The White Lotus Season 3: 5 Best & 5 Worst Characters

This article features spoilers for the entire third season of "The White Lotus."

The third season of Mike White's supposed anthology series "The White Lotus" is done and dusted, and now we know where everybody ended up. Specifically, we know who was on the receiving end of the gunshots we heard from afar in the season premiere: Hotel owner "Big Jim" Hollinger (Scott Glenn) fell first, followed by Rick Hatchett (Walton Goggins) and his young girlfriend Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) — but we also know what happened to everybody else, including the Ratliff family from North Carolina, the employees of the Thailand location of the fictional White Lotus, and everybody else.

Even if season 3 ultimately reached a sort of unsatisfying conclusion in this writer's opinion, I'll say this: Mike White is excellent at creating characters from whole cloth who feel real, flawed, and infuriating, and I did have to leave some of those characters off of this list. With that, let me just say that Kate Bohr, Lochlan Ratliff, Thidapon "Mook" Sornsin, and Rick Hatchett — the first three of whom are played by Leslie Bibb, Sam Nivola, and Lalisa "Lisa" Manobal — were largely fascinating to watch this season, though I'd argue that Manobal, one of the biggest pop stars in the entire world, simply didn't have enough to do (though she did manage to prove, with limited screen time, that she's a talented actress). Okay, so let's get to it: Who are the 5 best and 5 worst characters in season 3 of "The White Lotus?" 

The fact that Timothy Ratliff, the Durham-based businessman played by Jason Isaacs, survived the third season of "The White Lotus" absolutely sucks. I'm sorry, but it's true! We find out more or less immediately in season 3 of the series that Timothy has been dabbling in some financial crimes — including money laundering and bribery — thanks to a phone call from his associate Kenny (a funny little cameo from Oscar winner Ke Huy Quan). After getting news that he's probably going to jail for the foreseeable future and that his family will lose all of the wealth and privilege he's amassed up until this point, Timothy steals a gun from the hotel's inept security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong did an admirable job playing Gaitok, but the character is otherwise too dull to mention) and sort of ... faffs around with it for a while.

Timothy entertains the idea of taking his own life with the purloined gun, giving us a ton of fantasy sequences where he does precisely that, and in the season finale, he grinds up some poisonous seeds in his villa's blender and tries to Heaven's Gate his family with some "special" piña coladas. He ultimately changes his mind and talks his family out of finishing them, but has a larger change of heart the next morning when he realizes Lochlan made a smoothie with the dregs of the seeds and nearly dies, culminating in a very underwhelming reveal as the Ratliffs leave and he tells his family they're broke now. The whole thing feels pointless. Timothy is pointless (even though Isaacs is pretty great in the role).

Nobody does it quite like Parker Posey, and when I say "it," I mean that only Posey can make someone like Victoria Ratliff not only interesting, but completely enthralling. Victoria, wife of Timothy and mother of Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook), and Lochlan, is a shallow socialite and kept woman who becomes one of the season's best and funniest characters thanks to Mike White's writing and Posey's performance, which the actress delivers as if she's in a haze of booze and pills at all times. She canonically is; Victoria arrives in Thailand with a full prescription of lorazepam, and after Timothy starts stealing it to deal with his work-related stress factors, Victoria announces that she'll simply have to drink herself to sleep. Hey, whatever works!

Victoria, completely and blissfully unaware of the fact that her husband is melting down in real time and her kids are experimenting with each other, swans through the third season of "The White Lotus" just saying absolutely deranged stuff out loud, like saying all actresses are "prostitutes" and blithely asking younger women why they're with their older boyfriends. Posey is brilliant as a detached, chemically relaxed woman who can't imagine her life without unimaginable wealth, and even though I wouldn't say I was rooting for Victoria, I sure did love watching her on screen.

Much like Timothy Ratliff, I am freakin' incensed that Greg "Gary" Hunt (Jon Gries) escaped this season of "The White Lotus" with his life intact. We first met this absolute jerk in season 1 as he swept wealthy heiress Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) off her feet at the Maui location of the fictional hotel and resort chain, and by the time the couple are married in season 2, they're spending their vacation in Sicily sniping at each other. Greg then abruptly leaves Tanya alone in the coastal town of Taormina to attend to some mysterious business in Denver, at which point Tanya gets involved with a guy who may or may not know Greg named Quentin (Tom Hollander) and who may or may not be trying to kill Tanya on Greg's orders.

Tanya does, in fact, die at the end of season 2 — but she does it by accident falling off a boat after escaping Quentin — and when we catch up with Greg in season 3, he's living off Tanya's fortune in Thailand and going by the name "Gary" as he carries on with a much younger woman named Chloe, played by Charlotte Le Bon. (We don't know for sure until the finale that he's surviving off of Tanya's money, but before that, the massive mansion and huge yacht do sort of give the game away.) Greg almost gets caught by Belinda Lindsey (Natasha Rothwell), an employee at the Maui location who clocks him immediately, but all he has to do is pay her off and everything is fine! Greg sucks so hard. I hope that if Greg comes back in season 4, there's a whole episode where he dies slowly and painfully. 

Speaking of Belinda, it was great to see her back in the mix on this season of "The White Lotus" after she had her dreams crushed by Tanya in Maui. (As you may recall, Tanya promised to fund Belinda's own wellness center before reneging on the deal because she was so distracted by Greg's attention and presence). Ultimately joined by her son Zion (Nicholas Duvernay), with whom she has a wholly positive relationship that stands out as one of the only functional family dynamics on this entire show, Belinda is in Thailand to learn from the staff there, and I guess you could say she has some ... private tutoring sessions with Pornchai (Dom Hetrakul), the resort's resident wellness expert. Unfortunately, she also sees Greg skulking around, which puts her in a bit of a bind considering that, as she puts it to Zion in the finale, "he killed the b*tch." (Again, he only sort of killed Tanya, but we can definitely all agree that Greg sucks and is evil. All he does is sit in half-darkness and scowl. That's the hallmark of an evil character.)

The biggest issue with Belinda does involve Pornchai, though, because after Greg wires her a cool $5 million in exchange for her silence about all things Tanya, Belinda reneges on her own agreement to start a wellness business with Pornchai and leaves Thailand gleefully, Zion by her side. Honestly? Whatever! Belinda has suffered plenty, and while it's definitely crappy for her to go full Tanya when it comes to Pornchai, far be it from me to deny Belinda her well-earned wealth and happiness. I love Belinda, I love Natasha Rothwell, and that's that on that.

Who needs enemies when you've got a friend like Jaclyn Lemon, the TV star played on the series by Michelle Monaghan? We never learn that much about Jaclyn's evidently popular show, but it's big enough that she's frequently noticed and approached during her stay at the White Lotus, and it's also big enough that she paid for the entire trip and brought her best friends Kate Bohr and Laurie Duffy (Carrie Coon) with her. Unfortunately, though, Jaclyn is a classic mean girl who spends her vacation negging both of her friends. She also cheats on her husband, but I'm actually more concerned about the way she treats her lifelong gal pals! 

It is, frankly, extremely funny that Jaclyn, Laurie, and Kate keep pairing up in various combinations to talk smack about whichever one of them isn't there, but the fact that Jaclyn — a woman who claims that her marriage is blissful and perfect and has enormous privilege, wealth, and fame — feels the need to crap on her friends at all just feels toxic and awful. Jaclyn also appears to learn nothing from her time in Thailand, whereas Laurie has some pretty huge revelations during their final meal (more on all of that in a moment). Ultimately, Jaclyn is a shallow shell of a woman who doesn't care about the people in her life, based on her attitude and actions ... but at the very least, Monaghan played her brilliantly.

My girl Laurie Duffy goes on quite a journey throughout season 3 of "The White Lotus," unlike her unaware fake friend Jaclyn. We immediately learn that Laurie is divorced and recently got passed over for a pretty big promotion at work — she's a high-powered lawyer — so she really needs a vacation but is stuck feeling left out by her longtime girlfriends Kate and Jaclyn. Coon is transcendently good as Laurie, which isn't a surprise for anybody familiar with Coon's body of work (go watch "The Leftovers" and thank me later!), and Laurie is also the person in her little grouping who evolves the most throughout the season.

As the only single woman amongst her two friends, she takes an interest in Valentin (Arnas Fedaravicius), a wellness specialist at the resort who hails from Russia, but when Jaclyn decides to seduce Valentin instead, Laurie is understandably pissed off that her "friend" kept pushing the two together only to steal him away herself. In the season's penultimate episode, Laurie takes a big swing, attends a Muay Thai fight with Valentin's buddy Aleksei (Julian Kostov), and ends up sleeping with him, only to escape out of Aleksei's window when his girlfriend comes home and finds them. (Before this, Aleksei also tries and fails to get money out of Laurie, to add insult to injury.) Laurie closes out the season by giving her friends two seriously backhanded compliments — telling Jaclyn, who's had work done, that she has a "beautiful face," and telling Kate, who outed herself as a conservative, that she has a "beautiful life" — and concluding that their friendship, even with its flaws, does mean the world to her. At least Laurie's happy. That's all I care about.

Saxon's ultimate crime in season 3 of "The White Lotus" was, when all is said and done, being sort of boring. Patrick Schwarzenegger's performance as the odious, amorous, and openly pervy Saxon Ratliff is truly one for the ages, and as the season begins, he's definitely one of its most promising characters. After agreeing to share a room with his baby brother Lochlan, Saxon makes a big show of strutting around naked and enjoying some ... private time with his tablet, but when the Ratliff family ends up bullied into giving up their devices by Timothy (who's desperate to avoid phone calls on account of his crimes coming to light), Saxon has to survive without adult entertainment on demand.

He makes do by openly lusting after Chelsea and Chloe as they lounge by the pool. Eventually, both Saxon and Lochlan get invited to party with the two ladies on Greg/Gary's yacht, and while Chelsea avoids the late-night revelry out of loyalty to Rick, Saxon, Lochlan, and Chloe end up in arguably the season's most talked-about and wild situation. After the two brothers end up hooking up with each other — and Chloe — things between them are weird, to say the least, and that whole thing just never gets resolved at all! Saxon spends the finale sitting around and reading, which I guess we're supposed to see as him attempting to better himself, but his storyline just sort of ... ends without any real development. Again, Schwarzenegger is great, but I'm still putting Saxon in the "worst" column because of his unfinished character arc and because if I met a guy like this in public, I would immediately throw a drink in his face.

My sweet Chelsea! Of course she had to be the one to die. Yes, she was technically one of five, but she was also the only one of the five dead people who was truly innocent. Still, she kept saying stuff about how she'd make Rick happy if it "killed" her and how they'd be "together forever," which they now are in death, so I can't say the foreshadowing wasn't there (and pretty overt). Still, losing Chelsea was a tough blow, because she's the most delightful character on this season of "The White Lotus" by a mile.

From her carefree fashion sense — who can forget her "Little Mermaid" chic shell bikini top?! — to her undying love for Rick, Chelsea was a beacon of light, kindness, and innocence throughout this demented romp of a season. Without Aimee Lou Wood's stunning performance, she likely wouldn't have been as enchanting. Wood makes a real meal out of Chelsea's borderline obsession with Rick, even in scenes where she just has to say things like "I need to call Rick" or "I miss Rick" over and over again, and she also gets some of the show's funniest lines. (When Saxon realizes what went down between him and Lochlan, Chelsea nonchalantly tells him that there's no drug in the world that could get her to hook up with her brother before telling him she doesn't "judge.") If there's any justice in the world, Wood will be swimming in offers from major directors after her absolutely winning performance as Chelsea on "The White Lotus," and there's zero question that her take on Chelsea is precisely what makes this character so outstandingly memorable.

Piper's abrupt turn at the end of season 3 of "The White Lotus" does feel right, in a sense, but it doesn't make her any less irritating. A spoiled and pampered girl who hates her super-rich family, Piper is, at first, sort of unremarkable ... until she reveals to her parents that the trip they booked to Thailand for the benefit of her college thesis actually has nothing to do with a thesis at all, and she plans to move there permanently to live in a monastery. (Parker Posey's delivery of "You want to live in Taiwan?!" is, without question, one of the season's best laugh out loud moments.) 

It's genuinely hard to say whether Piper gives up on her whole monastery move because Lochlan wants to follow her there and she's annoyed by him, or because she truly hated sleeping on a sparse bed without many creature comforts, but the fact of the matter is that she starts sobbing at breakfast with her parents and tells them that she hated the time she spent in the monastery and wants to go back to the land of air conditioning and organic food. Either way, Piper's whole deal is that she's a total brat who tells her parents that their excessive wealth actually makes them worse — which she's actually right about — until she has to rough it for literally one night and abruptly changes course. Piper, I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!

Is it cheating to include Sam Rockwell's surprise supporting character Frank in this list because he only shows up more than halfway through the season and is a bit player at best? Maybe, but I don't care, because Sam Rockwell rules. To provide some context, Woody Harrelson was originally set to play Rick Hatchett but dropped out, and when it came time to cast someone for Frank, Mike White asked both Walton Goggins and Leslie Bibb — who are Rockwell's longtime friend and longtime romantic partner, respectively — to see if the Oscar winner would be willing to join the Thai party. He said yes, and the rest is HBO history.

Aside from whatever the hell was going on with Lochlan and Saxon, one of the most discussed aspects of season 3 of "The White Lotus" is absolutely Rockwell's incredible monologue in the season's fifth episode, which frankly needs to be seen to be believed. Thankfully, Rockwell pops up in the final three episodes of the show too, closing out the finale by drunkenly somersaulting in Rick's direction in a Bangkok hotel hallway and, later, praying in a temple (which I suppose is meant to indicate that he's returned to his sobriety after a night of partying with Rick). I will never, ever, ever be mad to see Rockwell show up in a project, and the back half of "The White Lotus" season 3 would have been a lot less fun without him there.

"The White Lotus" is streaming on Max now.