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

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Terms and more at applecard.com. 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 how exciting how does it feel joe uh pretty liberating but actually i miss the.
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 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 like dive right into the White Lotus finale.
well I guess a couple things first of all uh 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.
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 pod 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 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 gotta go somewhere and 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 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 Pod, the guy who plays Measles Dad is Devin Gummersall, who played Brian Krakow on My So-Called Life, of course, and I didn't say that, and I should have. But anyway, shout out.
That's what these pods are for, are 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 Krakow email. That's, I'm just like heading it off of the pass.
Don't email me about Brian Krakow. 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. 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 these shows uh pineapple bobbing i think had a level of whimsy that i enjoy in terms of the severance experience i'm i'm very glad that's the strain we hit was whimsy first yeah did we hit whimsy first with monkey shootout gmail.com i would argue accuracy first uh not a monkey holding a weapon in the finale so much finale so much, Joe, but 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, there is a metaphorical monkey shootout. It just involves Rick as a conduit.
Monkey mind shootout at gmail.com. All right.
Suckuck 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 and some other emails that hit the various trades, et cetera.
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 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. 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 very pretty firmly in a b plus space for this season i think four five and six were really good episodes of television 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 if you have listened to the official podcast interview with mike white or perhaps seen it uh you know report it out uh as it has been in the various trades um mike white has a very like hey if you don't what i'm doing don't want don't like what i'm doing don't watch it except he said like if you 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 quote, 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. 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, etc. 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, 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 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.
Right. Somewhere in the finale, I would presume, based on the way he was talking about it.
That's what he said. Yeah, 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 um you're oh i will 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 the saxon piper flip which is something that we had been talking about for the last couple episodes a saxon um decides to pick up a book and read a book and stuff like that. 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 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 that 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 an extra 10 minutes. And I'm like, 10 minutes doesn't feel like enough time to make these two major stories collide right at the end of things.
So yeah, that's sort of where I sit with that. I think overall, as he's talking about the getting out of my bed and the edging experience of White Lotus, as you said, most of that has to do with pacing, which you and I, as you alluded to, have not really had that much of a problem with.
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. 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 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,

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.

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.
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. 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 Radlifts know that Lockheed 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 this is um i want to talk about locky and the poison for a second because this is something that's been really um needling at me

um

the for a second because this is something that's been really um needling at me um the the inconsistent idea of like what this poison does i feel like to your point and and you know our pal mallory rubin was sort of her her take seemed to be there was more emphasis on the murder or the wise and the wares 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 characters characters drink that poison and then everyone's fine that is tough storytelling for me yeah but so here so um some doctor on twitter josh treeback md on twitter doctor 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 um 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 just when Colonel is enough to be deadly and there seemed to be ample leftovers in that nasty blender before he made his smoothie. Lachlan 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.
It's just good vibes that save Lachlan. And if that's case, then...
What's the love of a father? Let's be honest. Well, we had one listener, Daniel, write in.
I always love taking us to Tarot Corner, especially in a season of White Lotus, where Tani was always interested in Tarot. Chelsea is certainly interested in Tarot.
So what Daniel said is that Lachlan, as he's lying on the decking by the pool and sort of seeming like, 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 9 million different things. But something that I think is really interesting, my best friend wrote a book about witchcraft.
And so she's always looking at things through the lens of witchcraft. 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 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 a witch like one of those like iconic classic uh 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 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 distract our attention from the shootout to come.
Any thoughts on that or how is all of 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 involved and clear that possibility off the table.
I love a witch, but I don't want the over-theorizing about non-witches who are witches. I want the authentic witches to please step forward, and Lachlan is not one of them.
That's true. 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.
And ultimately I really like his overall journey and arc this season,

right?

Lockie 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 him it's like i gotta 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 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.
Thanks for that hand stuff joke. Really made my day.
Okay. You're welcome.
Our listener, Debra, wanted to point out that a reason among many, like nevermind the mountain of lorazepam that he had climbed throughout the week. 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 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 i even if i've never washed a dish in my life i'm still gonna give it a little rinseola 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 sight 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 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 run even if the coconut milk's a little funky not that it's not that that protein shake that's just protein powder and water and a banana like not even a single splash of oj or peanut butter what are you doing what are we doing 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 smoothie with it.
He really should have. Everything would have gone better for him.
Certainly. I want to talk about Victoria Ratliff 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 in the shaving out you lost i guess some of this um he didn't cite it this way but it reminded me so much of cersei lannister and game of thr Thrones when she would talk to Joffrey and she'd be like, anyone who isn't us is the enemy. We are, we Lannisters, we golden haired Lannisters are the only thing that matter, that are important.
And so it was sort of like, Cersei talking about that means no wonder there was incest in that family. And the idea is just sort of like, it's just us and no one else.
I remember when you put it that way, you know, it only leads one direction. It's just natural.
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 people or you know just sort of like and 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 know? And so, yeah, so it's just this sort of, like, it's us.
It's the Ratliff. 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 GIF expressed, it just continues apace. I think the thumbs up will be a moment that lives in at least infamy for me personally.
I really enjoyed it. You're a GIF guy? Am I just learning this've been around i hate to talk about this okay we've been down this road before i believe it i believe it i believe it also believe it if in the end i convinced you to come to my side and you agreed the jiff was the proper pronunciation of that word no don't mess with people with bad memories rob that's cruel and unusual um on the uh 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 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 they were saying, our listener was saying that perhaps Victoria's ability to just sort of like come through this lorazoplam withdrawal means she's more resilient than she gives herself credit for than anyone maybe gives her credit for and that perhaps uh whatever is waiting for them back home is something she can handle and i i kind of like this interpretation this idea that because Victoria pulls off a better con job than Rick manages, right?

Oh, 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 well first first she just about hyperventilates once piper starts down the road. Chef's kiss.
So good. Absolutely wonderful.
But like, could lorazepam

Victoria... First she just about hyperventilates once Piper starts down the road.
Chef's kiss.

So good. Absolutely wonderful.

But could lorazepam Victoria have accomplished all of that?

Does 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? 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 your interpretation that 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 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 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 it 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.
And they're all just going to figure it out. Like that's what it feels like to me.
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. We'll talk people talk to their people we'll get a lot connected i would say the only thing really jeopardizing the theory you're putting forth and i i think overall the way this season ends for many of the characters the rat lifts 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 anyone in this family is going to react to the news of what is about to happen to their life other than Timnos.

And he's kind of given them a 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 of confronting the idea that you know what some shit is gonna happen we are gonna 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 um can you hit us with that episode title again rob Rob? Amor Fati? What's wrong 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

Thank you. 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 no expectations, with like an unreliable mom, it seems like, and, you know, no connection, no communication with his father.
Well, his dad was on the Death Star. Like, he had stuff to do, do you know you know the that helmet won't polish itself is what i have 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 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.
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 pina colada's. 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 that rubs me the wrong way uh 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 so i like i agree with the premise or disagree with the premise.
And I also don't think the execution of that is on there 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 um and then execution it doesn't really work for me which on on the first part fair enough like i don't 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 curt 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 in like a parallel filmmaking sense they weren't shown in stories like they just didn't structure it in that way i think a more compelling parallel uh 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 um and that's been really interesting we got a great email from our listener who did not really sign it so i'm just gonna say a um 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 rick's 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, 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.
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 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. Don't the don't be the chelsea wish to see in the world well don't be the rick either is the problem you got to find other role models so like chelsea does chelsea does anyone on white lotus 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, but Chelsea, just leaving everything up this 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, they're, they're two, Amy Lee Wood 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 stark contrast to tim ratliff who is also quite buffety uh 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

is 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 with Rick and she didn't. You know? 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, Chelsea's talking to Rick and she says, this is so on brand for you to be the victim of your own decisions.
And that's where Chelsea ends up herself. 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 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 ble and already quite cynical seasons of white lotus yeah uh 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 have that inability to see what is right in front of them and the inability to 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 i her like chin wobbles. She's like, this is the most passionate and romantic thing you've ever said to me.
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, Jo? No.
Okay. But- 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 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 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 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 and that's fine i enjoy a terrence malick film but like yeah i like i don't know that i think mike really landed the plane in terms of like, and their love transcends 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.
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 um season overall yeah and 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, yeah, just like, almost aromantic. 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 mike white mike mike white who creates all these characters as prisms of himself he's talked about this many many times over the years that he's just sort of like every character white lotus is me to some degree and 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 i'm just curious you know and this is 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.
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. He talked about this as a very heady season, a very parable forward season, and then perhaps season four, and we'll talk about season four in a little bit, 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 is 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 a 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, 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.

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Now streaming exclusively on Max. 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 the Zion and Piper thing.
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 uh gets the girl, gets the job, is embracing Mook and seems quite happy to be embracing Mook. 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, that you have to like, put a pillow on the face of your inner

Guy Talk and just, you know, become a holager guard. 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. 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, uh, 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, that was astonishing to me. So it's such an 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 idealism rightly 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 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 Mook 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. Sure.
Can we can we talk about Mook for one second? No. Yes, of course.
Well, fair enough, as usual. Well, I think she and guy talks suffer suffer from a similar problem which is those characters are just not very flushed out over the course of this season uh 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 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 i i was left wondering how much the casting might have impacted that character if at all because like lisa playing mook yeah who 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 rough outline of a character. Thinly drawn.
Thinly for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
All right. right let's talk about belinda what do you want to say i like i 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 as was done to her.
I just think the circumstances are

so different between those two characters. And again, 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 this 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 what it means to a certain demographic or to how we digest story as a whole when certain characters are put in certain situations.
It just felt like a very, he felt 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 in specifically this season i like that she made this choice i like that it was a complicated. I like that, okay, if Gaitok wasn't upset when he drove away in the car with Sitela, she was upset on the boat with Zion as she's waving goodbye.
So this is a moment of conflict for her. And I liked leaving her there.
More upset than any of the Ratlifts seem. More upset than certainly any of the Fancy seem.
Well, Zion's not that upset upset either a body just floated by him and he's like cheesing up here yeah um i have decided and i didn't say this last night but i've decided that zion is who i wanted nouveau riche 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 her shoulder saying, take the money, take the money, take the money, take the money. 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. 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 i would have happily had him here all season like i don't see any reason why to hold back on him um other than like to introduce him at the beginning as like our pov character and then just not have him for a while but um i i 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 mention is like inside of his sales pitch he just casually drops langston hughes uh 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 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. 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 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 ruining 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 uh but it's left with the premise like that she now has kind of said goodbye to an uncomplicated life in a lot of ways.

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 a crime at a White Lotus, you leave a White Lotus.

That's the move.

What is Rick doing? Just go to the buffet. 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 handle it.
I think Natasha Rothwell as Belinda this season, I really liked the way her story ended. And I think as with everything, it all just felt a bit drawn out until the end.
And so, like, bring in Nicolas Duvernay as Zion 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? 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 us fewer episodes. But I just, I do like where it landed.
I like this decision decision from Linda. I like the decision that she made.
This feels like the most White Lotus thing to me. It's like someone compromises their morality.
They get a serious financial windfall and, 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, you know what?

This... 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 you know what this random dude who's supposed to be off the grid suddenly putting five million dollars 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 five million dollars to make it look more legit i gotta say i think i think there's some merit there i think they maybe should have thought this through i think 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 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.
I imagine they're gonna have a lot of questions about how this hotel spa worker just got 5 million dumped into her 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 a few financial questions counterpoint do laws matter i don't know great question um okay 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 Laurie.
Where are you with that? I think Laurie'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 comparing apples to apples, to oranges, to grapefruits, to pomelos, to whatever fruit we have on the white lotus table 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 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 Laurie 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 Laurie 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, 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 yeah 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. Right.
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. And those people are so valuable, not just for people like me who can't remember how Rob 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 laurie and jacqueline and kate might be people who don't have their parents in their lives anymore necessarily perhaps you necessarily, perhaps.
And so 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 good the sam rockwell thing like the 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 that's the case. 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. 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 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 the dead sprint that she puts on after jim hollinger gets shot oh oh my god we we needed to carry coon in paris well 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 laura is just like bye very force majeure in that way like i am out survival instincts are kicking in oh my god force majeure is such a white lotus coated okay uh 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 yes that is something that's on his mind so there are not many i mean sundance i guess aside like i was about to say you could take place in in usually if you're film festing yeah in toronto yeah what year is tiff or what time of year is tiff i don't know it's in the fall it's like not super cold when well 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 tiff necessarily but you know a telluride or a can or a venice we're looking at sort of sunny 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 um yeah are we gonna get like a can-esque I don't know how different that will look from season two necessarily but um I 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 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 just like, really, I get it. And I can do it really easily.
I've done a lot of reading about Buddhism lately. Can I just draw from something a little more familiar to my actual lived experience? So Nicholas DuVernay as Zion, who has maybe decided to become a movie producer with his money, like a high-powered agent with his negotiating skills.
Gotta negotiate those contracts, yeah. 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, 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 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.

Actors can hurt themselves doing stuff like that. That's a real moment.
You really read me when you pointed out that Saxon is exactly 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 before we go? One final note on the piña colada front.
Or two notes on the piña colada front. One, Tim Ratliff, 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 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 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. 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 immacaculate and oh i'm seeing i'm seeing a little tension in that joe do you not 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 just that yeah just like i don't know artistic disagreement no my own 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 pina colada front my favorite bit of score all season is the vocalizing blender as tim radliff is cooking up up the pina colada which is just like this weird gasping vocalizing sound as the vitamix worse it just really did it for me i guess you want to give us a an impression of it uh not for free oh i'm only a session musician joe you got to get me in the studio i have 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 um that has been my genuinely like slightly brain dead coverage of the white lotus finale thanks for bearing with uh standing ovation for joanna robinson please double white lotus pods not just period but within i don't know 12.
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 give the folks for your Last of Us hype?

You thought this shit was bleak?

Come on.

White Lotus Season 3 is child's play.

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 Dourif.

So please join us for the pit finale later this week.

Y'all are the best.

We'll see you soon.