Despite the extended monologue by the monk at the beginning of Sunday night’s finale about how life has no resolutions, Season 3 of The White Lotus did, ultimately, come to a tidy ending—if a rather dark and, if you spent a lot of time reading theories on the Internet, somewhat predictable one. While the deaths in the first two seasons of The White Lotus were almost comical in nature—accidental affairs involving the stabbing of a man who just defecated in a suitcase and a ditzy heiress escaping a murder plot only to trip and fall off a boat—the deaths this season were violent and intentional.
Here’s who died, who didn’t, who left Thailand a whole lot richer, and what it all means.
Lochlan Ratliff almost dies by poison fruit smoothie
We knew there would be gunshots in the finale: Zion hears crossfire and finds a body floating in the water in the first five minutes of the very first episode. But first came a feint. There was a brief moment in which it looked like Timothy Ratliff would poison his entire family save Lochlan—the only family member who told his dad he thought he could survive without a lot of money—by blending up the poisonous seeds of a fruit that’s been ominously hanging from the trees shading the family’s villa all season. (And that blender did seem to be getting louder and louder, prompting us to predict this very fate for at least one of the Ratliffs.) But Timothy, after barring the underage Lochlan from the special piña coladas, ultimately knocked the smoothie out of his eldest son Saxon’s hand, declaring that the coconut milk was off. He couldn’t follow through on the murder-suicide fantasies he’d had all season.
Later, Lochlan, a pampered teenager too lazy to even consider rinsing out the blender, uses it to make the protein shake his brother will no longer serve to him—earlier in the episode Saxon dismissively tells Lochy…
