The White Lotus season 3 spoiler review: Ending explained through Buddhist philosophy

What exactly is The White Lotus about? It's a question that has echoed across the internet since the first episode premiered in the summer of 2021.

The anthology show, created by Mike White, is hard to classify. Each season is set at a branch of the fictional White Lotus resort, following both the fabulously wealthy guests and working-class staff, each striving for a better life in different ways.

The Thailand-set season three, which concluded on Sunday, is perhaps the most divisive yet, with some viewers doubting the season has anything to say at all. But as the stories wrapped up, for better or for worse, it became clear what this season's message has been all along.

The self can be a prison, if we let it. If season three is about anything in particular, it's that basic truth – an idea that has its roots in Buddhism.

Each of The White Lotus characters is trapped in the identity they've crafted for themselves. They are bound by their egos, by their expectations and traumas. Only those who escape the self are able to reach their happy ending; their enlightenment.

As the American Buddhist psychotherapist Mark Epstein writes in his book The Trauma of Everyday Life: “The picture we present to ourselves of who we think we ought to be obscures who we really are.”

This plays out primarily in the journeys of the complementary male leads of the season: the Southern patriarch Tim Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) and the tortured loner Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins).

Warning: This article contains spoilers

Tim is a pillar of is community, a successful businessman and reliable provider for his family. When his shady dealings cause him to lose everything, he debates ending his own life as well as the lives of his family members who cannot imagine themselves outside of their privileged circumstances.

Rick is an outcast both by choice and by default, overcome by the traumas that resulted from his having grown up without a father. He has come to Thailand in a quest for vengeance to find the man who, his mother told him, killed his father on her deathbed.

The prison of trauma and the freedom of letting go

In the end, both of them are presented with a choice between ego death and literal death. Tim nearly chooses the latter, presenting himself and his family members with poisoned cocktails, only to change his mind at the final moment. He chooses instead to let his ego die, tell his family the truth and have faith that they will get through it together.

Rick, on the other hand, tragically chooses literal death, after first choosing ego death. In his initial confrontation in episode seven with Jim Hollinger (Scott Glenn), the man who he was told killed his father, he realises just how unfulfilling murdering him would be, and returns to the arms of his loving girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood).

But when Jim returns, and insults both his dead mother and father's memories, telling him that his father was a bad man and his absence from his life was no great loss, Rick is overcome with rage. And after failing to find guidance from his spiritual counsellor, Rick shoots and kills Jim.

What follows for Rick echoes the classic musical Sweeney Todd, in which the titular character kills the wife he thought was long dead in an attempt to avenge her. Rick, like Sweeney, is a man unable to live in the present because his traumas have become his eternal present.

Moments after killing Jim, Sritala, the wife of Jim and owner of the resort, reveals that Jim was Rick's father all along. Though he realises the error of his choice, he is now bound to it, engaging in a shoot-out with the security guards that inadvertently kills Chelsea. And as he attempts to take Chelsea to get help, he is shot and killed. They fall into the pond and appear as a yin and yang, together forever but trapped to the fate they manifested for themselves.

And it all could have been avoided had Jim not chosen his own ego and traumas. If he had chosen a different path, admitting to Rick that he was his father, forgiving himself for his past mistakes and attempting to forge a better future with his long-lost kin, he could have achieved happiness. Instead, he signed his own death warrant.

While it may not play out as dramatically, each of the other lead characters also have their stories resolve depending on how they confront their own ego.

Lochlan Ratliff (Sam Nivola), the youngest son of Tim and Victoria (Parker Posey), has lived his life as a people pleaser, emulating the paths of those around him and strictly adhering to their expectations of him. Lochlan's ego death is perhaps the most literal, as he inadvertently takes the poison that his father had intended for the rest of the family. He falls unconscious and has a vision of God, and awakens in his father's arms a changed man.

Saxon Ratliff (Patrick Schwarzenegger), his older brother, accepts that his shallow pursuits of carnal interests, and defining himself by the perceived success of his father, are both empty, opening himself up to an egoless future.

Laurie Duffy (Carrie Coon), a corporate lawyer and recent divorcee on holiday with her two friends Kate (Leslie Bibb) and Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), finds herself in existential crisis when she realises the selves that she'd defined herself by – her career and her former relationship – were failures. In the end, she lets go of who she was and embraces the present, no longer a slave to the jealousy she had for her more successful friends.

False happy endings

The season even contains several tragedies that appear, upon first glance, to be happy endings – particularly the staff of the hotel who yearn for better lives closer to those of the guests and owners.

Belinda Lindsey (Natasha Rothwell), an American spa manager who also appeared in the show's first season set in Hawaii, dreams of being a rich woman like Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), a lead character of the show's first two seasons. Tanya and she planned to open a spa together, but season one ended with Tanya abandoning Belinda and their plan, coldly saying her circumstances have changed.

In season three, she discovers Tanya's murderer living near the Thailand resort, and is presented with a choice in how to handle it. She can accept the murderer's bribe and become the rich woman she always yearned to be, or she can do the right thing and turn him in, and then open a more humble spa with Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul), a Thai wellness expert and love interest.

In the end, she chooses to take the money, abandoning Pornchai in the same manner that Tanya once abandoned her. In doing so, she has chosen to be a villain – defining herself as a “rich woman” – and loses out on love and enlightenment in the process. She chose ego – the person she believes “ought to be”. And as Buddhism teaches, all desire is suffering – and only suffering is to follow.

Security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) suffers a similar fate. He is presented with the choice between his better self, choosing Buddhism and non-violence, and the ambitious, violent man that his love interest Mook (Lalisa Manobal) wishes him to be. At the demand of Sritala, he shoots and kills Rick, securing the bodyguard job that he had wanted, happily driving off into the sunset as another villain.

Verdict

Ultimately, while identity is unavoidable, it's about knowing where the limits lie that is key to a true happy ending.

Robert Thurman, a professor of religion at Columbia, once echoed the teachings of a Mongolian Buddhist lama he met in suburban New Jersey in the early 1960s: “It’s not that you’re not real. We all think we’re real, and that’s not wrong. You are real. But you think you’re really real, you exaggerate it.”

Philosophically, this was the show's most ambitious season yet. And while parts are deliberately unsatisfying, this is still one of the most compelling and rewarding shows on television. Now, where will season four be set?

The White Lotus season three is available on OSN+ in the Middle East