Spoilers below.
A financial scandal. A lost bottle of Lorazepam. A night of brotherly incest. A murder-suicide attempt. Are the Ratliffs going to be okay after their vacation in Thailand? At the end of last night’s The White Lotus season 3 finale, the answer is a little unclear.
The 90-minute episode concludes with the family on a boat headed back home—all five of them still alive even after Timothy tried to poison them all with a toxic fruit. (He was able to stop most of them from drinking it, but Lochy got a few sips in his smoothie the next morning and almost died.) As they depart the resort and reunite with their phones, it’s only a matter of time before Timothy’s wife and three kids learn that he will likely go to jail for embezzlement and fraud—and that their riches will probably be taken away.
The White Lotus creator Mike White weighed in on the Ratliffs’ fate after the season 3 finale in a behind-the-scenes clip after the episode. “It’s a bittersweet ending,” he said. “Life goes on past this personal valley, but what’s going to happen without their comforts? I don’t think Victoria is someone who can live in poverty. I’m sure she can come up with some other solution.”
As for Victoria, White explained she “has a superiority complex and it has extended to her kids and it’s turned it into a little bit of a cult where they’re all kind of incestuous, that nobody’s good enough and so they’re all kind of looking inward.”
Jason Isaacs, who starred as Timothy, imagined where the Ratliffs now stand in an interview with The New York Times. “Our life is over, as we know it. We are all going to be broke and poor. We won’t have a house, a car, a phone. I will be in prison. Our family name will be in tatters,” he said. “I mean, it’s unimaginable to him.”
Timothy also likely won’t be staying at the White Lotus hotel again. “I think he’s going to be completely wiped out, which at that moment feels OK to him,” Isaacs added. “He’s looking forward to being a member of the human race and not feeling like he needs to be better than anyone else. When he looks at the water, right at the end, the water flying in the air and joining the ocean again, there’s some part of him that feels less alone than he’s ever felt.”
The mystery about the Ratliffs’ future is intentional. Patrick Schwarzenegger (Saxon) also doesn’t know what happens to his character or his relatives after that ending.
“There’s so much I wish I knew!” he told Variety. “I just watched the finale. I wonder if Saxon knew that Chelsea died. And when we power our phones on, is that when we know everything about our dad? Mike likes ambiguity. He wants people to have these conversations.” Schwarzenegger added that White originally filmed a two-and-a-half-hour finale which he cut down to 90 minutes.
The scene on the boat, however, was as it appeared on the page. “It was always scripted how it aired,” Schwarzenegger said. “Mike did say he wanted it to be me who looks to my dad after my phone comes on—because they work together and there are more consequences for Saxon.”
Sam Nivola (Lochlan) doesn’t have a clue what happens next for the Ratliffs either. “I don’t know,” he told Deadline. “It’s such an earth-shattering thing that’s happening to them, I don’t know what’s going to happen, how their way of life is going to change. I think of all of them, Lochlan is probably best prepared to deal with the no money, not for good reasons, but because he is already so lost that he can’t really get much more lost than he already is.”
He continues: “So I think he’ll be all right. I don’t even know if he’ll go to college, I don’t even know if that’s the right thing. I don’t know what he needs, and he definitely doesn’t know what he needs.”
