The Prestige TV Podcast - 'The White Lotus' Season 3 Finale Deep Dive and Theories: A Super Cynical Season

Episode Date: April 9, 2025

'The White Lotus' Season 3 Finale Deep Dive and Theories: A Super Cynical Season It’s time to check out of the White Lotus with a look at Jo and Rob’s thoughts on Season 3 (4:11), resolutions for the Ratliff family (11:00), Rick and Chelsea’s ending (28:06), and Gaitok’s growth (37:18). Plus, they discuss Belinda’s choice (41:20) and Laurie’s monologue (49:31) before looking ahead to Season 4 (54:15). Email us! [e-mail] Subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel here for full episodes of ‘The Prestige TV Podcast’ and so much more! Hosts: Joanna Robinson and Rob Mahoney Producers: Kai Grady and Donnie Beacham Jr. Additional Production Support: Justin Sayles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I know. I'm back home. How exciting. How does it feel, Joe? Pretty liberating. But actually, I missed the team. John Richter, who's been doing such an amazing work on a lot of our video pods, gave me a letter last night that said, like,

from, you know, the void will, from the void, the void will miss you sort of thing. It's very sweet. It takes a village to make a void, it turns out. It's true. It's very true. We are here recording a little earlier than we usually do about the White Lotus finale. We're here recording Monday evening. I don't know when you'll hear it. You'll hear it whenever you hear it. But this is when we are recording this podcast episode. Two quick things before we get in. I just want to dive right into the White Lois finale. Well, I guess a couple things. First of all, I am going on vacation. I'll be gone for a week, but Rob and I pre-recorded our pit finale take.

So that will be up later this week. You will, if you have emailed us in the interim, your emails will not be read on that podcast, but they have been read by us. And thank you so much for them. So the pit finale pot is coming from us on this feed. Also stay tuned. We will be having some Last of Us coverage. And also, we intend to dip into your friends and neighbors.

We're not hitting that first episode because, again, I'll be on vacation. but we will swoop in for episode two and see how it goes going forward. So that is sort of what we are up to here on this feed. And we've had so much fun with you guys with Severance, with White Lotus, with the pit. So we hope you'll like stick around for what we have coming up. Yeah. The vacation doesn't have to end. You know, we have to leave Thailand.

We're on the boat. Yes. But the boat's got to go somewhere. And why not to John Hamsville as far as I'm concerned? Yeah. And like, who cares that there was a mass shooting or one of us was nearly poisoned? Everything seems fine. That's just more zombies for the.

the last of us, you know? Very true, very true. One thing about the pit finale pod that we did not, I did not mention, and I will be like drummed off the internet by my fellow Generation Catalano members if I don't is that the guy who plays measles dad, if you're listening to this pod and also listening to Pit Pot, the guy who plays Measles Dad is Devin Gummersall who played Brian Crackow on my so-called life, of course, and I didn't say that and I should have. But anyway, shut pods are for, for cross pod corrections for mistakes we made, omissions, things we forgot, talking about the pit. You're, Rob, you're really nice because you're like, hey, Joanna, you kind of like apologize too much or whatever, correct yourself too much. I just don't want to get a single Brian Crackow email.

That's what I'm just like heading it off of the past. Don't email me about Brian Crackow. Okay. And the other thing is, we had an email from a listener and I can't find it right now. But they were asking us here at the end of all things, the pit wrapping up. White Lotus wrapping up, Severn's having concluded, do we want any do-overs, or in the case of the pit, a first over, on what our email choice would have been.

We got Monkey Shootout and Pineapple Bobbing. Rob Mahoney, would you stick with those or Hindsight's 2020? Would you Monday evening quarterback a different email address for any of these shows? Pineapple bobbing, I think, had a level of whimsy that I enjoy in terms of the severance experience. I'm very glad that's the strain we hit. Was whimsy first. Yeah.

Did we hit whimsy first with monkey shootout at gmail.com? I would argue accuracy first. Not a monkey holding a weapon in the finale so much, Joe. But, you know, Rick has this big line about how he has to get the monkey off his back. I would argue the fact that he doesn't get the monkey off his back is the reason that he and Chelsea die in the end. Ultimately, like, there is a metaphorical monkey shootout. It just involves Rick as a conduit.

monkey mind shootout at gmail.com. All right. Suck it haters. We got it right. I love that. Okay. Before we get into you, I have like things I want to get to.

There was this Mike White interview on the official podcast that we kind of want to dig into a little bit. Yep. And some other emails that hit the various trades, etc. So we want to talk about that. But I haven't gotten a chance to talk to you, Rob Mahoney, about how you felt about this finale. So what are your big picture takes on the White Lotus finale as it stands as an episode or as it

reflects on the entire season. As a season, like, I am also of the opinion, as it sounded like you guys were on the panel, that White Lotus is just too well acted and too well made to ever not be good and fun. And I will always enjoy these seasons as they roll out. This is my least favorite of the three seasons. I was, I would say, underwhelmed by this finale, in part because they put off so much toward the back end. And so there's a lot of seven episodes of circling the same kinds of issues over and over and

over and I'm not opposed to that kind of storytelling if it takes us somewhere in the end. And I think it was pretty hit and miss as far as which of the stories actually delivered on that promise and which ones didn't. And that's that's a tough place to end when you're putting so much on a 90-minute finale to resolve so many of these threats. Bill was asking us sort of, when Mallory and Bill and I did our sort of instant reaction, we watched the episode, we hopped on mics and we talked about it without really being able to marinate in it. And he was asking sort of we were talking about letter grades. And I think I said A minus or B plus.

I think I'm pretty firmly in a B plus space for this season. I think four, five, and six were really good episodes of television. And so I just think, I don't know if it's like a peak too soon or just like interestingly calibrated. If you have, or have you, I'm going to take that again, Donnie, thank you so much. If you have listened to the official podcast interview with Mike White or perhaps seen it, you know, reported out as it has been in the various trades. Mike White has a very like, hey, if you don't like what I'm doing, don't like what I'm doing,

don't watch it, except he said, like, if you don't want to fuck me, don't go home with me. Do you want to repeat his language? There was edging involved. There was a lot going on in that Mike White's as there always is. Yeah. If you don't want to fuck me, don't go home. Get out of my bed. Don't go home with me.

Like, he's like, if you don't like what I'm doing, don't watch my show. I don't care. which was pretty fun and spicy for Mike White. But I think some of the criticisms of nothing's happening, which Mike White seemed to be responding to directly, et cetera. I don't ever truck with those. But I do think the pacing was off this season or just like the stories were calibrated oddly. And then listening to his take on certain endings, I was like, man,

And Mike White and I are just not on the same page for certain things. And since he's the creator, I guess I'm the one on the wrong page. What show are we watching if that's the show that he's making? Were there any Mike White takes that particularly stood out to you as like, huh, that's not, that wasn't my view of things? I think it was, here's where we get into tricky territory. He talked explicitly about this scene that I believe was at least written if not shot in which Piper loses her virginity to Zion.

Somewhere in the finale, I would presume, based on the way he was talking about it. That's what he said. Yeah, yeah, final episode. Yeah. I don't know what story purpose that serves or how it fits into this at all or what sense it would make. Now, maybe if you laid it all out for me, I would get it. And maybe this is the reason why it was ultimately cut. So it's like, can I judge him for something that wasn't even in the final product because somebody thought better of it at some point than to include it? I give you permission to always judge whoever you want to judge. Thank you, Joe. No, but I think I kind of understand where he's coming from because he was trying to really underline this Saxon Piper flip, which is something that we had been talking about for the last couple episodes, as Saxon decides to pick up a book and read a book and stuff like that.

And so, and then it's reflected. Piper's transformation to privileged princess is reflected in her wardrobe change in the last episode and stuff like that. So if he really wanted to underline that, I think the point he was trying to make was that Saxon was all about like, carnality and getting after it. And so then Piper should get after it in the final episode. And there's a version of that that makes sense to me. But trying to shoehorn it, I would almost pick a rando over Zion who's an established character. You know what I mean? Picking an established character then just makes it, it's almost going to be not enough. If it's Piper like fucks a stranger in the finale, that's its own thing and could potentially work. But Mike was like, well, the

finale was already really long and this would be like an extra 10 minutes and I'm like 10 minutes doesn't feel like enough time to like make these two major stories collide right at the end of things. So yeah, that's sort of where I said with that. I think overall as he's talking about the getting out of my bed and the edging experience of White Lotus. So you said most that it's to do with pacing, which you and I as you alluded to, I've not really had that much of a problem with. I think there's certain certain things we wish it had evolved differently. Certain things we would get more or less of and overall maybe just condense this to six or seven episodes rather than eight. And some of these stories would be better served for it. I thought in this finale, this is where I was kind of confronted with what I love about White Lotus and where it is not delivering on that. And maybe that's on me as a viewer that I'm watching it, as you said, for like something different for what Mike White is trying to deliver. I'm not here for plot. I am here for character. I am here for to ruminate with these people. I'm here because every White Lotus season, these are such fully realized versions of people that I've met, I know people that I've experienced out in the world,

or you can just see how that person would come to be within their little bubble of privilege. And I thought in this finale, there were a lot of our favorites, and they just stopped acting like people, and they started acting like characters on a TV show. And they started just cutting narrative corners. They started doing things that were maybe like one or two beats beyond anything we had seen them do before in a way that I didn't feel like we quite got there.

And then all of a sudden, because it's the finale, here's the end point. And because it's the finale, all these people are going to die. because it's the finale, not a word will be said by any character about the massive shootout that just happened at their hotel that no one seems all too fussed about, Joe. On one hand, that's nitpicking, but on the other hand, it's like, where is any, maybe, maybe I was told up front there would not be resolution and that was correct. Or the near-death experience of a teenager. Like, it's just like, business as usual.

Do the ratlifts know that Lockheye almost died? You mean people other than Tim? Yeah, like, does Victoria know? Do his siblings know? We were given, I, we don't know, I guess. I want to talk about Locky and the poison for a second, because this is something that's been really needling at me. The inconsistent idea of like what this poison does, I feel like, to your point and, you know, our pal Mallory Rubin was sort of her take seem to be. there was more emphasis on the murder or the wise and the ways of the murder than there was in previous seasons. And I kind of agree.

I'm not quite exactly where she is on that. But I do think that if you are going to do a murder mystery show and you have someone say something is a poison at the beginning of the season and you have them reiterate it in the finale, it's a poison. And then you have multiple, multiple characters drink that poison. And then everyone's fine. that is tough storytelling for me. But so here, so, um, some doctor on Twitter, Josh Trebek, MD on Twitter, did a long thread about these specific seeds and their specific lethality and what exactly they do to you and how many you need to take.

Turns out it's just one to like really fuck yourself up and stuff like that. So he wrote, just one colonel can be enough to mess with your heart and cause significant poisoning and even death. In my opinion, Lachlan would probably have died. Just one colonel is enough to be deadly and there seemed to be ample leftovers in that nasty blender before he made his smoothie. Locky also didn't get any medical care or digoxin antibody fragments, which is all part of his long thread that he wrote about how you combat this poisoning. So it's just like it's just good vibes that save Lucky. and if that's the case. Yeah.

Then... Well, it's the love of a father. Let's be honest. Well, there's... We had one listener, Daniel, right? And I always love taking us to tarot corner, especially in a season of White Lotus, where Tani was always interested in tarot. Chelsea's certainly interested in taro.

So what Daniel said is that Lachlan is he's lying on the decking by the pool and sort of seeming, and the camera's panning up as very... Tom Cruise far and away, like his soul is leaving his body sort of thing. He's in the pose of the hanged man on a tarot card. And Daniel says, the hanged man upside down symbolizes surrender, letting go, reflection, sacrifice, punishment, a test period, uncertainty, blah, blah. But when reversed, it can symbolize triumph of selfishness, insufficient effort, indecision, lack of spirituality, excessive conformity, death of the soul, yearning, detachment, or unnecessary sacrifice. So we love a tarot card because it can mean nine million different things. But

something that I think is really interesting. My best friend wrote a book about witchcraft. And so she's always like looking at things through the lens of wishcraft. And she was like, well, something like this is definitely used in trials by ordeal. And I looked it up and it is just right there on the Wikipedia page that this particular poison was used in witchcraft trials where it's like, take this seed. If you live, you're innocent. If you die, you were away. witch, like one of those, like, iconic classic, fun witch trials. And so is Lachlan taking this poison and surviving, meaning, like, a testament to his innocence that he was tried by those four monks that he saw, like, hovering over the surface of the pool and found innocent and allowed

to live? And was Rick tried and found guilty and not allowed to go forward? I'm trying to make the Lachlan and Poison story make more sense than just a fake out to, you know, to distract our attention from the shootout to come. Any thoughts on that or any, or how is all of that that Lachlan poison story sitting with you? I'm relieved to find out that he's not a witch. That's just good news for everybody involving clear that possibility off the table. I love a witch, but I don't want the over theorizing about non-witches who are witches, you know, like I want the authentic witches to please step forward. And Lachlin is not one. of them. That's true. I think where I struggle with the Lockland Poison stuff is I do ultimately think

it was mostly there for the pump fakes and it's mostly there for the murder subplot. And ultimately, I really like his overall journey and arc this season. Right. Lockhe is coming to this and ending in a place where he has done enough introspection and enough hand stuff, I guess, to like finally know that he should be the one steering the ship of his life and not just his siblings telling him where to go to school or his parents telling him what to do or his brother even like making a protein shake for him. It's like, I got to take control of my own shit. And he's fumbling through that and maybe he'll go to a monastery and maybe he won't. Maybe he's found religion. Maybe he didn't. Maybe he saw God. I don't know. But I think he has come to a moment of honest realization about himself and kind of what he needs and what he

wants and the fact that only he can get it. And so he did pass a trial of a kind at the White Lotus, poison or not. Um, thanks for that hand stuff joke really made my day. Okay. You're welcome. Um, our listener Deborah wanted to point out that a reason among many, like, never mind the mountain of Larazepan that he had climbed throughout the week. Yeah. A reason that Tim didn't clean the blender is that he has never had to clean a dish in his life. This was a great call. He's always had people doing it for him. And I'm like, yeah, I'm just, if there's poison goop at the

bottom of the blender. Even if I've never watched a dish in my life, I'm still going to give it a little rinsola. You know what I mean? Just like a slosh around, at least. I don't know. But is that better or worse than Locky the next morning taking the remnants? Like, even he gives it a quick sniff, right?

Like he's, and everyone has told him, this tastes bad. This tastes funky. This coconut milk is off. A coconut milk is off, but there's a little rum in there. And he was told he couldn't have any, you know? And he's like, maybe I can just sneak a little, even if the coconut milk's a little funky. Not that's not that that protein

shake that's just protein powder and water, nary a banana. Like not even a single splash of OJ or spinach. No scoop of peanut butter? What are you doing? Come on. What are we doing? Saxon taught him nothing, I think. Well, this is the problem with the rum theory is he is in a villa that has steady access to alcohol.

That's true. If what he's looking for is a bottle of rum, I assume the bottle's just sitting there. He could spike his own his own smoothie with it. He really should have. Everything would have gone better for him. Certainly. I want to talk about Victoria Rilf in this episode. And something that Mike White said about Victoria,

like he was talking a little bit about the ways in which her, some of her scenes and some of her lines had been shaved out. And in the shaving out, you lost, I guess, some of this. He didn't cite it this way, but it reminded me so much of Cursie and Lanister and Game of Thrones when she would talk to Joffrey and she'd be like, anyone who isn't us is the enemy. We are, we lanisters, we golden-haired lanisters are the only thing that matter, that are important. And so it was sort of like, Circe talking about that means no wonder there was incest in that family.

If the idea is just sort of like, it's just us and no one else. I don't know when you put it that way, you know, it only leads one direction. It's just natural. So, so Mike White was like, you know. there were lines where Victoria was basically like, you guys are so attractive, so wonderful, you're the best.

And there are lines that remain in there, you know, like the boat people or, you know, just sort of like, and he was sort of using it to explain the Kate interaction. He was like, the Kate interaction is basically like,

you're not in my family, so I'm not really interested in talking to you. Only my family matters. Only my attractive children who say terrible things, Saxon, but I laugh anyway at their jokes, you know. And so yeah, so it's just this sort of like, it's us, it's the ratlifts.

We're the best thing that has ever been made on this planet. So why would we breed with anyone else sort of energy coming from Victoria, I guess? Disturbing. What do you want to say about Parker Posey's performance or Victoria in this episode? Needed more of it. Just because I love it so much every time that she's on screen. Every interaction, every, look, the reaction jiffx. express. It just continues a pace. I think the thumbs up will be a moment that lives, at least

infamy for me personally. I really enjoyed it. You're a Jiff guy? Am I just learning this about you? We've been around. I hate to talk to this. Okay. We've been down this road before. I believe it. I believe it. I believe it. Would you also believe it if in the end I convinced you to come to my side and you agreed the Jif was the proper pronunciation of that word? Nope. Don't mess with people with bad memories. Rob, that's cruel and unusual. On the, uh, someone who surely has a bad memory. is Victoria, given all the larazepam she's had. And something, one of our listeners, Nayana said,

and I like to think this is intentional, but I kind of think they just didn't want to deal with the reality of laurazepam withdrawal. But they were saying, our listener was saying that perhaps Victoria's ability to just sort of like come through this larazepam withdrawal

means she's more resilient than she gives herself credit for than anyone maybe gives her credit for, and that perhaps whatever is waiting for them back home is something she can handle. And I kind of like this interpretation, this idea that like, because Victoria pulls off a better con job than Rick manages, right? She's just sort of like, right?

She's like, sure, Piper, go spend a night there. It's fine. And then when she goes back, she's like, oh, you didn't like it? How interesting, you know? And it's just sort of like could. First, she just about hyperventilates once Piper starts down the road. Chef's Kiss. So good.

But like could Larazapam, Victoria have accomplished all of that? Did she need to be sober in order to pull this off with Piper? What do you think? I think so. And look, I will never underestimate the brute force strength of a Southern mom. I think this is where Victoria and Kate have a lot in common, right? Like the amount of grit and Barrett that you have to have in some of these social situations, formidable to say the least. So I agree with the interpretation of the Victoria.

is stronger than she gives herself credit for. She may not want to live without the all-inclusive buffet and, you know, all of the assortment of riches and benefits that come from staying at a white lotus, for example. But I think she's going to get through everything just fine. You know, maybe not with a smile on her face, but she's going to survive. Like, one of the theories that I had was, um, that it would wind up that Tim was not actually going to get in any trouble and they would be fine. That doesn't seem to be how it panned out.

But I want to say that like one of my inspirations for this comes from, a member of members of my own family where I had a member of my family, not my immediate family, but a member of my family who had a, like a fortune in real estate. And then the real estate market crashed and that they were like quite used to a ton of money and they had no money. And then his partner figured out how to play the stock market essentially. And she made back like all of their money in the span of a couple of years. So it was sort of like, What are they going to, they had all this money? What are they going to do? They have no money now. And then she figured out how to make their, so I'm just sort of like, I feel like Victoria, not maybe not

playing the stock market, but I feel like Victoria will figure out how they can still live in style, that there is like a certain level of untouchability at a certain level of wealth. That's my sort of anecdotal evidence of that. I'm not saying that's always the case, but I think it can be the case that it's just sort of like too big to fail, extends beyond institutions into certain like just people. You know, they are, you know, how what like very important people in their community. Like I just feel like someone's going to come through with an opportunity for Saxon.

Someone's going to figure out something for Victoria to do. And they're all just going to figure it out. Like that's what it feels like to me. So first of all, not to piggyback off your relatives capitalist endeavor, with our own capitalist endeavor. But have they sold the book rights or movie rights to their life yet? Because that's quite a turbulent journey they've been on.

No, I'll talk to them about it. See if that's something they're interested in. My people will talk to your people, talk to their people. Sounds great. I would say the only thing really jeopardizing the theory you're putting forth. And I think overall the way this season ends for many of the characters, the ratlifts included, are sort of asking you of like to fill in the blank on what happens next, to find the connective tissue between this and that.

We don't know how any of the way. anyone in this family is going to react to the news of what is about to happen to their life other than Tim knows. And he's kind of given them of shred of a pep talk that everything is going to be okay. And I think it has his own sort of moment of clarity. Like if anyone in this finale is sort of embodying Amor Fati, it would be Tim Ratliff among that list. I think he, in even talking and broaching the subject with his family, is sort of confronting the idea that, you know what, some shit is going to happen. we are going to try to stick through it as a family. And I am maybe slightly more willing to talk about it than I was 24 hours ago or certainly 72 hours ago when I was neck deep in lorazepam.

Can you hit us with that episode title again, Rob? Amorfati? What's on with that? You just put a lot of some beautiful spice on it. I really loved it. Okay. I think that brings me into the next thing I want to talk about perfectly, which is something that Mike White said that his whole conception for this season is a parable. and a parallel story between Rick and Tim.

And he talked about it at length on the official podcast. And I just don't think he was terribly successful in this specific endeavor. I think he was successful in a lot of other endeavors. But in this specific endeavor, his premise is this, that Tim, and we hear it from Tim himself, Tim is raised with a lot of expectations. Everyone expected the most, the best, everything from Tim. And then Rick was raised with, with, no expectations with with like a unreliable mom it seems like and uh you know no connection no

communication with his father and um well his dad was on the death star like he had stuff to do you know you know the that helmet won't polish itself is what i'm to say about that so um so i think that um so the idea is that tim comes from this place of encouragement and that rick comes with this place of wound that he can't, as Chelsea lays out explicitly in these episodes, he can't see the love in front of him because he's too preoccupied with the lack of love that he had, the lack of support he had growing up. Whereas Tim grew up well nurtured. And so Tim can make the right choice, which is not pull the trigger and, you know, the metaphorical trigger that is Pinyukaladas. And then Rick makes the wrong choice in pulling the triggers. And then Rick is punished

with death and Tim is rewarded with Lockland not dying. That rubs me the wrong way. Like, I really don't like that as a, as an idea at all. I don't think that parallel is very successfully laid out. No, I agree. I agree with the premise, or I disagree with the premise. And I also don't think the execution of that is on their on screen. So like, we meet them on the boat and they are clearly being set up as like these two guys, very different walks of life sort of thing. So I understand the sort of first steps that we took on that journey. But I wouldn't say those parallels really cleared for me. I would say that was more successful inside of the microcosm that is the fancies, the three ladies. Like their parallels make a lot more sense to me. But the Rick and Tim on parallel

paths, but different choices and different backgrounds, yeah, premise-wise, I don't really like what it's trying to say then, and then execution, it doesn't really work for me. Which, on the first part, fair enough. Like, I don't want to agree or have to agree with every expression of an idea on a show. Like, that's totally fine. But you want to sell the ideas that are important to you. And if you think this is an important piece of the text that these two guys are parallels, I'm going to be honest with you, short of those current interactions in episode one and two that you just described, I didn't really think about Tim and Rick in conjunction whatsoever. And I don't think they were shown on screen and like a parallel film making sense. They weren't shown in

stories. Right. Like they just didn't structure it in that way. I think a more compelling parallel coming out of the finale. And this has a lot to do with a lot of the interviews that Amy, Amy Lee Wood has been giving are the Rick and Chelsea parallels. And that's been really interesting. We got a great email from our listener who did not really sign it. So I'm just going to say A. outlining a bunch of interviews that Amy Lou Wood has given talking about the ways in which and a friend of mine really loved the way that Chelsea's story ended. Chelsea's story ending the way it did rubbed a lot of people the wrong way because we love Chelsea and it seems like she dies for Rick Sins and it's very like, what are we doing here? But a friend of mine was talking

about how much she was like, this is the most true to life. She's like, she's like, characters like Chelsea and she's like, to be clear, I have been the Chelsea. who are just like refused to see the reality of these men that they're with and are just sort of like he's wounded. I can help him. I can fix him. He's like my child. We're like don't look at any of the red flags and just hitch their wagon to this thing that's dragging them all the way down into hell. And it's just sort of like and then you just wind up like completely fucked over because you are been unwilling to take the blinders off when it comes to this guy that you have attached yourself to. And I'm sure it happens the other way. gender-wise. But like... Oh, it's a gender-neutral Chelsea situation. Anyone can be the Chelsea. Be the... Don't be the Chelsea wish to see in the world. Well, don't be the Rick either is the problem. You've got to find other role models. So like Chelsea, does Chelsea... Does anyone on White Lowe's deserve to die? I don't think that's

really... It's not really about deserving, I think. And I think that's why the whole, like, Rick fails a test so that he dies, sort of rubs me the wrong way. But, um, but Chelsea just leaving everything up... idea that Rick feels like he can't make any active decisions that he has no choice but to pursue Jim Hollinger to Bangkok or, you know, basically he gets a sort of like Marty McFly don't call me chicken moment like when his dad talks about his mom. And he's just like there's nothing I have, there's nothing I can do. I'm buffeted by the winds of fate and I've got to do this. And Chelsea feels the same way. She's like, we're fated to be together. So whatever happens to you happens to

me and that's just how I feel. And so they're both, their, they're two, Amy Lee Wood's words are they're two sides of the same coin and they're just going to like, you know, go where the breeze takes them without making these conscious decisions. I just don't know how I could make that stand in stark contrast to Tim Ratliff, who is also quite buffety this season. But I like thinking about Chelsea that way. Chelsea, a character we really loved. Chelsea, a character you and I talked about last week as sort of like what is her identity outside of her thing with Rick?

Like who is she? What is going on with her? And so it's devastating because she's so charming and so bubbly and so wonderful. But it's like, okay, but she had a lot of opportunities to make different decisions. She did. With Rick and she didn't, you know?

Mal brought up a line from episode one on the pod you guys did after the actual show. Yeah. When she's talking to Rick, Chelsea's talking to Rick and she says this is so on brand for you to be the victim of your own decisions. Yeah. And that's where Chelsea ends up herself. Like ultimately, I was trying to think, you know, if this is a doomed, tragic couple, and they are.

They die in the finale in a way that, you know, once we get through some of the Chelsea character stuff, I think we should kind of zoom out at, to talk about the cynicism of this season overall, kind of the overall scope of how fucking bleak and tragic this season ended up, even relative to already quite bleak and already quite cynical seasons of White Lotus. Yeah. The death of Chelsea is just a totally different thing. And I think we get there because she and Rick to what Amy Lou is saying and you're echoing here, Joe, about like the same, like different sides of the same coin. They share that tragic flaw.

Like they both had that inability to see what is right in front of them and the inability to like live in the present. You know, Chelsea is so much dealing with an idealized version of Rick based on what she thinks she can do if she saves him. If she gets to that point, if she pulls him out of the darkness. But this dude continues to give her just about nothing. Like, yeah. That's the plan is the most non-committal commitment you could possibly get. And she, like, tears up and her, like, chinwobbles. She's like, this is the most passionate and romantic thing you've ever said to me.

I was, I was wrong all season. I was rooting for Rick and Chelsea, and I was wrong all season, and I will happily admit that. Do you want to reflect on the unceremonious end of your favorite couple, Joe? No. Okay. I thought this season was about reflection. What happened to that? I'm good. Thank you so much for asking.

But I think that I think it's fascinating for Mike White to talk about their end and talk about this hopeful nature to this end because in his view, what this episode is giving us is an indication that their love will transcend this tragedy and that if it doesn't work out for them in this lifetime, it will work out for them in the next. and I'm just not sure that again, I think he made a really good point earlier talking about the opportunities inside of a show as artistic as White Lotus for visual storytelling. So if there's something like visual that's met, you know, and there's like shots of the Rick looking up at the sky and maybe that is supposed to indicate something to us. And that's fine. I enjoy a Terrence Malick film. But like I don't know that I think Mike really landed the plane in terms of like and their loved. Prince ends the physical death that they've experienced here. Maybe the way that they're laid out in the pond, but I don't know.

I think I would have, yeah, I don't know. It didn't quite work for me. No. Do you want a big, let's big picture talk about the cynicism. I started talking about this last night with Bill and Mallory, this idea of like it felt like an extremely cynical season overall. And then I sort of tucked myself out of it thinking like the other seasons were also cynical. But I really agree.

Like I think this is just like an extra degree of. Yeah, just like almost a romantic. Like there is no love story in here worth pulling for at all. And I and that's fine. I mean, whatever at the end of the day. But like I don't know if like Mike White, Mike White. Mike White, who creates all these characters as prisms of himself. He's talked about this many, many times of the years that he's just sort of like every

character in White Lotus is me to some degree. And this is my favorite thing about what I do is I just sort of refract my own experiences across all of these characters. But I'm just curious, you know, and this is, he is well entitled to this in his life. But if Mike White is in a more cynical space now than he was when he made seasons one and two, that's entirely possible. So we are getting the reflection of maybe someone who is a different place in their life than they were when they wrote different versions of these seasons. He talked about this is a very like heady season, a very parable forward season.

And then perhaps season four, and we'll talk about season four in a little bit, like will be a bit of a return to form. He seems a little rattled by some of the reaction it feels like to the season. But what do you want to say about the cynical nature? of White Lotus season three. I think there's kind of two parts of it. And the first one is just the overall story that Mike White is telling with season three, which, as we said, is ending in a level of death

and an upped body count that is just totally different and a level of tragedy that's totally different from previous seasons. It's one thing to show people who are trapped in loveless marriages, stuck in difficult situations, trying to figure out how their means and their values can coexist and where they need to compromise in order to have all those things at once.

All of that, very fair game. for White Lotus. And to be fair, anywhere Mike White wants to take White Lotus's fair game. I just think that this is a quite cynical turn as far as you're not wrong that the romance has kind of been sapped off the screen here.

And I would say take it even step further to say the most romantic characters are Chelsea, who is dead in the water, and Guy Talk, who is on a violent path he never wanted to be on in the first place. And basically starting to live a life completely outside himself. Like, this is a

pretty bleak way to end. And I think killing Chelsea, as opposed to the characters we've seen die in previous seasons, and killing Rick for that matter, not just Chelsea, but core kind of splashy cast members of White Lotus opens up the sort of anything can happen nature that I think is catnip for TV viewers, but is also like kind of a cynical play in itself. This episode is brought to you by Prime. Obsession is in session. And this summer, Prime originals have everything you want. Steamy romances, irresistible love stories, and the book to screen favorites you've already read twice. Off campus, L, every year after, the love hypothesis, Sterling Point, and more. Slow burns, second chances, chemistry you can feel through the screen.

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apply. I want to go back to the Guy Talk thing because this is, this is between listening to Mike White's interview, I think the big takeaway a lot of people had was like the Zion on Piper thing. For me, it was like the record scratch moment was when he was talking about Guy Talk because for me, that was my interpretation was the one thing about the finale that really, really worked for me. And Mike White's like, that's not how I see it. That's like, oh, no. Right. Okay. So Guy Talk kills Rick, gets the girl, gets the job, gets, is embracing MOOC and seems quite happy to be embracing MOOC. That was clear. That's what he wanted. But when he gets in the car, there was something about his face that I misinterpreted, I guess, as a sort of end of the

graduate, what have I done sort of face. Mike White thinks Guy Talk is happy. And he said things like in order to get ahead, you have to suck up your idealism. You have to shove people down the stairs. Like this seems like something, a hard lesson that Mike White has learned in his life. Yeah. That you have to like put a pillow on the face of your inner guide talk and just, you know, become a haulager guard. And that's how you get ahead in life.

And he's like, you know, Mike White said, we as an audience know what was lost. But that guy talk is fine. And I was like, well, okay. there goes the one ending that I thought I really like understood and felt like I knew what the show was trying to do with it. And that is the most cynical thing to me that Mike White's like, Guy Talk, sacrifice his own ideals and that's a good thing at the end of the day. And I'm like, what are we talking about? That was astonishing to me. So it's such a odd way to put it. Yeah. I was I was really bummed out by that, frankly. I think ultimately like he's not wrong to say that in order to quote unquote get ahead. You do have to swallow that idea. Right? You do have to make compromises of yourself. I think where we might disagree is where that leaves you at the end of the day and where that leaves a character like Guy Talk in particular who we should say got this job because the last two guys who did it just got shot. And Guy talk is somebody who does not want to pull the trigger, does not want to participate in this kind of violence. If anything had one foot out the door and was trying to quit so he wouldn't have to deal with anything even remotely like this before. And yet because he's presented with an opportunity that could bring him and moot closer together now at the end of the day, which is what he's wanted all along. He jumps at the chance and, yeah, of course he wants to be with Mook, but he doesn't want any of this other stuff, at least based on what we've been told all season long. What do you make of the general consensus, this idea that Belinda is the new Tanya? Before we go to Belinda, can we talk about Mook for one second?

No, yes, of course. Fair enough, as usual. Well, I think she and Guy talks suffer from a similar problem, which is those characters are just not very flush. out over the course of this season. Guy Talk has a little bit more to do. Mook is mostly there to be an object of affection and desire. And yes, she has some agency. She has some stuff she wants, mainly for Guy Toc to be more ambitious or for whoever

she ends up with to be an ambitious sort of guy. That's all fair. Totally fine. I was left wondering how much the casting might have impacted that character, if at all. Oh. Because, like, Lisa playing Mook. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point.

if you're if you're not familiar with k-pop in that world she might just be like an interchangeable celebrity but it's like there are different kinds of fame involved here and there's there's a level of fame where there are guardrails all over the place as far as how k-pop stars specifically can act in public including if they're acting on a show like white lotus and so if you can't do anything let's say let's just say hypothetically that she can't be on screen doing anything too risque or too adult or too complex or too polarizing what can you do with a character like that on White Lotus other than frankly where Mook ended up. That's fascinating. I hadn't thought about it that way. Yeah. And maybe that's giving it all too much credit. And maybe Mook is just a badly drawn character or a poor or a, you know, a rough outline of a character.

Thinly. Thinly, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Let's talk about Belinda. What do you want to say? Like, I was pushing back a bit on this Belinda's the new Tanya thing. I understand that that's the parallel that they're drawing here.

I think it's definitely. there. I just don't think it's as clean as she did exactly to Porn Chai as was done to her. I just think the circumstances are so different between those two characters. And again, I don't, I don't want to dwell on this Mike White interview, but it's just sort of like, I found it very peculiar that he basically said that a reason that he put Belinda on this path this season was because people had critiqued him for putting a woman of color in this horrible position in season one. And that, you know, he has talked sort of throughout his work on White Lotus about the whiteness of the characters or, you know, how people of color are treated inside of these

spaces and all the sort of stuff like that. And so he basically, basically reading between the lines, he basically said, people were mad that I didn't treat this black woman well. So I gave her an ending where she got a lot of money, are you happy now? Like was sort of my takeaway from what Mike White said, and maybe I'm misunderstanding what he said. And on the one hand, we love it when a TV creator listens to people when they talk about, give feedback on, you know, what it means to a certain demographic or to how we digest story as a whole when certain characters are put in certain situations.

he just felt like a very he sounded sort of weary when he was talking about it he's like well people seem mad about this so I think I fixed it did I fix it? And it was just like that was bizarre to me

I kind of liked the Belinda story a lot this season like her ending specifically this season I like that she made this choice I like that it was a complicated choice for her I like that

okay if if Guy Talk wasn't upset when he drove away in the car with Sitala she was upset on the boat with Zion as she's way goodbye. So like this is a, this is a moment of conflict for her. And I, and I liked leaving her there. More upset than any of the rat lifts seem more upset than certainly any of the fancy scenes. Well, Zion's not that upset either. A body just floated by him and he's like cheeszing up here.

Yeah. I have decided, and I didn't say this last night, but I've decided that Zion is who I wanted. Nouveau-Rish Zion, season four of White Lotus, give it to me. That's what I want. I am open to it from the perspective of you got to get him in episode one and you have to establish this guy as a character because he's breezing in and being like oh by the way I'm an MBA in the finale I did not particularly enjoy it

there's just a lot of contrivance to him being here at the end kind of being the little like I guess if you want to take Belinda's decision from a moral standpoint he's a little bit of the devil on our shoulder saying take the money take the money take the money this is your opportunity

like good things happen to good people even though this maybe isn't a good thing to sweep a murder under the rug. Don't have to talk about that part. I didn't know what to make of his character because he's so charming. And it's a very funny presence on screen. But I don't know why he's doing anything he's doing

and it came out of nowhere and nothing he's doing means anything to me because of the state of the season he came in. I would have happily had him here all season. Like I don't see any reason why to hold back on him other than like to introduce him at the beginning as like our P of you character, than just not have him for a while.

But I feel like I kind of get it. Okay, first of all, something I didn't mention last night that I want to make sure I mentioned is like inside of his sales pitch, he just casually drops Langston Hughes, Dream Deferred. That was just like one of the funniest things that I've ever seen on screen. I thought it was so good. But I think that like, I think this idea that like, why? the fuck not. All these other people, like Tim Ratliff is doing absolute bullshit stuff for his money. And Greg Gary is literally murdered a lady and he seems fine. Why don't we get some of this?

And that all just seemed like it worked for. I don't know. That really worked for me. But I agree with you. I would have happily had Zion there all season. I thought he was great. And if Zion's there all season, then a Piper Zion hookup at the end of the season could actually work. If they were interacting all season long and leading up to that, like I could see that happening. But yeah, his perspective is not a problem for me. It's just the way and the timing of when he was thrust into the season. And then expected to do all of this stuff in the finale in terms of carrying these negotiations and representing Belinda and like leave while us businessmen talk. Like there's all these elements of it that are just like, I don't know, man.

That was so funny. Like some of the stuff is very funny and very charming. And I'm enjoying watching it. It's just like from a character perspective. I don't really get it. That said, I love, as you say, the kind of complicated end point we put Belinda in in which, you know, she's been. ruin all season. Like can't one thing go right for me?

And at the end of the day, she sells out what she thinks is right for a big old bag of money and fair enough. But it's left with the premise that she now has kind of say goodbye to an uncomplicated life in a lot of ways. Like she's going to be looking over her shoulder in some manner

for a long time. But she's the one person at the White Lotus who seems to understand if you do some suspect shit, you've got to get out of town as quickly as humanly possible. Get out. You do cry of a White Lotus. you leave a white lotus. That's that's the that's the move. What is what is Rick doing? Just go to the buffet like nothing like you didn't hold a gun to the owner of the hotel. This is so aggravating.

I was like too dumb to live. I just like couldn't I couldn't handle it. I think Natasha Rothwell as Belinda this season like I really like the way her story ended and I think as with everything it all just felt a bit drawn out until the end. And so um, um, So like bring in Nicholas DuVernay as I end at the beginning of the season. Let them be interacting with each other. Let them, their relationship be a bit more complicated. Let us understand that because they have this like perfect buddy,

buddy cop like, you know, mother son relationship. Like where's the conflict and the drama inside of their relationship? Yeah. And make that something for Belinda to do while she develops this romance with this guy. And then she makes this decision at the end of the season. or just give her a few

us fewer episodes but I just I do like where it landed I like I like this decision from Linda I like the decision that she made this feels like the most white lotus thing to me

is like someone compromises their morality they get a serious financial windfall and a less as you say a more complicated life going forward we did get an email from Daniel

who I thought had a great suggestion which was that But this random dude who's supposed to be off the grid, suddenly putting $5 million into someone's bank account is going to get flagged all over the place. This could be like a real problem once the authorities start sniffing around. What Belinda should have done, Daniel said, was Shark Tank this shit and sell Greg Gary a stake in her future spa

some arbitrary percentage for the $5 million to make it look more legit? I got to say, I think there's some merit there. I think they maybe should have thought this through. I think MBA Zion should have been on top of it. And he frankly fell asleep at the wheel. Okay. We're just, U of H is taking hits all over the place because.

Well, really, it's the negotiation. It's the Mallory Rubin School of Negotiation that Zion graduated from if we're all being honest about it. Courtney, our listener, Courtney said all wire transfers over $10,000 have to be reported by the bank to the IRS. I imagine they're going to have a lot of questions,

but how this hotel spa worker just got $5 million dumped into account. I guess U of H didn't teach the importance of setting up offshore accounts. when doing business with international fugitives. So yeah, we have a few financial questions. A counterpoint, do laws matter? I don't know. Great question. Okay, we have some season fours I've talked about, but we haven't talked about, I don't know what you think about Kate and Jacqueline and Lori. Where are you with that? I think Lori's speech is my favorite moment of the finale. I think it's really beautiful. I think it's amazingly written.

And if we're just, if we're just comparing apples to apples to oranges to grapefruits, to pomellos, to whatever fruit we have on the white lotus table, dragon fruit, I'm sure it's, you know, it's a tropical situation. I think it's probably my favorite, like, monologue moment. Like, I actually prefer this to Sam Rockwell's big ordeal.

I thought this was just really powerful. And just connected with me on a really emotional level, right? This idea of time spent transcending everything else that when you know people and you, it invest in a life together over time, that even as I'm growing and you're growing, that there's this like tether that is holding us together is, I think, a really poignant idea. And I'm really glad Lori delivered it. I don't know how we got there. Yeah. But we got there. And so it's yet another

one of these plot lines where it's like, I like the Jacqueline Laurie scene kind of waking her up and sort of half apologizing in the morning, but they don't really get to have the conversation. I like the scene that we get of Lori, seeing her friends at the pool taking selfies without her. And there's clearly a lot weighing on her in that moment. Yada, yada, yada, yada, big emotional speech. It's just like, what happened in the yada, yada, yada? I don't really know. I think that's perfect encapsulation of how I feel about it. And I think I've been thinking more and more about it about this idea of like time, not just like time. We're still here, but time. And you and I were talking about this a little bit because like we were talking about, you know, you are friends with your childhood friends.

And I've got like, you know, there's like people like my sister have known me my whole, like the people who have known you your whole life know you in a way that no one else could know you. And there's the negative of that in terms of what Carrie Coon has talked about all season in terms of your decisions. The choices that you've made are shown in sharp contrast to choices that other people have made who have been on the same path as you or a similar path as you. but there's also this aspect of like you almost get to know and see yourself in a more full way when you're around those people who have known you your whole life yeah um and those people are so valuable not just for people like me who can't remember how rob pronounced mispronounces gif but like whoa whoa whoa uh-huh uh-huh but like you know just just the fullness of you as a person and so when you start to lose those people as you get older and all this sort of stuff like that,

those people get rarer and rarer around you, like Lori and Jacqueline and Kate might be people who don't have their parents in their lives anymore necessarily perhaps, you know. And so like the people who have known you that amount of time, that pool gets smaller and smaller and smaller. And so how important those relationships are to you. I agree. I think Lori's speech, Carrie Coon's delivery of it, is my favorite monologue of the season. is it my favorite white lotus monologue maybe actually the san rockwell thing like the you know the more

the season goes on the more i'm just sort of like it it was showy and fun but like at the end of the day do i really feel like it deeply illuminated the season in a way that i i would be missing if i didn't have it i don't know that that's the case you know yeah i think that's very much in there but you get sam rockwell to deliver that moment because he can hold you in that monologue in a way that not a lot of actors can. And you get Carrie Coon for this moment. Like this is kind of what we've been waiting for,

not just a big emotional outburst, which she can do so well, but selling the, like the inner conflict of how she's felt on this whole trip, this whole journey she's been on, like, emotionally trying to rectify the person she's been with the person she's trying to be and kind of who these three women

are in each other's lives and all these things. Like, this is why you get Carrie Coon on your show. The other reason you get Carrie Coon on your show is because she is a fucking athlete, Joe. The dead sprint that she puts on after Jim Hollinger gets shot. Oh. Oh, my God.

We needed to carry Coon in Paris. U.S. track and fields. Like, we got to get a baton in this woman's hands. We got to get her on the track. We did get some emails from listeners who are like so much for the bonds between those three women because Lori's just like, bye.

Very force majeure in that way. Like, I am out. survival instincts are kicking in. Oh my God. Force Mjeure is such a White Lotus coated movie. Oh, very much so. Okay. Speaking of, we were talking about Cold Lotus,

this idea of White Lotus taking place in a snowy locale in season four. But what Mike White has said in this, you know, the official podcast interview and around to the various trades, is he actually is contemplating doing something like either a film festival or an art festival because he says he wants to get back to his roots of something he really, really understands, which is like making fun of like celebrity and art criticism, that that is something that is on his mind. So there are not many, I mean, Sundance, I guess, aside.

I was about to say, you could do both. Usually if you're film festing. Yeah. Toronto, it's not like. What year is TIF or what time of year is TIF? I don't know. It's in the fall. It's like not.

super cold when fall in Toronto is pretty cold as far as I'm concerned um but like but you but like I feel like it's only Sundance where you see extremely famous people in like their parkas and stuff like that you don't see that at TIF necessarily but you know a telly ride or a can or a Venice we're looking at sort of sunny uh you know water adjacent sort of situations and he has also said I think in a few places that maybe he wants to go just go back to Europe. So, yeah, are we going to get like a Cannesque? I don't know how different that will look from season two necessarily. But I think that could be really fun.

And, you know, he's like, I want to, I want something to do something that's like maybe less heady and more just sort of like sharp satire of a world that I'm intimately familiar with. And like this was like an attempt to sort of wrap his arms around a big concept in a world that was like slightly off the beaten path of his own experience. And there are many ways in which it was successful and some ways in which it didn't work for us. And I understand his impulse to be like, well, maybe I'll just like, let's just do a layup season. Let's just do something that's like, really I get it and I can do it really easily. I've done a lot of reading about Buddhism lately.

Like, can I just draw from something a little more familiar to my actual lived experience? So Nicholas de Verne as Zion, who was like maybe decided to become a movie producer, with his money, like a high-powered agent with his negotiating skills. I don't know. I can see it. I think you would roll out some incredible fits and we would all have a great time. So that's my, that's my pitch for who the cast carryover should be. Who would you want to see in a like film festival, art festival, version of White Lotus? See, this is where it sucks that we've already used Patrick Schwarzenegger, you know, like rolling out Patrick Schwarzenegger as some, again, some version of his actual self, as he in many ways is in this season, I think would be delicious

in that context. And I would be excited about even more, given what we saw from him performance wise this season. Like the smoldering, wounded look over the shoulder that he gives Chelsea and Rick on the beach, I think is very impressive. Like, you know, actors can hurt themselves doing stuff like that. You know, that's a real moment. You really read me when you pointed out that Saxon is exactly the kind of the archetype that I tend to enjoy in a show. Thank you so much for that, Rob Mahoney. I see you, Joe. I just want to acknowledge you and everything, all of your many interests. That's all. Thanks, thanks. They're pretty narrow. Okay. Anything else you want to say about White Lotus? Where we go? One final note on the Pina

Calada front. Or two, I guess two notes on the Pena Cilada front. One, Tim Ratliff, don't do this to the Pena Colada, a wonderful beverage that you have weaponized against your own family that you have debased with poison? How dare you, sir? I just, I think it's completely uncalled for. You want to put a gun in your hands. You want to kill your family through other means. That's your business. I am not terribly concerned about it. I find a Pena Cagata delightful. And I'm not sure I'm not ever going to be able to look at one the same way ever again. Leave the pineapples and the coconut out of it. Yes, completely. And along those lines, this is among the incredible production value of White Lotus. which this just looks better than most things on TV.

It's better acted and better performed, as we said, than most things on TV. The direction overall, I think, is superlative. The score fucking rules. Every single episode, the score is immaculate. And, oh, I'm seeing a little tension in that, Joe. Did you not appreciate the score of this season? No, of course, I agree. But did you see the drama from the show's composer?

I know there is some drama and that the composer is leaving the show. But I don't know the source of that drama. Would you like to fill me in? No, no, no, just that, yeah, just like, I don't know, artistic disagreement. No, my only face was like you're like, the score is the best. And I'm like, and he's leaving. Well, the score is the best and maybe you shouldn't let that composer leave. That seems like a bad idea.

In particular, on the pinia collada front, my favorite bit of score all season, is the vocalizing blender as Tim Bradliff is cooking up the pinia collada, which is just like this weird gasping vocalizing sound as the Vitamix was. It just really did it for me. Do you want to give us an impression of it? Not for free. I'm only a session musician, Joe. You've got to give me in the studio. I have many requirements for the green room, and we just don't meet them on this podcast.

I'm sorry. Rob said, fuck you pay me. All right. That has been my genuinely, like, slightly brain dead coverage of the White Lotus finale. Thanks for bearing with. Yeah. Can we get a standing ovation for Joanna Robinson, please? Double white lotus pods, not just period, but which.

within, I don't know, 12 hours, basically. Everything's great and all the takes were good. And she didn't mess up anything. Thank you to Rob Mahoney, who is a pure delight always to work with. Thank you to Donnie Beecham, who is up late on a Monday doing this recording for us. Thanks to Justin Sales for managing everything. Always. That's it.

Rob, I'll see you soon for mushroom zombies. Can't wait. Any teasers you want to get. give the folks for like your last of us hype? You thought this shit was bleak? Come on. White Lotus season, season three is Child's Play.

In the air, in the relative bleakness of the universe, we're going to go so much darker. We're going to go into the real pits of despair. So come along with us. Child's play starring pit star Brad Durif. So please join us for the, also start me knowing us about that.

Please join us for the pit finale later this week. Y'all are the best. We'll see you soon. Bye.