The White Lotus Season 3 finale sucked: Here’s why
The White Lotus Season 3 is over. In this spoiler-heavy take, Steve Dinneen laments an ending that went awry.
The final episode of The White Lotus Season 3 pulled off the dubious trick of ending with both a bang and a whimper. It’s been a rollercoaster: the season opened to a fairly tepid reaction – The music is worse! There’s no Jennifer Coolidge! – but over eight episodes this new group of entitled guests slowly won us over with their woozy, lorazapam-laced lives, only for the grand finale to veer off into wild, flailing melodrama.
More than the previous seasons, which focused on luxury resorts in Hawaii and Sicily, this one set in Thailand felt like it had something broader to say about humanity than the (admittedly fun and zeitgeisty) reflection on the corrupting power of wealth.
The disparate threads of this uncomfortable, steamy drama felt like parts of a carefully crafted puzzle-box, which would finally click into place in the last act to reveal some terrible truth. Frequent allusions to Buddhist philosophy (Parker Posey’s drawling pronunciation of “Buuuuddhism?” is now forever etched upon my brain) also suggested this story was heading somewhere profound. Themes of fate and hubris and incest clearly riffed upon Greek tragedy. It felt like series creator Mike White, one of the most respected showrunners out there, was gearing up for his magnum opus.
How would the worlds of the trio of female friends, Jason Isaacs’ loathsome family and Walton Goggins’ inscrutable modern cowboy eventually collide? In the end… they don’t, really. They’re just separate instances of the same old story: greed is bad.
We knew from episode one that before check-out at The White Lotus, gunfire would ripple through the jungle. That played out in the most uninspiring of ways: a gunfight straight out of a Western. The lone anti-hero dispatching goons. An unlikely saviour stepping up at the final hour. A man paying the ultimate price for the sins of his past. The sense of melodrama felt at odds with what The White Lotus has come to represent. Season one ended with an accidental stabbing after a hotel manager defiled a guest’s suitcase. Season two saw Jennifer Coolidge escape her kidnappers only to fall head-first into the ocean. These were, after all, hotel guests, not characters in a video game. The White Lotus shines brightest when its characters realise how little agency they have, that their vast wealth does not provide them with the practical or emotional skills to deal with the real world.
It’s a shame because season three had some brilliant moments. The appearance of Sam Rockwell as a (temporarily) reformed alcoholic reminiscing about the Thai sex industry is perhaps the most iconic moment of TV in 2025 so far. The strange, incestuous relationship between the group of siblings was morbidly, compulsively watchable. And the resolution of the three friends’ story is genuinely touching.
There are also clever breadcrumb trails to follow throughout the series: the Chekhov’s gun wielded by security guard Gaitok; the conspicuous mention of the poisonous “suicide fruit” growing around the resort; the quasi-mystical yammerings of Aimee Lou Wood, who seems to predict her own eventual fate.
But as the sun set over the White Lotus Thailand, it all felt like a bit of an anticlimax, a loud and clumsy ending to a series that dared to burn slowly. Season 4 has already been commissioned: I hope Mike White has a new trick up his sleeve.
• The White Lotus Season 3 is streaming now on Now TV