‘The White Lotus’ Season 3 Finale Gave Us the World’s Dumbest Shootout

The 90-minute episode delivered an inevitable reveal, some inexplicable choices, and big questions about where the series goes from here

This post contains spoilers for "Amor Fati," the third season finale of The White Lotus, now streaming on Max.

The finale of The White Lotus Season Three begins with a montage of various characters getting ready for their final full day at the Thailand resort, including Piper and Lochlan waking up after their night at the monastery. The head monk greets all his guests with a speech about the elusive nature of life itself, acknowledging that it brings with it many questions when we want resolution. Life gets easier, he suggests, once we accept that there is no resolution.

< As a mostly self-contained season of scripted television, The White Lotus does not allow itself to be as mysterious or unknowable as the monk argues that our own lives are. So "Amor Fati" offers resolution plenty. But given how predictable, contrived, and/or outright silly these resolutions are, maybe it would have been better if there had been none at all?

This was already the bumpiest of the series' three seasons. Expanding to eight episodes (after six in the first season and seven in the second) resulted not in more depth, but to certain ideas — Tim's murder-suicide fantasies, the friends' decades-old resentments — being repeated much too often. The stories of both Belinda and Gaitok felt badly underfed, as Lotus creator Mike White's level of interest in the non-wealthy — and/or non-white — characters has dipped with each passing season. If not for the specter of the mass shooting teased in the season-opening flash-forward, the whole thing would have felt like a meandering tone poem, elevated by some good performances (especially by Walton Goggins, Aimee Lou Wood, and Carrie Coon), the occasional zinger (mostly from Parker Posey's Victoria), and random bits of sexual experimentation (Lochlan giving his brother a hand, Frank's monologue about his ladyboy fantasies).

But having seen the shooting in context, as well as all the other climaxes — or lack thereof — I wonder if maybe these deaths aren't now the promotional cart driving the narrative horse. Or if White has simply run out of things to say about the terribleness of the idle rich, but has become too successful himself through this show to stop. The first (and still best) and second seasons reached their creative high points in their respective finales, where "Amor Fati" just summed up all the things that weren't working about Season Three.

Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie

We have to start at the end regarding the trio of old friends. They are first-person witnesses to one murder, and are at least in the vicinity when four other people are shot and killed, and their reaction is… what? We have no idea, because we literally do not hear them speak in the aftermath of those five deaths. There is a brief glimpse of the pals cuddling up together on the boat taking them back to the mainland for their flights home. But if they are traumatized by the ordeal, or are simply using it as another reason to cast all their petty grudges aside and embrace their friendship, we have no idea.
As a whole, the finale doesn't seem to know what to do with the idea of this huge and horrifying burst of violence happening in the middle of the resort, since Belinda, Zion, and the Ratliffs seem similarly untroubled to have been on the property at the time. (When Tanya shot up all the gays who were trying to murder her in the Season Two finale, that at least was on a yacht, and not at the hotel itself.) But the others get to talk about something in the season's closing minutes, where the friends are all but ignored — a frustrating but somewhat fitting conclusion to a subplot that was buoyed much more by the three actors involved in it than by the material they were asked to play.
When you hand Coon — a.k.a. one of the greatest and most emotionally raw actors working today — a heartfelt monologue like the one that Laurie delivers at the friends' final Thailand dinner, of course it's going to be at least a little effective. But the words she was delivering with such force were wildly at odds with how the character was portrayed throughout the season. The idea that she was scared straight after her bad night with Aleksei, followed by the glimpse of the other two happily playing together in the pool, didn't make sense after we had watched her so clearly hate both of them for the rest of the week. Maybe if they'd saved the speech for after, again, the three of them were witnesses to a mass shooting, it might have seemed more honest?
What a bummer! It's not that Belinda is corrupted by the life-changing bribe she and Zion are able to negotiate with Greg. It's that her corruption felt inevitable and unearned at the same time. Belinda felt like a rich and complicated person in the first season. Her relationship with Tanya had many layers, and wasn't just about a rich woman emotionally leeching off of a poor one. Brought back for a new season, Natasha Rothwell didn't have a lot to do, and Belinda was a much thinner sketch this time around. And compared to pretty much every other younger character in the show's history — from the Mossbacher siblings in the first season to the Ratliffs here — Zion was granted zero depth. He was just a cartoon chasing after dollar signs.

The White Lotus’ Season 3 Finale Gave Us the World’s Dumbest Shootout

‘The White Lotus’ Season 3 Finale Gave Us the World’s Dumbest Shootout

Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie

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