This post contains spoilers for “The White Lotus” season 3.
The biggest surprise in “Amor Fati,” the season 3 finale of “The White Lotus,” is also its silliest: the long-suffering Timothy Ratcliffe (Jason Isaacs) decides to murder his family by blending up some poisonous fruit seeds into four piña coladas. He gives the deadly drink to his wife Victoria, his oldest son Saxon, his daughter Piper, and himself. Absent from his list of victims is his youngest son, Lochlan (Sam Nivola), the only member of Tim’s family to say he thinks he can handle a life without wealth. Of course, if the other family members knew the full context when Tim asked them about the topic, I doubt they would’ve answered so flippantly.
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The good news: Tim has second thoughts about this plan. He smacks the drink out of Saxon’s hand and dumps the other drinks down the drain. The bad news: Tim forgets to clean the blender before going to bed, leaving it open all night for an unsuspecting Lochlan to poison himself with it in the morning. In Tim’s defense, your honor, he was high on Lorazepam at the time he did all this. Plus, he likely assumed the next person to use the blender would clean it before they blended anything else.
But just as Lochlan doesn’t know that you’re not supposed to jerk off your brother, he also doesn’t know that you’re supposed to rinse out the blender before using it. So he makes himself one of those protein shakes his brother kept pushing on him, ends up ingesting some of those suicide seeds, then goes off and dies by the pool. To make things worse, Tim wakes up and finds his son’s body. He’s hit with the realization that he’s accidentally killed the one son he tried to keep safe last night, and he doesn’t even have any Lorazepam left to numb the pain.
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False alarm! Turns out Lochlan didn’t actually die
As poor Tim is cradling his son’s lifeless body, there are a few minutes where it feels like the show has gotten insanely dark, especially by the standards of previous seasons’ finales. The reveal that there’s another death outside the ones implied by the season’s cold open is shocking, and I was impressed by the show’s willingness to truly go there. There’s something poetic about Tim killing the only member of his family who isn’t addicted to wealth — although let’s be real, Lochlan’s just as spoiled as the rest of them.
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But don’t worry: Lochlan wakes up. He still feels like trash for the rest of the episode, but it appears the amount of poisonous seeds he ingested hadn’t quite crossed the lethal threshold. This may seem like a cop-out on the part of the show — and to be clear, it 100% is — but at least it offers the show the chance to get real spiritual. While Lochlan’s dying, he envisions himself trapped underwater as four mysterious figures look down at him from the surface. It’s not ominous, though; it feels both otherworldly and oddly calming. When Lochlan regains consciousness, he says he thinks he saw God, and hey, maybe he did.
It’s a fun callback to a conversation Lochlan had with Piper in the season’s second episode, “Special Treatments.” There, Lochlan doubts if Piper had actually felt a spiritual presence, wondering if perhaps she imagined it. Now the tables have turned: Piper has decided against spending a year in Thailand on a spiritual quest to find herself, while Lochlan has had a real spiritual experience that might stick with him for the rest of his life.
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Why the storyline works, despite its flaws
The best part of Lochlan’s near-death experience is how much of it was foreshadowed from the very start of the season. Not only does it pay off the Piper scene in the second episode, but it also pays off that funny scene in the first episode where Pam tells the family all about how the fruits outside their house have extremely poisonous seeds. It’s the most obvious smoking gun in the world, but most viewers forgot about it after six episodes with no mention.
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Most importantly, Lochlan’s near-death by protein shake serves as a fitting conclusion to the character’s identity crisis. Lochlan’s spent the season pulled back and forth between his two siblings’ philosophies on life; he could choose the toxic alpha male route like his brother Saxon, or he could pick the quiet, spiritual route like his sister Piper. At the start of the finale, Piper shuts down the spiritual route for him by telling him not to follow her to the monastery. This pushes Lochlan back towards Saxon’s way of life, except Saxon (still traumatized by Lochlan’s handjob from a few episodes back) tells him he has to pick his own path.
Lochlan doesn’t quite seem to hear Saxon’s advice though, which might be why he starts the next day by making a protein shake even though he hates the taste. The fact that he’s almost murdered by this protein shake, the symbol of all things Saxon, sparks Lochlan’s realization that he really does need to be his own man.
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We don’t know what’ll happen to Lochlan going forward. Will he figure out that it was his dad who nearly killed him? Will he handle the loss of his family’s wealth as well as he claimed he could? The only clear takeaway from the finale is that he’ll be dealing with these problems as himself, not as an imitation of one of his siblings. Compared to the resolutions some of the other characters got this season, Lochlan’s character arc ended on a pretty optimistic note.
