"How Mad Do You Think Duke Is That They're Out of the Men's Finals AND This"

The White Lotus S3 finale, according to the Hung Up chat. (spoilers)

More from Hung Up this week: Tomorrow at 12 PM I’ll be live on Substack with

Big Salad

’s Joanna Goddard! And Thursday, there will be a chat for the season finale shift of The Pitt.

Parker Posey in The White Lotus. Photo: Screenshot.

It’s wonderful that your mom is always right, except when it’s terrible. Piper Ratliff (Sarah Catherine Hook) insists that her wealthy North Carolina family travel to Thailand to research a thesis she wasn’t assigned. She wants to give up her many suburban luxuries (an iPhone and Ciao Lucia dresses) for a Buddhist meditation center she thinks will give her life direction. Is she passionate or just pithy? Piper’s main enthusiasm seems to lie in acting opposite of her brothers; she’s zen by way of a big Free People order.

Victoria (Parker Posey, ever-excellent), Piper’s mother, knows this. She scoffs at the suggestion that her daughter is following any type of calling, let alone one to “Taiwan.” “You can be interested in this stuff, but you can never really be it. It’s an entirely different world,” she tells her daughter. “My parents were Christians. Your parents are Christians.” It sounds out of touch in the moment and falls upon her daughter’s deaf ears. By the White Lotus season three finale on Sunday, it was a thesis: Piper tears up telling her family that she won’t be staying at the meditation center as she’d said. “The food... I mean, it was vegetarian, but you could tell that it wasn’t organic. It was just kind of bland. I was like, ‘Could I really eat this for a whole year?’” She begins by way of explanation. “And then I went back to my room, and it was this tiny little box with a mattress with stains on it and no air-conditioning.” She knows she shouldn’t be attached to those things, Piper says. “But, I don’t know, I think I am.” Tears stream down her face. “I know I am.”

Acting is reacting; Posey’s face is the performance of the show. She cycles, almost imperceptibly, from disgust to smugness to love. Her world adheres to a specific order that her daughter submits to. There will be no meditation center, no Buddhism, no wherever-the-hell-they-are (to be clear, Thailand). Her daughter is as rebellious as a suburban mall’s Hot Topic. Victoria was right, and they all go home.

Otherwise, the finale left me ambivalent. I’m not opposed to the melodrama of one father almost killing his son as another son kills his father, but the spread of those stories across these eight episodes started to feel thin. (I would’ve liked more of Timothy embarrassingly trying to connect to a teen son who is mystified him. That we don’t really know our parents and maybe can never really know our parents was a really wonderful shade of season one.) Happiest for Belinda and Giatok who both got what they wanted (better jobs). Zion … well I love a dumb jock!

I also loved the dread of Checkov’s blender … near-death by way of a man not washing a dish! Chelsea and Rick were a bit too sentimental to me. I didn’t care for their cover of “II Most Wanted!” The Rick’s dad reveal was not a surprise, but the cruelty of “You didn’t miss out on much” shook the table for me. How are you going to confront me with my father wound at a buffet? I am endlessly curious about why Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood no longer follow one another on IG…

The Hung Up chat about the White Lotus finale was paywalled. Here are some highlights! You know what … I’m thinking that you should upgrade your subscription now so you don’t miss the paywalled chat for the Pitt season finale shift.