In the ‘White Lotus’ Finale, That Damn Blender Was a Total Cop-Out
The show’s third season finale left a more bitter taste in our mouths than those pina coladas
Spoilers for seasons 2 and 3 of The White Lotus within.
On Sunday night, the third season of Mike White’s prestige HBO drama The White Lotus came to a conclusion. Now, we know exactly who died, who killed them, and who survived the week at the lush Thai resort, and the show’s sleuthy fans can stop posting their deranged theories about the show’s complicated symbolism. But before we can move on, we simply must discuss that goddamn blender storyline.
Chekhov’s blender has loomed as an evil specter over the entire season, assailing our ears as Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) whips up his protein shakes, which exist both to help maintain Saxon’s sinewy physique and function as a metaphor for the toxic swill of protein and misogyny that is served up daily to him by the manosphere. Fans have speculated for most of the season, in memes and lengthy Reddit threads, that it would play some major role in the downfall of the Ratliff family. Most people thought that it would be one of Saxon’s smoothies that would be the downfall of the family, but ultimately it was the appliance itself that was nearly their undoing.
Midway through the finale, titled “Amor Fati,” it seemed like fans were right. It was do or die time — literally — for the Ratliff family. Patriarch Timothy (Jason Isaacs) knows that financial ruin and social scorn awaits the family when it returns to the United States, and he’s not quite sure if any of the family members are capable of living without the pleasures and comforts that their extreme wealth affords them. He has, to some extent, spent the entire week pondering what to do with his wife — No. 1 Lorazepam fan Victoria (Parker Posey) — and their children. Does he kill them, and spare them the indignity of poverty? Or will they survive the complete shattering of their lives and his imprisonment?
Ultimately, Timothy finally decides that he has to kill them with the “suicide fruit,” which grows on trees all over the resort. He rips through the fruit’s flesh to pull out its poisonous seeds, which he then blends (poorly) for some post-dinner pina coladas After a cheesy toast and a little bit of wavering, Timothy encourages his family to drink up. They quickly realize something is off about the drinks — it is perhaps not surprising that the suicide fruit’s seeds taste terrible — but Timothy insists that they drink anyway, until he suddenly has second thoughts. He ends up literally slapping the poisoned libation out of Saxon’s hand, insisting that something about the coconut was off. He does not, however, take the time to rinse the poison from that blender, and it’s immediately obvious that Timothy’s plan is about to go to hell.
His son Lochlan (Sam Nivola), who is possibly the only pure and decent member of the entire Ratliff family and the only one who you actually believe could make it without money, decides to make one of Saxon’s smoothies in the dirty blender. He drinks the shake, then ends up vomiting and unconscious on the side of the villa’s pool, where Timothy finds him. Eventually, Lochlan wakes up, and Timothy has a moment of true epiphany: Money and prison time don’t really matter, not when he has the love of his family. Well shucks, Tim! That’s a whole lot of emotional growth for a guy who was just about to annihilate his entire family, and in such a short time.
From the moment that fans started floating the blender theory on social media, I was immediately annoyed. The blender was a total cop-out, just like Tanya McQuoid’s allegedly comedic, maybe accidental death at the end of season 2. With the blender, White on some level insulates Timothy from two different attempts at murder. It wasn’t Timothy who almost killed Lochlan, it was his sloppiness! And that’s the only throughline that The White Lotus had this season — the rich are messy and often incompetent. What else is new?
We knew that The White Lotus would not have a traditionally satisfying ending, but come on. This is a show that harps on the fact that the rich are as shallowly bad as we expect that they are. It reminds us that they are petty, capricious, and above all, miserable despite their wealth. We are not supposed to envy the Ratliffs, even as they relax on a megayacht, because what awaits them is a fate worse than death. We are, on some level, supposed to root for their demise, whether that’s at the hands of the suicide fruit or their deep embarrassment at returning to the United States as paupers. But ultimately, it’s unable to really pull the trigger — literally or figuratively — on the Ratliffs, or on any of the many plotlines that fell totally flat this season.
But by the end of the finale, the blender that promised us cathartic destruction is just one of so many red herrings planted all over the resort, and those fish have really started to stink. Instead of what they deserve, the Ratliffs get a real chance at redemption, at least in Timothy’s eyes. Sure, survival is the real punishment for the Ratliffs, another iteration of the idea that hell is other people. It’s just that after eight long and torturous episodes full of incestuous hand jobs and Saxon’s loud-ass smoothies, I don’t really care what happens to them.
