(This article contains massive spoilers for “The White Lotus” season 3 finale.)
Up until season 3, most fans agreed that Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) was the only major character on the show to actually be a good person. Everyone else is shown to have some sort of dark side by the entirety of their respective seasons, but throughout season 1, Belinda harms no one. Her only crime is putting too much trust in Tanya (McQuoid Jennifer Coolidge), a mega-rich woman who offers to give Belinda the money she needs to start a wellness business and then doesn’t follow through.
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The storyline was a poignant tale of the way rich people can cause so much distress to the lower-class people around them without even realizing it. Tanya barely seems to understand that she’s been taunting Belinda with a golden lottery ticket all season. She doesn’t notice that Belinda is performing an excessive amount of emotional labor to keep Tanya happy, all in pursuit of what the audience knows is a dead end. When Tanya abandons Belinda to run off with some guy she just met (the guy being Greg, who would end up murdering her), she’s not being cruel or spiteful — she’s being thoughtless, as so many of the rich people on “The White Lotus” tend to be.
That’s why it’s fascinating for Belinda to end season 3 on almost the same note. Having suddenly acquired $5 million (by essentially strongarming Greg), Belinda says farewell to Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul), a guy who had recently approached Tanya with his own idea to start a wellness business. She tells Pornchai that “circumstances have changed” and she has to abruptly leave Thailand, and that the wellness business they talked about is not going to happen.
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It even seems like Belinda is channeling a bit of Tanya here, talking to Pornchai in a way that feels subtly dismissive and careless. Belinda sympathizes with Pornchai, it seems, but that’s outweighed by how clearly she’s psyched about the money and happy to get out of town.
There are no innocents on ‘The White Lotus,’ not even Belinda
In defense of Belinda, this isn’t quite as mean as what Tanya did. In season 1, Tanya’s the one proposing to give Belinda a ton of money to start a business, and she sure seems to mean it in their initial conversation. Season 1 also dedicates way more time to showing that Belinda put in the work to make this happen; she writes up a big binder full of ideas for Tanya and repeatedly stays hours after work to make the deal happen.
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Meanwhile, in season 3, Pornchai’s the one to bring the idea up, and Belinda doesn’t seem that comfortable with it. Tanya actively led Belinda on, whereas Belinda only passively gets Pornchai’s hopes up. The end result, sadly, is still the same. Season 3 doesn’t show us much of Pornchai’s point of view, but it’s safe to say he’s probably just as heartbroken as Belinda once was.
Making the storyline darker is the way that Belinda, as an American, is in a more privileged financial position than Pornchai, even before she comes into that $5 million. The US dollar goes farther in Thailand than it does in Hawaii; Belinda might not as comparatively rich to Pornchai as Tanya was to her, but she’s still in a position of power over him. All season, she’s been the one with the power to help Pornchai achieve his dreams, and he’s been the one trying hard to make the situation work while she’s been distracted with other things. If this storyline had been told from Pornchai’s point of view, Belinda would probably come off way more like Tanya than we’d like to admit.
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Although in further defense of Belinda, the show does at least gesture at the idea that this outcome is what Tanya would’ve wanted. Greg apparently told Belinda off-screen that Tanya had always felt bad about flaking on her, and those who remember season 2 well can recall that Tanya has indeed spoken regretfully about the situation. Not to mention that “The White Lotus” has always made clear how untouchable the wealthy are; we know Greg will most likely never be brought to justice no matter what Belinda does, so hey, maybe Belinda should at least get something out of the situation.
The darkest moment for Belinda is her earlier conversation with her son
The biggest surprise moment with Belinda is how she gets the $5 million from Greg in the first place. At first, Greg offers her $100,000 to stay quiet about where he’s been living. Belinda seems reluctant, but her son Zion (Nicholas Duvernay) convinces her to meet with Greg again. Throughout this meeting, it seems like Belinda is unsettled by how ruthlessly her son is behaving, almost like she realizes that the money is already corrupting his soul. When she storms out of the meeting and says she can’t take Greg’s blood money, it almost seems like a rare case of someone on “The White Lotus” doing the right thing. But then she reveals this is all a trick to get as much from Greg as possible. It’s a trick that works.
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That scene is the moment where Belinda reveals her devious side, and it’s riveting. It’s also a moment that casts a few previous scenes of her in a different light; for instance, earlier, over breakfast, she talks about money and acts annoyed when Zion jumps at the opportunity to talk about Greg’s offer again. In hindsight, it seems likely that Belinda knew exactly what she was doing there.
In a New Yorker profile of showrunner Mike White published before the season premiere, the author Kelefa Sanneh mentioned a conversation she’d had with Natasha Rothwell about her character Belinda. It’s only now, after the season 3 finale, that we can understand exactly what Rothwell was talking about. As Sanneh wrote:
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“On set in Thailand, I mentioned to Rothwell that many fans perceived Belinda as an oasis of decency, and I asked whether she ever wished that her character could be as indecent as some of the others. She told me that she had thought carefully about giving Belinda agency, and suggested that it might be possible to read her not as a spa manager with a heart of gold but as a strategic operator whose big idea — that Tanya will invest in her new business — suggests a certain degree of ‘narcissism’ and ‘hubris.'”
Belinda’s final moments in the season show her and her son celebrating on the boat back to the airport. She doesn’t seem guilty about what she’s done, nor does Zion seem all that shaken up over the massacre he’d witnessed earlier that day. They may be surrounded by suffering, but they’re rich now, and that’s all that matters.
