'The White Lotus' Season 3 Finale Deep Dive and Theories: A Super Cynical Season

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Speaker 4 Hello, welcome back to the Prestige TV podcast feed. I'm Joanna Robinson.
I'm Rob Mahoney. And I'm no longer in the void.
I know.

Speaker 5 I'm back home.

Speaker 4 How exciting.

Speaker 5 How does it feel, Joe?

Speaker 4 Pretty liberating, but actually I miss the team.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 It's very sweet.

Speaker 5 It takes a village to make a void, it turns out.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 You'll hear it whenever you hear it, but this is when we are recording this podcast episode.

Speaker 4 Two quick things before we get in, I just want to like dive right into the Whitelows finale.

Speaker 4 Well, I guess a couple things. First of all,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 If you have emailed us in the interim,

Speaker 4 your emails will not be read on that podcast, but they have been read by us. And thank you so much for them.

Speaker 4 So the pit finale pod is coming from us on this feed. Also, stay tuned.
We will be having some Last of Us coverage.

Speaker 4 And also, we intend to dip into your friends and neighbors.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So, we hope you'll like stick around for what we have coming up.

Speaker 5 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 Hammsville, as as far as I'm concerned?

Speaker 4 Yeah. And like, who cares if there was a mass shooting or one of us was nearly poisoned? Everything seems fine.

Speaker 5 That's just more zombies for the last of us, you know?

Speaker 4 Very true. Very true.

Speaker 4 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 Pod, the guy who plays Measles Dad

Speaker 4 is Devin Gummersoll, who played Brian Krakow on my so-called life, of course. And I didn't say that and I should have.

Speaker 5 But anyway, that's what pit pods are for, are for cross pod corrections for mistakes we made, omissions, things we forgot, talking about the pit.

Speaker 4 You're, 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.

Speaker 4 I just don't want to get a single Brian Krakow email. That's I'm just like handing it off at the pass.

Speaker 4 Don't email me about Brian Krakow.

Speaker 4 Okay, and the other thing is, we got 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, severance having concluded.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Rob Mahoney, would you stick with those or Hindsights 2020? Would you Monday evening quarterback a different email address for any of these shows?

Speaker 5 Pineapple bobbing, I think, had a level of whimsy that I enjoy in terms of the severance experience. And I'm very glad that's the strain we hit was whimsy first.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 Did we hit whimsy first with monkeyshootout at gmail.com? I would argue accuracy first.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 It just involves Rick as a conduit.

Speaker 4 Monkey mind shootout without gmail.com.

Speaker 5 All right.

Speaker 4 Suck it, haters. We got it right.

Speaker 4 I love that. Okay.
Before we get into, 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

Speaker 4 and some other emails that hit the various trades, et cetera.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So what 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?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And I will always enjoy these seasons as they roll out. This is my least favorite of the three seasons.

Speaker 5 I was, I would say, underwhelmed by this finale, in part because they put off so much toward the back end.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And he was asking, sort of, we were talking about letter grades.

Speaker 4 And I think I said A minus or B plus. I think I'm very, pretty firmly in a B plus space for this season.
I think four, five, and six were really good episodes of television.

Speaker 4 Um, 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, uh, or or have you, I'm gonna take that again, Donnie.
Thank you so much.

Speaker 4 If you have listened to the official podcast interview with Mike White or perhaps seen it, it, you know, reported out as it has been in the various trades,

Speaker 4 Mike White has a very like, hey, if you know what I'm doing,

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 5 repeat his language.

Speaker 5 There was edging involved. There was a lot going on in that Mike White.
Yeah, as there always is.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 If you don't want to fuck me, don't go home. Get out of my bed.
Don't go home with me. Like this sort of, he's like, if you don't like what I'm doing, don't watch my show.
I don't care.

Speaker 4 Which was pretty fun and spicy for Mike White. But

Speaker 4 I think some of the criticisms of nothing's happening, which Mike White seemed to be responding through to directly, et cetera, I don't ever truck with those.

Speaker 4 But I do think the pacing was off this season or just like the stories were calibrated oddly. And then

Speaker 4 listening to his take on certain endings, I was like, man, Mike White and I are just not on the same page for certain things. And since he's the creator,

Speaker 5 I guess I'm the one on the wrong page. What show are we watching?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 5 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.
Right.

Speaker 5 Somewhere in the finale, I would would presume, based on the way he was talking about that.

Speaker 4 That's what he said. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Final episode. Yeah.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And maybe this is the reason why it was ultimately cut. So it's like, how do, can I judge him for something that wasn't even in the final product?

Speaker 5 Because somebody thought better of it at some point than to include it?

Speaker 4 I give you permission to always judge whoever you want to judge, Ramoni. Thank you, Joe.

Speaker 4 No, but I think I kind of understand where he's coming from because he was trying to to really underline this Saxon Piper flip, which is something that we had been talking about for the last couple episodes as Saxon

Speaker 4 decides to pick up a book and read a book and stuff like that.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And so, then Piper should get after it in the final episode.

Speaker 4 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 is an established character. You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 Mike was like, well, the finale was already really long and this would be like an extra 10 minutes.

Speaker 4 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 sit with that.

Speaker 5 I think overall, as he's talking about the getting out of my bed and the edging experience of White Lotus, since you said most of that is to do with pacing, which you and I, as you alluded to, have not really had that much of a problem with.

Speaker 5 I think there's certain things we wish 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.

Speaker 5 And some of these stories would be better served for it.

Speaker 5 I thought 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I am here for to ruminate with these people.

Speaker 5 I'm here because every White Lotus season, these are such fully realized versions of people that I've met, people that 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And 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.

Speaker 5 On one hand, that's nitpicking, but on the other hand, it's like, where's any, maybe, maybe I was told up front there would not be resolution and that was correct.

Speaker 4 Or the near-death experience of a teenager.

Speaker 5 Like, it's just like, business as usual. Do the Ratliffs know that Locky almost died?

Speaker 4 You mean people other than Tim?

Speaker 5 Yeah, like, does Victoria know? Do his siblings know?

Speaker 4 We were given,

Speaker 4 we don't know, I guess.

Speaker 4 I want to talk about Lockheed and the poison for a second because this is something that's been really

Speaker 4 needling at me.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 take seemed to be

Speaker 4 there was more emphasis on the murder or the whys and the where's of the murder than there was in previous seasons.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And then you have

Speaker 4 multiple characters drink that poison and then everyone's fine,

Speaker 4 that is

Speaker 4 tough storytelling for me.

Speaker 4 But so here, so,

Speaker 4 some doctor on Twitter, Josh Truebeck, MD on Twitter,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Turns out it's just one to like really fuck yourself up and stuff like that.

Speaker 4 So he wrote, just one kernel can be enough to mess with your heart and cause significant poisoning and even death. In my opinion, Lachlan would probably have died.

Speaker 4 just when curtle is enough to be deadly, and there seemed to be ample leftovers in that nasty blender before he made his smoothie.

Speaker 4 Locky also didn't get any medical care or digoxin antibody fragments, which is all part of his like long thread that he wrote about how you combat this poisoning. So it's just like it's just

Speaker 4 good vibes that save Lockheed. And if that's the case,

Speaker 5 then what's the love of a father? Let's be honest. Well,

Speaker 4 there's,

Speaker 4 we had one listener, Daniel writing. I always love

Speaker 4 taking us to Tarot Corner, especially in a season of White Lotus, where Toddy was always interested in tarot.

Speaker 4 Chelsea is certainly interested in tarot.

Speaker 4 So what Daniel said is that Lachlan, as he's lying on

Speaker 4 the decking by the pool and sort of seeming like, and the camera's panning up as a very Tom Cruise far and away, like his soul is leaving his body sort of thing.

Speaker 4 He's in the pose of the hanged man on a tarot card.

Speaker 4 And Daniel says, the hanged man upside down symbolizes surrender, letting go, reflection, sacrifice, punishment, a test period, uncertainty, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And so she's always like looking at things through the lens of witchcraft. And she was like, well, something like this is definitely used in trials by ordeal.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 If you live, you're innocent. If you die, you were a witch.
Like one of those like iconic classic fun witch trials.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 And was Rick tried and found guilty and not allowed to go forward?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Any thoughts on that or any, or how is all of that Lachlan poison story sitting with you?

Speaker 5 I'm relieved to find out that he's not a witch. That's just good news for everybody involved and clear that possibility off the table.

Speaker 5 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 Lachlan is not one of them.
That's true.

Speaker 5 I think where I struggle with the Lachlan Poison stuff is I do ultimately think it was mostly there for the pump fakes and it's mostly there for the murder subplot.

Speaker 5 And ultimately, i really like his overall journey and arc this season right locky 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And so he did pass a trial of a kind at the White Lotus, poison or not.

Speaker 4 Thanks for that hand stuff joke. Really made my day.

Speaker 5 Okay. You're welcome.

Speaker 4 Our listener, Deborah, wanted to point out that a reason among many,

Speaker 4 like never mind the mountain of Lorazepan 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

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 even if I've never washed 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.

Speaker 5 But is that better or worse than Locky the next morning taking the remnants?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 4 The 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.

Speaker 4 Not that

Speaker 4 that protein chic that's just protein powder and water, Mary, a banana, like not even a single splash of OJ or

Speaker 5 a spoon of peanut butter. What are you doing?

Speaker 4 What are we doing? Sexton taught him nothing, I think.

Speaker 5 Well, this is the problem with the rum theory is he is in a villa that has steady access to alcohol. If what he's looking for is a bottle of rum, I assume the bottle's just sitting there.

Speaker 5 He could spike his own smoothie with it.

Speaker 4 He really should have.

Speaker 4 Everything would have gone better for him.

Speaker 5 Certainly.

Speaker 4 I want to talk about Victoria Ratliff in this episode. And something that Mike White said about

Speaker 4 Victoria.

Speaker 4 Like, he was talking a little bit about the ways in which

Speaker 4 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.
Um,

Speaker 4 he didn't cite it this way, but it reminded me so much of Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones when she would talk to Joffrey and she'd be like, Anyone who isn't us is the enemy.

Speaker 4 We are, we Lannisters, we golden-haired Lannisters are the only thing that matter, that are important.

Speaker 4 And so it was sort of like Cersei 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.

Speaker 5 And put it that way. You know, it only leads one direction.

Speaker 4 It's just natural. So, so Mike White was like,

Speaker 4 you know, there were lines where Victoria was basically like, you guys are so attractive, so wonderful. You're the best.

Speaker 4 And there are lines that remain in there, you know, like the boat people or, you know, just sort of like, and, and he was sort of using it to explain the Kate interaction.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Only my attractive children who say terrible things, Saxon, but I laugh anyway at their jokes, you know?

Speaker 4 And so, yeah, so it's just this sort of like, it's us. It's the Ratliffs.
We're the best thing that has ever been made on this planet. So why would we breed with anyone else?

Speaker 4 Sort of energy coming from Victoria, I guess.

Speaker 4 Disturbing.

Speaker 4 What do you want to say about about Parker Posey's performance or Victoria in this episode?

Speaker 5 Needed more of it. Just because I love it so much.
Every time that she's on screen, every interaction, every look, the reaction GIF Express, it just continues apace.

Speaker 5 I think the thumbs up will be a moment that lives, at least in infamy for me personally. I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 4 You're a GIF guy. Am I just learning this about you?

Speaker 5 We've been around. I hate to talk about this.
We've talked about this. Okay.
We've been down this road before.

Speaker 4 I believe it. I believe it.

Speaker 5 But would you also believe it if in the end I convinced you to come to my side and you agreed that Jif was the proper pronunciation of that word?

Speaker 4 Nope, don't mess with people with bad memories, Ron.

Speaker 5 That's right. That's cruel and unusual.

Speaker 4 On the someone who surely has a bad memory, is Victoria, given all the Lorazepam she's had. And something, one of our listeners, Nayana, said, and I

Speaker 4 like to think this is intentional, but I kind of think they just didn't want to deal with the reality of Lorazepam withdrawal. But

Speaker 4 they were saying, our listener was saying that perhaps Victoria's ability to just sort of like come through this Larazoplam 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.

Speaker 4 And I kind of like this interpretation, this idea that like,

Speaker 4 because

Speaker 4 Victoria pulls off a 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.

Speaker 4 And then when she comes back, she's like, oh, you didn't like it? How interesting, you know, and it's just sort of like, well,

Speaker 5 first, she just about hyperventilates once Piper starts down the road.

Speaker 4 Chef's kiss. So good.

Speaker 4 But like, could Larazapam Victoria have accomplished all of that? Did she need to be sober in order to pull this off with Piper?

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 Like the amount of grit and barret that you have to have in some of these social situations is formidable, to say the least.

Speaker 5 So I agree with your interpretation that Victoria is stronger than she gives herself credit for.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 4 Like one of one of the theories that I had was

Speaker 4 that it would wind up that Tim was not actually going to get in any trouble and they would be fine.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 a member of members of my own family

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 do? They had all this money.
What are they going to do?

Speaker 4 They have no money now. And then she figured out how to make their.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 That there is like a certain level of untouchability at a certain level of wealth.

Speaker 4 That's my sort of anecdotal evidence of that.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 You know, they are, you know,

Speaker 4 a

Speaker 4 very important people in their community. Like, I just feel like someone's going to come through with an opportunity for Saxon.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 5 Because that's quite a turbulent journey they've been on.

Speaker 4 No, I'll talk to them about it. I'll see if that's something they're interested in.

Speaker 5 My people will talk to your people. We'll talk to their people.
We'll get it all connected.

Speaker 5 I would say the only thing really jeopardizing the theory you're putting forth, and I think overall, the way the season ends for many of the characters, the Ratliffs 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.

Speaker 5 We don't know how 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 a shred of a pep talk that everything is going to be okay.

Speaker 5 And I think has his own sort of moment of clarity. Like if anyone in this finale is sort of embodying a Morfati, it would be Tim Ratliff among that list.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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 Larazapam.

Speaker 4 Can you hit us with that episode title again, Rob?

Speaker 5 Amorfati? What's up with that? You just put a lot of some beautiful spice on it. I really loved it.
Okay.

Speaker 4 I think that brings me into the next thing I want to talk about perfectly, which is something that Mike White said, like that his whole conception for this season is a parable and a parallel story between Rick and Tim.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And then Rick was raised with

Speaker 4 no expectations, with like an unreliable mom, it seems like, and,

Speaker 4 you know, no connection, no communication with his father. And

Speaker 5 well, his dad was on the Death Star. Like, he had stuff to do, you know?

Speaker 4 You know, that helmet won't polish itself,

Speaker 4 is what I have to say about that. So, um,

Speaker 4 so I think that, um,

Speaker 4 so the idea idea is that Tim comes from this place of encouragement and that Rick comes from this place of wound that he can't, as Chelsea, you know, 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.

Speaker 4 Whereas Tim grew up well nurtured. And so Tim can make the right choice, which is not pull the trigger.
And,

Speaker 4 you know, the metaphorical trigger that is pinya coladas.

Speaker 4 And then Rick makes the wrong choice in pulling the triggers, and then Rick is punished with death, and Tim is rewarded with Lachlan not dying.

Speaker 4 That rubs me the wrong way.

Speaker 4 Like, I really don't like that as

Speaker 4 an idea at all.

Speaker 5 I don't think that parallel is very successfully laid out.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 I agree with the premise, or I disagree with the premise, and I also don't think the execution of that is on there on screen.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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. Um,

Speaker 4 I would say that was more successful inside of the

Speaker 4 microcosm that is the

Speaker 4 fancies, the three ladies. Like their parallels make a lot more sense to me.

Speaker 4 But the Rick and Tim on parallel paths, but different choices and different backgrounds, yeah, premise-wise, premise-wise, I don't really like what it's trying to say then. And

Speaker 4 then execution, it doesn't really work for me.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But you want to sell the ideas that are important to you.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And I don't think they were shown on screen in like a parallel film making sense. They weren't shown in stories.

Speaker 5 Like they just didn't structure it in that way.

Speaker 4 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 Lee Wood has been giving. are the Rick and Chelsea parallels.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 outlining a bunch of interviews that amy lee wood has given talking about the ways in which and 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 and it seems like she dies for ricksons 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, and she's like, to be clear, I have been the Chelsea who are just like refuse 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And it's just sort of like, and then you just wind up like completely fucked over because you have been unwilling to take the blinders off when it comes to this guy that you have attached yourself to.

Speaker 4 And I'm sure it happens the other way gender-wise, but like

Speaker 5 gender-neutral Chelsea situation. Anyone can be the Chelsea.

Speaker 4 Be the, don't be the Chelsea you wish to see in the world.

Speaker 5 Well, don't be the Rick either is the problem. You got to find other role models.

Speaker 4 So like Chelsea, does Chelsea, does anyone on White Lowest deserve to die? I don't think that's really, it's not really about deserving, I think.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 Chelsea

Speaker 4 just leaving everything up. This idea that Rick feels

Speaker 4 like he can't make any active decisions, that he has no choice but to pursue Jim Hollinger to Bangkok, or, you know,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And that's just how I feel. And so they're both, they're, they're two,

Speaker 4 Amy Lee woods words are they're two sides of the same coin and they're just going to like you know go where where the breeze takes them without making these conscious decisions i just don't know how i could make that stand in in stark contrast to tim ratliff

Speaker 4 who is also quite buffety uh this season but i like thinking about chelsea that way chelsea a character we really loved yes chelsea a character you and i talked about last week as sort of like

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 okay, but she had a lot of opportunities to make different decisions

Speaker 4 with Rick, and she didn't, you know?

Speaker 5 So, Mal brought up a line from episode one on the pod you guys did after the actual show, which was when she's talking to Rick.

Speaker 5 Chelsea's talking to Rick, and she says, This is so on brand for you to be the victim of your own decisions.

Speaker 5 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 what 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.

Speaker 5 The death of Chelsea is just a totally different thing.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Like they both have that inability to see what is right in front of them and the inability to like live in the present.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 But this dude continues to give her just about nothing. Like, that's the plan is the most non-committal commitment you could possibly get.

Speaker 4 And she like tears up and like chin wobbles. She's like, this is the most passionate and romantic thing you've ever said to me.

Speaker 4 I was wrong all season. I was rooting for Rick and Chelsea and I was wrong all season.
And I will happily admit that.

Speaker 5 You can reflect on the unceremonious end of your favorite couple, Joe.

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 But I thought this season was about reflection. What happened to that?

Speaker 5 I'm good. Thank you so much for asking.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 what this episode is giving us is an indication that there is like 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

Speaker 4 and i'm just not sure that Again, I think you made a really good point earlier talking about the opportunities inside of a show as artistic as White Lotus for visual storytelling.

Speaker 4 So if there's something like

Speaker 4 visual that's meant, 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.

Speaker 4 I enjoy a Terrence Malik film, but like, I like, I don't know that I think Mike really landed the plane in terms of like, and their love transcends

Speaker 4 the

Speaker 4 physical death that they've experienced here.

Speaker 4 Maybe the way that they're laid out in the pond, but I don't know. I think I would have,

Speaker 4 yeah, I don't know. It didn't, it didn't quite work for me.

Speaker 4 Do you want to big, let's, let's big picture talk about the cynicism.

Speaker 4 I started talking about this last night with Bella Mallory, this idea of like, it felt like an extremely cynical

Speaker 4 season overall.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And then I sort of talked 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

Speaker 4 yeah just like almost a-romantic um like there is no love story in here

Speaker 4 uh worth pulling for at all and i and that's fine i mean whatever at the end of the day but like

Speaker 4 i don't know if like mike white mike mike white who creates all these characters as prisms of himself.

Speaker 4 He's talked about this many, many times over the years, that he's just sort of like, every character in White Lotus is me me to some degree.

Speaker 4 And, and this is my favorite thing about what I do: I just sort of refract my own experiences across all of these characters.

Speaker 4 But I'm just, I'm just curious, you know, and this is this is, he is well entitled to this in his life.

Speaker 4 But if my, if Mike White is in a more cynical space now than he was when he made seasons one and two, that's entirely possible.

Speaker 4 And 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.

Speaker 4 He talked about this as 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.

Speaker 4 He seems a little rattled by some of the reaction, it feels like, to the season.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 4 what do you want to say about the cynical nature of White Lotus season three?

Speaker 5 I think there's kind of two parts of it.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 All of that, very fair game for White Lotus. And to be fair, anywhere Mike White wants to take White Lotus is fair game.
I just think that this is a quite cynical turn as far as

Speaker 5 you're not wrong that the romance has kind of been sapped off the screen here.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Like, this is a pretty bleak way to end.

Speaker 5 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.

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Speaker 4 I want to go back to the guy talk thing, because 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.

Speaker 4 For me, it was like the record scratch moment was when he was talking about Guy Talk, because for me, that was...

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 5 Like, oh no, right, okay.

Speaker 4 So, Guy Talk

Speaker 4 kills Rick, uh, gets the girl, gets the job, gets

Speaker 4 embracing Mook and seems quite happy to be embracing Mook. That was clear, that's what he wanted.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Mike White thinks Guy Talk Talk is happy.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Like, this seems like something, a hard lesson that Mike White has learned in his life that you have to like put a pillow on the face of your inner guy talk and just, you know, become a Hollinger guard.

Speaker 4 And that's, 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.

Speaker 4 And I was like, well, okay, there goes the one ending that I thought I really like understood and felt like I, I knew what the show was trying to do with it.

Speaker 4 And that is the most cynical thing to me that Mike White's like, guy talk

Speaker 4 sacrifices 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.

Speaker 5 So it's such an odd way to put it.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I was really bummed out by that, frankly.

Speaker 5 I think ultimately, like, he's not wrong to say that in order to quote unquote get ahead, you do have to swallow that idealism, right? Like, you do have to make compromises of yourself.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And Guy Talk is somebody who does not want to pull the trigger, does not want to participate in this kind of violence.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And yet, because he's presented with an opportunity that could bring him and Mook closer together now, at the the end of the day, which is what he's wanted all along, he jumps at the chance.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 4 What do you make of the

Speaker 4 general consensus, this idea that Belinda is the new Tanya?

Speaker 5 Before we go to Belinda,

Speaker 5 can we talk about Mook for one second?

Speaker 4 No, yes, of course.

Speaker 5 Fair enough, as usual. No, no, no.

Speaker 5 Well, I think she and Guy Talk suffer from a similar problem, which is those characters are just not very flushed out over the course of the season.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 She has some stuff she wants, mainly for Guy Talk to be more ambitious or for whoever she ends up with to be an ambitious sort of guy. That's all fair, totally fine.

Speaker 5 I was left wondering... how much the casting might have impacted that character, if at all.

Speaker 5 Because like Lisa playing Mook. Yeah.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And so

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 What can you do with a character like that on White Lotus other than, frankly, where Mook ended up?

Speaker 4 That's fascinating. I hadn't thought about it that way.

Speaker 5 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 character.
Thinly, thinly drawn, yeah.

Speaker 5 Thinly, for sure.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 All right, let's talk about Belinda.

Speaker 5 What do you want to say?

Speaker 4 I like, I was pushing back a bit on this Belinda is the new Tanya thing. I understand that that's the parallel that they're drawing here.
I think it's definitely there.

Speaker 4 I just don't think it's as clean as she did exactly to porn chai as was done to her. I just think

Speaker 4 the circumstances are so different between those two characters. And again,

Speaker 4 I don't want to like dwell on this Mike White interview, but it's just sort of like,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 this sort of stuff like that.

Speaker 4 And so he basically

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 Like was sort of my, my takeaway from what Mike White said. And maybe I'm misunderstanding what he said.

Speaker 4 And on the one hand, we love it when a TV creator like listens to people when they talk about get 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.

Speaker 4 It just felt like a very,

Speaker 4 he felt, he sounded sort of weary when he was talking about 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 melinda story a lot this season like her ending and 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 waving goodbye so like this is a this is a moment of conflict for her and i and i liked leaving her there.

Speaker 4 More upset than any of the rat lifts seem, more upset than certainly any of the fancy seem.

Speaker 5 So Zion's not that upset either. A body just floated by him and he's like cheesing up here.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I have decided, and I didn't say this last night, but I have decided that Zion is who I wanted. Nouveau Rich Zion, season four of White Lotus, give it to me.
That's what I want.

Speaker 5 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 breezing in and being like, Oh, by the way, I'm an NBA in the finale, I did not particularly enjoy.

Speaker 5 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 her shoulder, saying, Take the money, take the money, take the money, take the money.

Speaker 5 This is your opportunity. Don't like good things happen to good people, even though this maybe isn't a good thing to sweep a murder under the rug.
Uh, I don't have to talk about that part.

Speaker 5 I, I, I didn't, I didn't know what to make of his character because he's so charming and it's a very funny presence on screen.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 4 I would have happily had him here all season. Like, I don't see any reason why to hold back on him

Speaker 4 other than like to introduce him at the beginning as like our POV character and then just not have him for a while. But

Speaker 4 I feel like I kind of

Speaker 4 get it. Okay, first of all, something I didn't mention last night that I want to make sure I mention is like inside of his sales pitch, he just casually drops Langston Hughes

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 4 All these other people, like Tim Ratliff is doing absolute bullshit stuff for his money.

Speaker 4 and greg gary has literally murdered a lady and he seems fine why don't we get some of this and that all just seems like it worked 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 stuff in the finale in terms of carrying these negotiations and representing Belinda and like leave while us businessmen talk.

Speaker 5 Like there's all these elements of it that are just like, I don't know. That was so funny.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I love, as you say, the kind of complicated endpoint we put Belinda in in which she's been ruining all season. Like, can't one thing go right for me?

Speaker 5 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,

Speaker 5 but is left with the premise like that she now has kind of said 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.

Speaker 5 Like, she, but she is the one person at the White Lotus who seems to understand if you do some suspect shit, you got to get out of town as quickly as possible

Speaker 5 as humanly possible. Get out.

Speaker 4 You do a crime at a white lotus, you leave a white lotus. That's, that's the, that's the move.

Speaker 5 What is Rick doing? Just go to the buffet, like, nothing, like, you didn't hold a gun to the owner of the hotel?

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 I really like the way her story ended.

Speaker 4 And I think as with everything, it all just felt a bit drawn out until the end. And so,

Speaker 4 um,

Speaker 4 so like bring in Nicolas Duvernay as Zion at the beginning of the season.

Speaker 4 Let them be interacting with each other. Let them, their relationship be a bit more complicated.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 5 Or just give her a few us fewer episodes.

Speaker 4 But I just,

Speaker 4 I do like where it landed. I like, I like this decision from Belinda.
I like the the decision that she made. This feels like the most white lotus thing to me.
Right.

Speaker 4 It's like someone compromises their morality. They get a serious financial windfall and

Speaker 4 a less, as you say, a more complicated life going forward.

Speaker 5 We did get an email from Daniel, who I thought had a great suggestion, which was that, you know what?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 This could be like a real problem once the authorities start sniffing around.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I got to say, I think there's some merit there. I think they maybe should have thought this through.
I think NBA Zion should have been on top of it, and he frankly fell asleep at the wheel.

Speaker 4 Okay, we're just, U of H is taking hits all over the place because 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.

Speaker 4 I imagine they're going to have a lot of questions about how this hotel spa worker just got 5 million dumped into her account.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 5 Counterpoint, do laws matter? I don't know.

Speaker 4 Great question.

Speaker 4 Okay,

Speaker 4 we have some season four stuff to talk about, but we haven't talked about, I don't know what you think about Kate and Jacqueline and Lori.

Speaker 5 Where are you with that?

Speaker 5 I think Lori's speech is my favorite moment of the finale. I think it's really beautiful.
I think it's amazingly written.

Speaker 5 And if we're just, if we're just comparing apples to apples, to oranges, to grapefruits, to pomelos, to whatever fruit we have on the white lotus table, dragon fruit, I'm sure it's, you know, it's a tropical situation.

Speaker 5 I think it's probably my favorite like monologue moment. Like, I actually prefer this to Sam Rockwell's big ordeal.

Speaker 5 I thought this was just really powerful and just connected with me on a really emotional level, right?

Speaker 5 This idea of time spent transcending everything else, that when you know people and you 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.

Speaker 5 And I'm really glad Lori delivered it. I don't know how we got there,

Speaker 5 but we got there.

Speaker 5 And so it's yet another one of these plot lines where it's like, I like the Jaclyn Lori scene kind of waking her up and sort of half apologizing in the morning, but they don't really get to have the conversation.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Yada, yada, yada, big emotional speech. It's just like, what happened in the yada, yada, yada? I don't really know.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And I've got like, you know, there's like people like my sister who have known me my whole life. Like the people who have known you your whole life know you in a way that no one else could know you.

Speaker 4 And there's the negative of that in terms of what Carrie Kuhn 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.

Speaker 4 But there's also this aspect of like

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And those people are so valuable, not just for people like me who can't remember how Rob pronounced, mispronounces gift, but like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Speaker 4 uh uh 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 Koon's delivery of it, is my favorite monologue of the season.

Speaker 4 Is it my favorite White Lotus monologue? Maybe.

Speaker 5 Very good.

Speaker 4 The Sam Rockwell thing, like the, you know, the more the season goes on, the more I'm just sort of like, it was showy and fun, but like at the end of the day, do I really feel like

Speaker 4 it deeply illuminated the season in a way that I would be missing if I didn't have it? I don't know that that's the case, you know?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I think that's very much in there, but you get Sam Rocklow to deliver that moment because he can hold you in that monologue in a way that not a lot of actors can.

Speaker 5 And you get Carrie Kuhn 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

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 Like, this is why you get Carrie Koon on your show. The other reason you get Carrie Kuhn on your show is because she is a fucking athlete, Joe.

Speaker 5 The dead sprint that she puts on after Jim Hollinger gets shot. Oh,

Speaker 5 oh my God.

Speaker 5 We needed Carrie Kuhn in Paris. Well,

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 5 Very force majeure in that way. Like, I am out.

Speaker 5 Survival instincts are kicking in.

Speaker 4 Oh, my God. Force majeure is such a white lotus-coated.

Speaker 5 Oh, very much so.

Speaker 4 Okay, speaking of.

Speaker 4 We were talking about cold lotus, this idea of white lotus taking place in a snowy locale in season four.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 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. Yes.
That is something that's on his mind.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 there are not many,

Speaker 4 I mean, Sundance, I guess aside, like

Speaker 4 film festivals that take place in

Speaker 4 usually if you're film festing,

Speaker 4 Toronto.

Speaker 5 Yeah, what year is Tiff or what time of year is Tiff? I don't know.

Speaker 4 It's in the fall. It's like not super cold when

Speaker 5 fall in Toronto is pretty cold as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 4 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 a TIFF necessarily.

Speaker 4 But, you know, a telluride or a can or a Venice. We're looking at sort of sunny,

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 yeah, are we going to get like a can-esque?

Speaker 4 I don't know how different that will look from season two necessarily, but

Speaker 4 I think that could be really fun.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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,

Speaker 4 let's just do a layup season.

Speaker 5 Like, let's just do something that's just like, really, I get it.

Speaker 4 And I can do it really easily.

Speaker 5 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?

Speaker 4 So, Nicolas Duvernay, as Zion, who is like, maybe decided to become a movie producer with his his money,

Speaker 4 like a high-powered agent with his money.

Speaker 4 I don't know. I can see it.
I think he would roll out some incredible fits, and we would all have a great time. So, that's my

Speaker 4 pitch for who the cast carryover should be. Who would you want to see in a like film festival,

Speaker 4 art festival

Speaker 4 version of White Lotus?

Speaker 5 See, this is where it sucks that we've already used Patrick Schwarzenegger.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 And I would be excited about even more given what we saw from him performance-wise this season. Like

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 You know, that's a real moment.

Speaker 4 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, Ramahoni.

Speaker 5 I see you, Joe. I just want to acknowledge you and everything, all of your many interests.
That's all.

Speaker 4 Thanks, thanks. They're pretty narrow.
Okay, anything else you want to say about White Lotus before we go?

Speaker 5 One final note on the piña colada front. Or two, I guess, two notes on the piña colada front.
One, Tim Ratliff.

Speaker 5 Don't do this to the piña colada, a wonderful beverage that you have weaponized against your own family that you have debased with poison? How dare you, sir?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 I find a pina colada delightful, and I'm not sure I'm not ever going to be able to look at one the same way ever again.

Speaker 4 Leave the pineapples and the coconut out of it.

Speaker 5 Completely. And along those lines, this is

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 5 The direction overall, I think, is superlative. The score fucking rules every single episode.
The score is immaculate. And, oh,

Speaker 5 I'm seeing a little tension in that, Joe. Did you not appreciate the score of this season?

Speaker 4 No, of course I agree, but did you see the drama from the show's composer?

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 4 Just that, yeah, just like, I don't know, artistic disagreement. No,

Speaker 5 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 uh in particular on the piña colada front my favorite bit of score all season is the vocalizing blender as tim radliffe is cooking up the piña colada which is just like this weird gasping vocalizing sound as the vitamix wors it just really did it for me i guess you want to give us a an impression of it uh not for free only i'm only a session musician, Joe.

Speaker 5 You got to get me in the studio.

Speaker 5 I have many requirements for the green room, and we just don't meet them on this podcast. I'm sorry.

Speaker 4 Rob said, fuck you, pay me. All right.

Speaker 4 That has been

Speaker 4 my genuinely slightly brain-dead coverage of the White Lotus finale. Thanks for bearing with me.

Speaker 5 Do you have a standing ovation for Joanna Robinson, please? Double white lotus pods, not just period, but within, I don't know, 12 hours, basically.

Speaker 4 Everything's great, and all the takes were good. and um, she didn't mess up anything.
Thank you to Rob Mahoney, who is a pure delight, always to work with.

Speaker 4 Thank you to Donnie Beacham, who is up late on a Monday

Speaker 4 doing this recording for us. Thanks to Justin Sales for managing everything, and always

Speaker 5 that's it, Rob.

Speaker 4 I'll see you soon for Mushroom Zombies. Can't wait.
Any teasers you want to give the folks for like your Last of Us hype?

Speaker 5 Oh, you thought this shit was bleak? Come on. This is white Lotus Season 3 is child's play.

Speaker 5 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.

Speaker 4 Child's Play starring pit star Brad Duriff.

Speaker 5 So please join us. Also, suck annoying us about that.

Speaker 4 Please join us for the pit finale later this week. Y'all are the best.
We'll see you soon.

Speaker 5 Bye.