Warning: Major spoilers ahead for “The White Lotus” season three.
Chelsea’s warning that “bad things happen in threes” came true on Sunday in the season three finale of “The White Lotus,” when, after escaping a robbery and being bitten by a snake at a reptile show, she finally met her end.
The hopeless romantic played by Aimee Lou Wood died in the crossfire of the show’s much-teased shootout, which ended up being between her evasive, impulsive boyfriend Rick (Walton Goggins) and newly armed hotel guards, who came after Rick after he shot Jim (Scott Glenn), whom he believed killed his father (but, plot twist: Jim is Rick’s father).
The couple’s final scene shows Chelsea and Rick lying lifeless in the water, their bodies and fates intertwined. Eagle-eyed fans pointed out that the composition of their bodies in the shot even resembles a Yinyang symbol, a callback to Chelsea’s earlier comment that she and Rick are in a “yin and yang battle, and I’m hope, and Rick is pain.”
Eventually, as Chelsea says, one of them will win. And it turns out, it was Rick.
Both Goggins and Wood are in agreement that their characters’ ending was tragic.
“She’s the most hopeful character on the show and that’s why she has to die, but obviously on a human level it is really fricking sad,” Wood explained to GQ on April 7.
In an interview with Vulture published the same day, Goggins described Chelsea as the “very thing that he had been looking for his whole life,” which had been “staring him in the face.”
“That’s the irony, and that’s the fucking tragedy,” he added.
The show has made it clear that Chelsea and Rick are very different people in the way that they see the world. And it appears that in real life, Wood and Goggins also differ in how they view the relationship between their characters.
Wood told GQ that she thinks Rick and Chelsea’s relationship was one-sided.
“I think it’s really confronting for some because there’s a lot of people that have been Chelsea and it’s painful when you love someone and they’re not giving you anything back. It fucking hurts,” she said. “It’s only after you leave that relationship that you go, ‘What the fuck was I doing for so long, how did I do that?'”
Goggins, however, has a more romantic view of the couple, describing them as “soul mates” when speaking to The New York Times.
“Do they deserve each other? Of course they do. They’re soul mates. Anyone [who disagrees], you’re in an arrested state of development, or you’re incapable of seeing the nuance in this story,” he said.
But despite the difference of opinion, Goggins heaped praise on Wood.
“Aimee Lou is a real sweetheart. I’ve been around a long time. I’ve had chemistry with a lot of different people in a lot of different genres. Right off the bat, the very first time that we met in Thailand, the chemistry was there,” he said. “It was as if we had been friends and soul mates on some level for a very long time.”
“The White Lotus” season 3 is streaming in full on Max.
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