Walton Goggins as Rick in HBO’s The White Lotus – Credit: HBO

This story contains spoilers for Sunday’s finale episode of The White Lotus.

The final episode of The White Lotus Season Three is titled “Amor Fati,” a Latin phrase that translates to “love of fate.” Cast members with particularly essential storylines had more time to embrace their characters’ inevitable fate, while others were left in the dark about what was coming next. And Sunday night’s finale episode left the rest of the cast — and viewers — reeling in the aftermath.

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“Finally, I have people to talk to, it’s been so many years,” Walton Goggins, who played Rick, joked on CBS Morning on Monday. Goggins added that he was often subjected to fan theories when stopped on the streets, but very few of the predictions he encountered proved to be true, though some came close. “I sympathize so greatly with Rick’s pain, because his entire life story was defined by this event,” he said about the tragic and twisted end to his character’s search for who he believed to be his father’s killer. “The genius of Mike White, in that revelation, Rick only has a couple of seconds to register it before he is being fired at.”

The flurry of bullets unloaded in the climax-marking shootout during the finale claimed both the lives of Goggin’s Rick and his girlfriend Aimee Lou Wood’s Chelsea, upending the predictions of many viewers who had come to expect only one character to die during the finale, as was standard during the show’s first two seasons. Patrick Schwarzenegger, who played Saxton, told attendees at the Four Seasons Westlake Village hotel finale viewing there was a “really weird feeling” attached to “spending so much time with all these cast members and then watching someone die; I don’t know how to describe it, you feel like something really happened.”

The actor only read the sections of the finale script that pertained to his character, leaving him as shocked as everyone else when the grand reveals came. But Wood carried it with her for much longer. “For about two weeks before we shot it, I felt super weird. It was like this odd, ominous thing that was just hanging over us, and then it was like the hottest day ever and Walton had to like carry me so many times and it was so hot,” she said. “Chelsea doesn’t know what’s gonna happen to her, but I know, so it’s this odd thing.”

In one scene, before tragedy claims both Rick and Chelsea, she tells him: “Stop thinking about the love you didn’t get, think about the love you have. I’m right here. I love you.” For Woods, this summed up the overarching narrative of the season. “Obviously, being the one that dies, this whole time I’ve been so sad, like, Mike kills hope! Because Chelsea is hope, and he kills her,” she said. “And it’s like yeah, but then what I saw just then was like there’s so much love in it, and that’s why it’s so much more painful because you’re having to hold it all at the same time. But that’s life isn’t it? It’s love and pain all the time.”

For some White Lotus viewers, all they’re feeling right now is pain. “Chelsea loved Rick more than she loved herself and in the end that was what brought her demise she should have been in the club! Not babying a 50 year old toddler,” one fan wrote on X. “Bad things come in threes and everything horrible kept happening to her as a direct result of her love for that broken crusty man baby.”

Some attempted to justify the ending by seeing it through Chelsea’s eyes, noting that it was just like her to want to die by the side of her soulmate. “She was the last real lover,” one fan said. Others see it as a cautionary tale for the real lover girls. “If Rick really loved Chelsea the way she loved him he would have never put her in that position,” another viewer said. “He never even would have brought her on that trip and I will stand ten toes down on that. Y’all romanticize stuff too much. Open your eyes!”

In a review of the finale, Rolling Stone‘s Alan Sepinwall wrote: “The Rick part went exactly where everyone knew it would, at least regarding the true nature of his relationship with Jim Hollinger. Jim didn’t kill his father, because of course Jim was his father. And Rick killed him. And got Chelsea, and then himself, killed in the process. To this subplot’s credit, Goggins and Wood were wonderful throughout the season, particularly both of them in the finale sequence where it seemed like Rick actually had finally let go of the grief he’d been carrying all his life, and Goggins at the climax when an utterly haunted and ruined Rick couldn’t stop himself from seeking vengeance.”

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