Spoilers after all comply with for The White Lotus Season 3 finale, “Amor Fati.”
Man, after all it wound up being Chelsea.
It’s turn out to be a convention at this level for followers of Mike White’s HBO/Max sequence, The White Lotus. You spend the entire season attempting to puzzle out who’s going to die, hoping sure characters received’t be the one(s) to get it, however in the long run it’s the individuals who undoubtedly didn’t need to go… who wind up going.
That’s to not say that any of the characters on The White Lotus really deserve demise. (Although some definitely must face justice.) Sure, somebody like Parker Posey’s Victoria Ratliff is hilarious but in addition terrible, however typically creator-writer-director White manages to evoke sympathy in us for even the seemingly most loathsome characters. (Patrick Schwarzenegger’s Saxon, the protein-shake-guzzling son of Victoria, is sort of tragic in his ultimate scene with Chelsea right here, for instance.)
But then there are the characters you like as a result of they’re so, properly, good in comparison with most everybody else. And that’s the place Aimee Lou Wood’s Chelsea got here on this season. As the at all times smiling girlfriend of Walton Goggins’ troubled Rick Hatchett, Chelsea, in all her astrology studying, chipper chattering, and undefatigable love for Rick, appeared to have discovered one thing concerning the universe that evaded a lot of the different characters on the present. The episode title sums it up: “Amor Fati,” which as Chelsea describes it, means “it’s important to embrace your destiny, good or unhealthy. Whatever will probably be will probably be.”
Of course, Chelsea completely shouldn’t have been the one to take a stray bullet within the White Lotus finale, and naturally that’s precisely what occurred to her. Just as Murray Bartlett’s Armond was unintentionally stabbed in Season 1 due to a dumb feud and Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya died in Season 2 in a ridiculous fall after she managed to take out all of her would-be assassins, Chelsea didn’t need to die. But she did. “Amor Fati.”
Anyway, whereas the large thriller of the season is at all times “who’s going to be murdered,” White mainly confirmed his hand this time within the scene the place Rick lastly returns from Bangkok. He had headed there to attempt to put his interior demons to relaxation by confronting the person (Scott Glenn) who he thought had killed his father. Meanwhile, Chelsea had waited for him the previous couple of episodes, keeping off the advances of Saxon – regardless of being tempted in any other case at one level – as a result of she liked him. The messed-up, sort of an a-hole (however not, and I quote Star-Lord, “100% a dick”) Rick appeared to barely discover her half the time of their relationship. But as Chelsea noticed him and ran to Rick on the seashore, there was no denying that they have been fated to be collectively. “At this level we’re linked,” Chelsea would later say, additionally throughout that Amor Fati chat. “If a nasty factor occurs to you, it occurs to me.”
There’s one thing about the best way White shoots that second of Chelsea rejoining Rick on the seashore. It’s simply the one shot, which lasts about one second, of Aimee Lou Wood operating in direction of the digital camera, however her pleasure at seeing him and his response to her cinched for me that she (and possibly they) have been doomed. She’s too pure to make it out of this place.
The actress telegraphed her destiny a bit when IGN’s Michael Peyton spoke to her and The White Lotus forged firstly of the season: “Chelsea gone unsuitable could possibly be Tanya. There is that overtrust. But she’s bought extra robustness, so I really feel like she would not go down that route hopefully.” Uh, sorry Aimee…
By the climactic scene the place the shoot-out teased in Episode 1 lastly occurs, we study that Rick and Chelsea certainly are each killed. Chelsea catches that stray bullet – we don’t even see it occur, simply her mendacity thereafterwards, and as Rick carries her physique away, he’s shot from behind and falls into the encircling pond. Both of their our bodies float on the floor of the water, aspect by aspect, and yep, they’re collectively perpetually. Somehow, I feel Chelsea would have wished it that means.
