7 Shocking Moments From ‘The White Lotus’ Season 3 Finale

Piper Abandons Her Dream

The episode’s first, major moment comes courtesy of Piper Ratliff (Sarah Catherine Hook), who returns from her and Lochlan’s (Sam Nivola) night at the nearby monastery sporting a tough face that quickly disintegrates. At dinner, she confesses to her mother Victoria (Parker Posey) and father Tim (Jason Isaacs) that the monastery’s food was “so bland” and that her mattress was small and covered in stains. Victoria is all too happy to hear her daughter say that she does not actually want to become a Buddhist but is just suffering from White Guilt over her own, immense privilege. (Tim is less pleased once he realizes that Piper also wouldn’t be happy without her family’s wealth.)

Belinda Plays Hardball (and Wins)

After some good-hearted, if naive, pressure from her son Zion (Nicholas Duvernay), Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) meets up again with Greg (Jon Gries). Zion leads the meeting, cockily proposing that Greg pay his mother $5 million — 1% of the net worth that Greg inherited from the murder of his wife Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) — so that she can really get her business off the ground and feel good about keeping Greg’s secrets. Greg initially rejects Zion’s counteroffer, but he eventually accepts it after Belinda makes a show of storming away (only to tell her son to make sure he “closes” the negotiation). 

In the middle of the night, Belinda checks her bank account to see $5 million from Greg sitting there waiting for her. The next morning, she and Zion make a speedy escape from Thailand before Greg can change his mind, and she leaves Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul) waving at her from the resort’s beach, his offer to co-found a spa firmly rejected. It is an act that feels eerily reminiscent of the way that Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) left her in Hawaii in “The White Lotus” Season 1. To be fair to Belinda, she does not owe Tanya or Pornchai anything. Those who were hoping for Tanya to receive some form of justice will have to look elsewhere, though, because it won’t be coming from Belinda.

Carrie Coon’s Emmy Moment

This may not be as “shocking” as the other moments on this list, but it must be included because it might just be the best scene of the entire “White Lotus” Season 3 finale. After Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) confess over dinner just how happy and grateful they are to have spent the last week together, Laurie (Carrie Coon) reveals that she has been “sad” for most of the trip. She goes on to admit that being around her friends and seeing up close just how happy they are with their lives has made her own mistakes and regrets inescapably clear to her.

In the end, Laurie finds meaning and peace in “time,” and in the depth that has grown over the years in her friendships with Kate and Jaclyn. Coon, one of the best actresses alive, has not had as many spotlight moments this season as fans of hers may have wanted. But her speech in “Amor Fati” more than makes up for that. It is a profound, spell-binding and emotionally cathartic moment, and Coon makes the absolute most of it.

Lochlan Makes a Smoothie

Tim decides at the last moment to ditch his idea to poison Victoria, Piper and Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) with a cocktail made out of the seeds of the resort’s poisonous fruits. But he does not rinse the blender after he tosses out his family’s deadly piña coladas, and neither does Lochlan when he wakes up the next morning and decides to make himself a version of his brother’s protein shakes. He does not even finish the shake before he begins convulsing, hallucinating and throwing up, and the episode leaves him for several moments lying face up, completely still, near his family’s pool.

Tim wakes up to find his youngest son seemingly dead and begins calling for help in one of the darkest moments of “The White Lotus” to date. Series creator Mike White pulls the rug out from under viewers minutes later, however, when he has Lochlan miraculously come back to life — much to a stunned Tim’s disbelief. “Amor Fati” later leaves the Ratliffs on their boat back to the airport. Tim’s warning that things are about to change for the family is met with mostly confused expressions from his wife and kids. That is, at least, until Saxon checks his phone and sees a notification that causes him to look back up at his father with dawning concern and horror. It looks like Tim will be going to jail, after all, but White stops short of revealing the Ratliffs’ ultimate fate.

Rick Kills Jim Hollinger

Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins) returns to the White Lotus with a renewed sense of peace early in “Amor Fati,” and he even reaffirms his commitment to spend the rest of his life with a delighted Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood). That all comes crashing down when Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn) confronts him in the resort’s breakfast space. Jim calls Rick’s mother a “drunk” and a “slut” and tells Goggins’ unstable Rick that he was told a “fairy tale” about his father. Rick is left shaken and enraged by the encounter. Chelsea attempts to calm him down, asking him to stop “thinking about the love you didn’t get” and “think about the love you have.”

While he tries to find some solace and advice again in meditation teacher Amrita (Shalini Peiris), she tells him to wait until her session with Zion is done. He does not do that. Instead, he seizes upon a moment when Jim’s bodyguards are gone and steals the man’s gun from his coat pocket while he is posing for a photograph with his wife Sritala (Lek Patravadi) and Jaclyn. Rick shoots Jim twice in the chest, killing him, only to find out from a horrified Sritala that Jim was actually his father. “He told me!” she screams, cementing the fact that it has always been Rick who has been responsible for his own unhappiness, and not some faceless old man.

Chelsea and Rick’s Shared Fate

After shooting Jim in the chest, Rick is chased and pinned down by the Hollingers’ armed bodyguards. Rick easily dispatches with both, but not before one of their bullets hits Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), who was standing nearby. She dies in Rick’s arms from a bullet to the chest — fulfilling her prediction from earlier in the season that “bad things happen in threes.” She survived a robbery and a snake bite, but she does not survive her boyfriend’s gunfight. Rick starts to carry her away, promising that they really are going to be “together forever.”

He’s right, but only in the sense that he is eventually shot and killed by a reluctant Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong). The couple topple into the resort’s pond — revealing Rick (or Chelsea) to be the body Zion saw at the start of the season. Ultimately, Chelsea was right. She and Rick really were like yin and yang, opposite forces intrinsically linked. Everything he did reverberated onto her, and while she was left floating face down next to him in the resort’s pond, Rick died floating face up. It is a fittingly tragic ending for a pair that felt doomed right from the start — even if Chelsea did deserve a bit better than dying because of Rick.

Gaitok Gets Promoted

Things end seemingly better for Gaitok, who is promoted to being one of Sritala’s bodyguards for killing Rick. In his final scene of the season, Gaitok — sporting an uncharacteristically black shirt and new sunglasses — hugs an impressed Mook (Lalisa Manobal) before hopping into the front seat of Sritala’s SUV. He seems happy and content, but he definitely does not seem like the Gaitok who viewers have spent the majority of the last eight weeks with. He got the girl and the job, but he sold his morals and beliefs in order to do it. Viewers can decide for themselves whether or not that is a fair trade.