Entertainment
What will happen on 'The White Lotus' finale? Fans share their theories
The latest installment of “The White Lotus” comes to an end on Sunday and everyone is speculating about how the series will wrap up its loose ends, who will die and how.
We asked readers to share their theories for how Season 3 will end.
Three ideas that people shared the most: Piper isn’t staying in that Buddhist monastery; Rick’s father is Jim Hollinger and Gaitok is going to confront the Russians over the robbery.
See below for more theories, broken up by character as well as a few general predictions. Responses have been edited for clarity.
Check back Sunday for more coverage of the Season 3 finale.
The Ratliff family
Timothy Ratliff will make a poison protein shake out of the forbidden fruit of the island so that Saxon will drink it and ultimately be blamed for the corruption of the company. Timothy will not be implicated. Piper decides the monastery is not for her after all, but the youngest brother, Lochlan, stays at the monastery. — Diana Perez, Granada Hills
Victoria Ratliff is going to die, unfortunately. The whole family is going to stay in Thailand in a fog for the rest of their lives while they do good things for other people. — Shelly, Highland Park
Victoria takes over the world, Piper ditches Buddhism for Duke, and Chelsea leaves Rick for Saxon. Lochlan stays behind in Thailand, taking Piper’s place. — Eva Sippel, L.A.
Timothy will not go to prison. After all of his worry on the entire trip and all of his criminal behavior, he will be another wealthy, middle-aged white man who somehow avoids hard time. And someone close to him will take the fall. Possibly his own son — who is completely losing his mind after the full moon party. — Allison Gold, L.A.
Timothy makes a poisonous shake for Victoria, Saxon and himself to drink. Piper and Lochlan accidentally start to drink it. Timothy breaks the glasses as the family discovers the truth, but not before Piper and Lochlan are sick. Piper returns home and Lochlan joins the monks. — Linda Weisbrod, Redondo Beach
Victoria Ratliff learns of what’s about to happen when she returns to America and about her youngest son’s sexuality. She does not agree with her daughter’s choice to stay at the monastery. She loses it, and kills herself and her family. She has said she would rather die than be poor, and her oldest son has said his entire life is tied to his dad’s business. — Michael Rogers, Edmonton, Alberta
Gaitok
Gaitok tries to stop the Russians from committing another robbery/crime at the resort but accidentally shoots a guest because he’s so incompetent. — Katie Den Bleyker, L.A.
Gaitok sees another robbery about to happen with the three Russians, chases them and is ambushed by one of the Russians who takes his gun and shoots him. He dies in Mook’s arms. — Cliff Klein, L.A.
Gaitok feels threatened by the Russian friends of Valentin who he is certain are the robbers. He confronts them and a struggle ensues, which culminates in the accidental shooting and death of Mook. — Myrna, Redondo Beach
Gaitok confronts Valentin and is disarmed. And Mook shoots Valentin to rescue Gaitok. — Andrew Katzenstein, L.A.
Gaitok protects the resort with his firearm. Gaitok reports the Russians as the robbers. [Fabian] is fired and Gaitok replaces him. — Shakti Newman, L.A.
Gaitok will show his girlfriend, Mook, that his compassion and preference for care over violence will not stand in his way in apprehending the robbers. Her life view is changed as a result. — Nick Panza, L.A.
Both Mook and Gaitok’s superior tell him he’s not strong enough. Gaitok spots the jewelry thieves and will show his strength by killing them. — Stephen Shapiro, L.A.
Mook
Mook will be revealed to be in cahoots with the Russians and will get killed. — Ashley, L.A.
The messy besties (Jaclyn, Kate and Laurie)
Aleksei’s girlfriend shows up at the White Lotus and kills Kate, mistaking her for Laurie since no one could tell them apart since childhood. — Bea, California
The three friends bond over Laurie’s incident with the Russian thief. — Bill Nuss, L.A.
Rick
Rick will die because he enjoyed committing a violent act — and Hollinger is his father. — Sylvia, L.A.
I believe [Jim Hollinger] will send some gunmen as proxy to off [Rick]. But he could really be Hollinger’s love child — who knows? Remember they both drink whiskey like real men. — Cheryl Penn, L.A.
Jim Hollinger is Rick’s father, not the guy who killed his father. The mom meant that metaphorically and an 11-year-old kid took it too literally. The body had on a white shirt and had short, dark hair. Rick had a white shirt in Episode 7, but with 90 minutes in Episode 8, it could be someone else. — Angel Zobel-Rodriguez, San Fernando
Rick’s encounter and less-than-violent actions with Jim will involve the police. Police will go to the resort searching for Rick, and all characters will feel like the police are there for them, which may result in each character panicking to flee or deal with the situation. — Benjamin Cendejas, Glendora
Chelsea
I think Gaitok accidentally shoots Chelsea and kills her. — Susan Scelfo, Hollywood, Fla.
Rick and Chelsea live happily ever after. — Nick Panza
Greg/Gary
Greg/Gary comes to the villas looking for Belinda and gets bitten by the snake that’s been loose in her room — and he dies! (Yay!) — Jill Frank, L.A.
Greg/Gary finally gets his due. Gaitok must overcome his Buddhist desire for nonviolence and shoot him to defend Belinda. Fabian helps Gary get access to Belinda when he thinks she and Pornchai are conspiring to take over his job. — Marika, Marina del Rey
Gary/Greg is revealed to have a connection to the GM or the owner, which explains his easy access. — Bill Nuss
Belinda
Belinda takes the money. I worry that Pornchai has alterior motives when he rushed to have her stay and open a spa in Thailand, but I think the Russians will corner the market on the grift. — Angel Zobel-Rodriguez
Belinda gets a gun and when she is about to shoot Gary in the dining room she accidentally shoots and kills Chelsea. As she is dying, Chelsea tells Rick to live a good life. He becomes a Buddhist. — Linda Weisbrod
Pornchai
Pornchai, Belinda’s colleague and new friend, is going to die. He told her, “I will protect you.” He will do that, but only by losing his own life. — Allison Gold
Fabian
Hotel director Fabian will finally have a big singing number that goes so badly that multiple guests start taking shots at him. — Chad McDonald, Saratoga Springs, Utah
Frank
Frank continues his debauchery and gives up his sobriety for good. He ultimately starts working for Sritala, as she was charmed by him — even if he really wasn’t a producer. — Diana Perez
The theories that tie up everything
Two sets of killers will descend on the hotel — the Russians looking for their re-stolen necklace and Sritala’s guards looking for Rick. Both efforts will get stymied. Chelsea and Laurie will elude them by connecting with Gaitok. A cross fire will ensue, distracting Timothy from eating the suicide fruit long enough to reunite with his family. He will decide to stay at the temple with Lochlan, and the rest of the family will decide to go home. Belinda will find solace in the arms of Pornchai. Gaitok will aim to defend the hotel from the attackers, and succeed in killing a couple of them, but in the chaos, he will also accidentally kill Fabian and Greg, who will wander into the fracas on their personal missions to micromanage and control others. Saxon and Chelsea will go back to England. Rick and Frank will be too hungover to get back to the hotel, and will stay in Bangkok. Mook will be proud of Gaitok and he will get promoted by Sritala. — Louise Yarnall, La Selva Beach
Oh this is easy. Gaitok wins Mook’s heart by identifying Valentin as one of the robbers, securing his place among the detail of bodyguards to arrest the thieves. The hotel owner persuades the girls to invite Valentin and his buddies to a party the night before they are scheduled to leave. The plan is to arrest them there. The security guards include those of the owner’s husband who have arrived to exact revenge on Rick. Meanwhile in another part of the resort, Greg/Gary prepares to flee but tries one last time to persuade Belinda and doubles his offer. She resists, against the wishes of her son. Gary/Greg is desperate and reveals a gun. Meanwhile, at the party Valentin’s buddy seizes Mook as a human shield. It’s a stalemate, and at the moment of highest tension, Fabian intervenes to exchange positions with Mook, saving her. Gaitok tries to take a shot but only grazes Valentin’s shoulder. Greg/Gary is distracted by gunfire that breaks out between Valentin’s gang and the bodyguards. Greg/Gary decides to flee, and on the way out, he is intercepted by Rick, who takes the gun. Rick runs toward the gunfire. He finally has a chance to be a hero, but he misses when he shoots. The Ratliff family, trying to escape the mayhem, takes the bullet. It’s Piper who goes down. Mike: Next season, make it harder! — Alan Farago, L.A.
General predictions
A tsunami arrives. — Liz Wex, Woodland Hills
Those monkeys have had it! They’ve been watching bad human behavior — and we all know the security guard doesn’t keep a good eye on his gun. — Cherie Wasoff, L.A.
Blackpink will show up and save the day. — Jason Lew, L.A.
They were there for six months — enough time to film two seasons. I predict a cliffhanger to be continued in Season 4. — Kurt Beske, Gig Harbor, Wash.
4/5 stars
In It Was Just An Accident, women in Iran can choose to appear and work in public without headscarves, and wear Western-style bridal dresses in the open. Modern bookshops do brisk business, and – perhaps most strikingly – paroled dissidents can rebuild their lives without hassle from the authorities.
In contrast to his previous films, the twice imprisoned Jafar Panahi – who is now allowed to work and travel freely after having his convictions overturned by Iranian courts – seems to have set It Was Just An Accident somewhere in an imagined, brighter future, when authoritarianism and religious dogma have receded into the distance.
As suppressed anguish takes over, however, the film turns into one dark nightmare. Could past traumas be so easily forgotten – and how should those who suffered confront or make peace with their tormentors in a land of relative freedom?
Filmed in Iran without official approval, It Was Just an Accident offers masterfully scripted, highly contemplative drama about the after-effects of political tyranny on the individual.
In between, Panahi has also laced his movie with dollops of jet-black, Beckett-like comedy, with the characters name-checking Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot in one scene.
George Wendt, who will be famous as long as television is remembered as Norm from “Cheers,” died Tuesday. He passed in Los Angeles, where he lived, though the cities to which he is spiritually tied are Boston, where the show was set, and Chicago, where he was born and entered show business by way of Second City, and which he unofficially represented throughout his life, and which claimed him as one of its own. One of his last Facebook posts, earlier this month, as a Chicagoan educated by Jesuits, was, “pope leo XIV is a sout’ sider my friendts. his cassock size is 4XIV.”
Entering stage right, as the assembled cast shouted his name, Norm would launch his heavyset frame across the set to a corner stool where a glass of beer — draft, never bottled — would appear as he arrived. He was the quintessence of Regular Guy, a big friendly dog of a person, with some of the sadness that big, friendly dogs can carry.
“Cheers,” which ran for 11 seasons from 1982 to 1993 — Wendt appeared in every one of its 275 episodes — was a show about going where everybody knows your name but also, as in life and fiction, a place for people who had nowhere better to be, or nowhere else to go. Though Norm was nominally an accountant, and then a house painter, his real job was to sit and fence with John Ratzenberger‘s font-of-bad-information postman Cliff Clavin — they were one of the medium’s great double acts — and drink beer, and then another. His unpaid tab filled a binder. (“I never met a beer I didn’t drink,” quoth Norm, though there was never any suggestion of alcoholism, or even of drunkenness.)
But as a person with work troubles and a marriage that could get the better of him — Wendt’s own wife, Bernadette Birkett, supplied the voice for the off-screen Vera — he was also the vehicle for some of the show’s more dramatic, thoughtful passages. (That his service to the series was essential was borne out by six Emmy nominations.) Unlike some other “Cheers” regulars, there was no caricature in his character. His woes, and his pleasures, were everyday, and he played Norm straight, seriously, without affectation, so that one felt that the Wendt one might meet on the street would not be substantially different from the person onscreen.
Like many actors so completely identified with a part, Wendt, who spent six years with Second City, worked more than one might have imagined; there were dozens of appearances on the small and big screen across the years, including his own short-lived “The George Wendt Show,” which took off on public radio’s “Car Talk.”
After “Cheers,” he’s perhaps most associated with the recurring, Chicago-set “Saturday Night Live” sketch “Bill Swerski’s Superfans.” But he also did theater, including turns on Broadway as Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray,” as Yvan in Yasmina Reza’s “Art” and as Santa in the musical adaptation of “Elf.” There was “Twelve Angry Men,” with Richard Thomas in Washington, D.C., and he was Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman” in Waterloo, Canada. In Bruce Graham’s “Funnyman,” at Chicago’s Northlight Theatre in 2015, he played a comic cast in a serious play, breaking out of typecasting.
We were connected on Facebook, where he regularly liked posts having to do with music and musicians; he was a fan, and sometimes a friend, of alternative and underground groups, and tributes to him from that quarter are quickly appearing. (When asked, he would often cite L.A.’s X, the Blasters and Los Lobos as among his favorites.) One of his own last posts was in memoriam of David Thomas, leader of the avant-garde Pere Ubu, twinned with “kindred spirit” Chicago Bears defensive tackle Steve McMichael, who died the same day.
Once, after he messaged me to compliment an appreciation — like this — I’d written about Tommy Smothers, I took the opportunity to ask, “Do I correctly remember seeing you at Raji’s a million years ago, probably for the Continental Drifters?” Raji’s, legendary within a small circle, was a dive club in a building long since gone on Hollywood Boulevard east of Vine Street; it wasn’t the Roxy, say, or other celebrity-friendly spots around town — or for that matter, anything like “Cheers,” except in that it served as a clubhouse for the regulars.
“Yep,” he replied. “Tough to get out like I used to, but please say hi if you see me around.” Sadly, I never did, and never will.
Director: Eric Aronson
Writer: Eric Aronson
Stars: Paul Guilfoyle, Taylor Gray, Alexandra Templer
Synopsis: To stage a masterpiece of a heist, you need time, friends, and balls. Steve has two of the three
Art thieves are complicated criminals. On the one hand, they seem to have a sense of art history and the value of the medium. On the other hand, they seem nuts because they are taking something that is catalogued and has no other like it on Earth and thus, nearly impossible to move without someone noticing. It takes a certain type of thief to be modestly successful at art theft. Which is not what you think when you meet the crew in Any Day Now.
Writer and director Eric Aronson’s script doesn’t give us much confidence that the crew of art thieves led by Marty (Paul Guilfoyle) could rob a liquor store, much less a guarded museum. At one point, a member of the crew is brought in to intimidate a drug dealer and in a confusing move with a shotgun, seemingly blows his own testicles off. It’s unclear whether it was intentional or not. Much of Aronson’s script evolves that way as we are stuck with point of view character Steve (Taylor Gray), who knows next to nothing about what is happening.
This is both a benefit and a detriment to Aronson’s script. The idea that we’re always on our back foot when it comes to Marty and his schemes is refreshing. This way of revealing things as they become necessary makes sure that the audience shouldn’t be ahead of the action in predicting the outcome of any one plot point. It’s an intriguing way to keep the audience interested.
It’s too bad the other main plot is such a dud. We have seen the lovelorn guy many times before. We’ve seen the girl of his dreams who doesn’t know how he feels and doesn’t understand her own self worth, many times before. We’ve seen the doormat guy who worries about losing his best friend since childhood even though that friend is an incredibly crappy adult. These plot points drag down the more interesting characters and plots.
Marty is a fascinating character. His charm is in his mystery, though, so he never would have worked as the focal character of this film. There is a scene that perfectly encapsulates how he is willing to save Steve from his pushover relationship with friend and roommate Danny (Armando Rivera) while also reminding Steve that he’s a pushover for Marty now. As Steve and Danny’s band play Massachusetts anthem, “Roadrunner” by Johnathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Marty makes his way to the stage and stares down Danny until he gets the microphone from Danny. Marty then begins to croon the Boston standard, “Dirty Water” by The Standells. He gets the band into it and the crowd into it and completely takes over the space that Danny once held in the crowd’s hearts and minds. It’s a scene that evolves the two overbearing relationships in Steve’s life without forcing the issue with unnecessary dialogue.
The scene is all the more rich for Paul Guilfoyle’s bruiser charisma. Guilfoyle has been a character actor for a long time and he can give us all we need to know about a character with only a word and a gesture. His presence is felt in every scene he’s in not because he’s speaking, but because he’s thinking. Marty is always thinking and Guilfoyle makes this plain with every look he gives. It’s a masterfully subtle performance that conveys everything dangerous and enticing about Marty.
For the most part, Any Day Now is an enjoyable film. It’s not the best of heist movies, or relationship dramas for that matter, but it has characters and instances that make it intriguing to watch. It’s hard not to want to know what is going to happen when the mystery is held back so well. It’s worth tracking down for Paul Guilfoyle’s performance and for the intrigue of the heist plot.
Grade: C
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