• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, April 14, 2025

Since the “White Lotus” season 3 finale aired last week, thousands of viewers have posted their own post-mortems. So let’s break down some spoilers and possibly cry over spilled  -- and spoiled -- coconut milk. 

I’ve written before about how this season of WL attracted an unprecedented number of brand collaborations, signed without seeing a script, although the location was known: the Four Seasons resort on the island of Koh Samui, Thailand. 

Sometimes I wonder if marketers really understand that “The White Lotus” is a satire, all about savaging the privileged rich folk who can afford to stay in these five-star places and are miserable.

Further, showrunner Mike White amped up the irony this season by setting it in a Buddhist-based retreat and “wellness” center. 

Each season, the mystery lies in who dies in the final episode. 

In season one, set in Hawaii, a sex-and-drug-crazed Australian hotel manager gets stabbed to death after defecating in a hotel guest’s suitcase. In the second season, set in Sicily, comic actor Jennifer Coolidge, as Tanya, a charming, but batshit-crazy heiress, drowns while trying to escape the “evil gays” aboard a yacht. 

Her ghost haunts this season, which was slower, longer, and darker. Even the brilliant cinematography was highly filtered, resulting in a shadowy look that added to the tension.

Indeed, it was less ha-ha funny, more boundary-cracking, philosophical, and so bloody that five characters died in a pile-up in the end.  

Plus, writer/director/exec producer White admitted that the whole season came to him while he was in a sleepless, 48-hour steroid haze, while being treated in Thailand for bronchitis. 

I believe him.

Buddhism is all about renouncing materialism, because wanting things is suffering.

A Buddhist-adjacent show would seem to present a riskier proposition for brand partners, since marketing runs on capitalism’s great engine of materialist desire. 

So CB2 can sell brass monkeys without irony, and H&M and Banana Republic can put happening jungle prints on their sarongs and caftans, and they do sell. 

But what were the marketers of Coffee Mate thinking -- or drinking -- in signing on and releasing two limited-edition “White Lotus” flavors, including Pina Colada?

These characters are people who shoot their baristas if they don’t like the height of the microfoam on their three-pump lattes. 

I’m sure becoming part of a shocking pina-colada family-death-pact scenario was not in the plan for the Nestle-owned creamer. 

So how did it happen? One of the storylines featured the five Ratliffs, a Durham, North Carolina family of bluebloods who travel to Thailand because their daughter Piper wanted to interview a Buddhist monk for her senior paper at UNC.

It turns out the paper was a ruse, part of Piper’s plan to escape her unenlightened, overbearing mother, Victoria, played by the always terrific Parker Posey with an accent that birthed a thousand memes. 

Piper planned to stay in a Buddhist monastery for a year, trying out a new life.

That’s anathema (“no air conditioning!”) to Victoria, who gets by on class consciousness, shopping and lorazepam.

Meanwhile, as soon as they arrive, husband and paterfamilias Tim, played by Jason Isaacs, a finance guy, finds out that he’s about to be indicted back home for shady business dealings. 

The thought of losing his money and status causes him to spend most of the eight episodes liquored up and in a lorazepam fog (after stealing a gun and his wife’s benzos.)

The older son, Saxon (the names are priceless) works with his dad in the family business. He’s played by Patrick Schwarzenegger as a handsome party boy who has found religion in his muscled masculinity and protein smoothies. 

In terms of the writing, the blender becomes like Chekhov’s gun, going off in the third act.

There’s a younger son, Lochlan (actor Sam Nivola), a lost high school senior who idolizes his manly brother. These brothers get into some Murdaugh-family-level-perversity, having drunken sex with each other during a yacht party.  

But poor Lochlan is smart enough to know that he’s a “people-pleaser” drowning in a sea of family narcissism.

Mom has already said that she’d rather be dead than live with no money, and after one night at the monastery, Piper decides it’s not for her. “The food isn’t even organic!”  she cries.

So ole Tim decides to do them all in, save Lochlan, who doesn’t care about money.

On their last night at the resort, daddy-o Tim announces that he’s throwing a pina colada party in their family suite after dinner. 

His wife rolls her eyes at his cliched, down-market idea. 

Will he kill them? We did get some sledgehammer foreshadowing as a hotel staffer points to the piog-pong tree, telling Tim that that it’s called the “suicide tree” because of its poisonous fruit. 

He throws the poisoned tree parts into a blender. It’s death-by-smoothie, although the father insists that Lochlan have a Coke, being too young to drink rum.

While serving the poisonous pinas,  the dad talks about the “perfect life” they’ve had with “no privations.” 

“And my job is to keep all that from you,” he says.

The family sips. 

Immediately feeling guilty, Tim knocks the poisoned drinks out of his family’s hands, claiming that the coconut milk was spoiled.  

The next morning, Lochlan decides to see what he missed, and makes a smoothie without cleaning the blender. 

In a Christ- like scene, the dad discovers the now-comatose kid, and miraculously, Lochy lives. 

Okay, but more importantly, can Coffee Mate’s Pina Colada flavor be saved? 

By the next morning, the brand had the presence of mind to run an ad on Insta with the message, “Well this is awkward" and a sweat-laugh emoji. 

Good response. Indeed, it is.  I'll have a Coke, thanks.