. “And I’m glad that you have a beautiful life,” she tells Kate. “I’m just happy to be at the table,” she concludes.

Our sweet darling Gaitok is having his own epiphany: he wants to quit his job. “I’m not meant to be a guard,” he tells a disappointed Mook, who warns him not to throw away his years of work, and even turns down a second date if he isn’t going to step up and be “successful.” His dilemma is this: Valentin has figured out that Gaitok knows he, Aleksai, and Vlad are responsible for the robbery, and that he’s considering turning them in. Doing so would put Gaitok in both his boss and his dream girl’s good graces, so it really seems like a no-brainer. But Valentin breaks out a sob story to Gaitok, telling him that should he turn them in, they’ll all be deported back to Russia, where they’ll surely die. “If you say something, you’re killing me,” Valentin tells Gaitok, who we already know is non-violent by nature and belief.

The matter is extra pressing, because Sritala and her husband Jim are heading back to the resort from Bangkok. This also all but ensures a run-in with Jim and Rick, whom Chelsea elatedly describes as “free” now that he’s overcome his past and his fears. “I think we’ll be together forever,” she tells Rick, and he says, “That’s the plan.” Chelsea starts crying, as he finally seems to have accepted her vision of their future as soul mates.

Belinda, though, still has a ghost to confront. Her son, Zion, convinces her to go back to Greg and renegotiate the $100,000 he offered her to keep quiet about Tanya’s murder. “Don’t miss your moment,” Zion tells her. Facing down a stony-faced Greg, Zion speaks on behalf of his mother, driving a hard bargain and saying she needs $5 million to stay gone for good. He did the math and the research, and found out Tanya was worth nearly half a billion dollars. “Peace of mind is worth one percent” of that fortune, he tells a very skeptical Greg. Belinda bluffs a walk-off and tells Zion to close the deal. He doesn’t, and later over a meal, he lets his mom know that he gave Greg her bank account info, and they have to wait to see what he decides. “There’s a line between positive thinking and delusional. You’re crossing the line,” she tells him.

That makes the moment the money hits Belinda’s account all the more euphoric. She tells Zion that Greg called her, and let her know that in a way, he was giving the money to Tanya—it’s what she would’ve wanted, he said. Justice for Jennifer Coolidge, sort of? Maybe not, but it’s definitely justice for Belinda. “You worked so hard, Mom,” Zion tells her. “Good things happen to good people.” Belinda says that after he completes the wellness session she booked for him—the one that the season opened with—they’re going to pack their bags and get out of Thailand. What about sweet, doting Pornchai, who is in love with Belinda and wants to open a spa with her? Belinda doesn’t have time for that. She wants to get away from Greg before he “changes his mind,” and anyway, “Can’t [she] just be rich for five fucking minutes?” Confirming that money makes people callous she abandons Pornchai in the same way Tanya had abandoned her in season one.

The Ratliffs are still enjoying their last hours of being rich, though they don’t know it, and Timothy is decidedly certain that they’ll never find out. After being reminded by the ever-cheery Pam that the fruit growing on the resort’s trees contain poison seeds—“suicide trees,” as she calls them, also known as cerbera odollam or pong pong trees—he pulls apart as many as he can and grinds up the seeds, leaving them in Saxon’s blender. After dinner, he makes piña coladas with the pulp and gives a depressing toast: “I couldn’t ask for a more perfect family. We’ve had a perfect life, haven’t we? No privations, no suffering, no trauma. And my job is to keep all that from you. To keep you safe.” He then encourages his family—everyone except Lochlan, under the guise of his not being 21, but really because he’s the only one who said he could live without money—to drink up, taking the first gulp himself. For a moment, it really seems like we’re about to witness a family annihilation on the screen. At the last moment, after everyone’s taken a few grimacing sips of the sour drinks, Timothy wildly knocks them out of their hands, saying the coconut milk has gone rancid. Somehow, luckily, none of them are poisoned at all.

It’s a ridiculously close call, but the family is far from safe. Lochlan, trying to be the man Saxon has been pushing him to be, makes one last smoothie, somehow not realizing he’s blending the poison seeds into the beverage. Sitting alone by the pool, he experiences a near-death experience. Just as the monk described the end of life as being a drop of water returning to the ocean of collective consciousness, Lochlan sees himself drowning in a dark pool. Timothy finds his son’s lifeless body and wails in despair and regret over what he’s done.

It’s not quite the end for little Lochy, thank goodness, as he eventually sputters back to life. “I think I just saw God,” he tells his dad. It’s enough to make Timothy realize the gravity of what he’s done, because on the boat ride home, when the family is finally handed back their electronics and the inevitable discovery of all that’s waiting for them back in North Carolina is about to hit, he calmly tells them that though “everything is about to change,” they’re strong, and they’ll be okay. Overall, they don’t really seem like people who will necessarily be okay, and it’s frustrating that we won’t get to see how the drama the season has been teasing with this family finally plays out—but at least we’re out of the murder-suicide woods?

So if the trio lives and the Ratliffs come out unscathed, that only leaves a few options for this season’s final victims. Jim Hollinger did, of course, run into Rick at the resort restaurant, and wasted no time in getting back at him for coming to his house, lying to his wife, and pushing him over in his chair. “I remember your mother,” Jim tells a stunned Rick. “I knew she was a drunk and a slut. Didn’t know she was a liar, too. She wanted you to think your father was some kind of great man. Told you a fairytale, kid. Your father was no saint. You didn’t miss out on much. And that’s the fucking truth.”

Rick, who just moments ago was a free man unburdened by what has been, is utterly destroyed by this conversation. His face drops, and he’s back in the dark pit of despair that drove him to Thailand in the first place. Jim flashes his gun at Rick to warn him from coming at him again. In a daze, he tells Chelsea, “How can I get over everything he’s taken from me? He took my whole fucking life.” She wisely responds, “Stop worrying about the love you didn’t get. Think about the love you have. I love you. I’m right here.” He tells her he needs to see his woman—the meditation instructor he met a few episodes ago—and he takes off with Sritala and Jim’s bodyguards leering at him from across the room.

When he runs into the instructor on the resort grounds, she’s on her way to Zion’s session and tells the panicked and distraught Rick to wait for her. He’s overcome with rage when he sees Jim and Sritala nearby taking a photo with Jaclyn and the girls, and blinded by emotion, Rick approaches Jim, pulls his gun out of his holster, and shoots him dead. Sritala cries out, telling Rick that Jim was actually his father all along (shocking! but also, not as the series had been leading up to this all along). Rick is horrified but has no time to process the information, as he gets into a gun fight with Sritala’s bodyguards. He somehow manages to kill them both, but Chelsea gets caught in the crossfire. As she lies bleeding from the heart on the ground, Rick promises his dying love that they’ll “be together forever.”

Gaitok, however, finally has his moment, with Sritala screaming at him to shoot and kill Rick, who is now stumbling away across the foot bridge with Chelsea. Going against all his instincts, Gaitok shoots Rick to death. Rick and Chelsea float down the river together, with one last shot of Rick’s face frozen in something like a smile. Together forever indeed! A tragic ending for a tragic couple, on some Final Destination shit as foreseen by Chelsea herself.

Still, more tragedy awaits. While Gaitok is handsomely rewarded for going against his morals (in the end, he has both Mook’s approval and a new position as Sritala’s bodyguard), Pornchai gets the short end of the stick from Belinda. In an ironic twist, she gives him the exact same treatment that Tanya gave her two seasons ago, breaking his heart by telling him that “circumstances have changed” and she won’t be starting a business with him anytime soon. Pornchai’s crestfallen face as he waves goodbye to Belinda and Zion’s boat from the shore is nearly as sad as the final shot of Rick and Chelsea—twin bodybags for twin flames—being rolled across the tarmac.