Honestly I feel like I’m a bit behind the 8 ball when it comes to whipping this up ~ the finale came out over a week ago (I/the rest of the world have already moved on to new seasons of The Last of Us and Hacks) but that SNL sketch (that was quite cruel to Aimee Lou Wood) has kept the ever-fickle attention of the internet on the series and as some of you know I was literally in the jungle last week (and yes I paid £2.49 to watch the finale the day it came out because my NOW subscription did not work in Colombia and I was terrified that spoilers would somehow find me).
So apologies for the delay and consider this your official spoiler warning (maybe the lag on my part is actually a good thing because most of you will have actually watched it by now). Also if you don’t give a shit about White Lotus that’s fine but we’re getting into some beautiful/tragic/lesser-known mythology with some STUNNING art to illustrate it so read on anyway for the pretty pictures.
I’ve gotta say Rick and Chelsea and their relationship really grew on me. I love how Mike White set them up as this stereotypical age-gap couple where Rick was a bit of a moody asshole and Chelsea was a ditzy little lovebug but god by the end of it I was really rooting for them. The pic above is their unbearably sweet reunion when he comes back from Bangkok (and has managed not to murder anyone).
The TLDR of the finale is this massive shootout goes down (the whole thing with White Lotus is that you’re waiting to figure out who dies because they show an anonymous dead body in the first episode and then the whole series retells the week leading up to it KIND OF LIKE HOW HOMER PLAYS AROUND WITH THE TIMELINE IN THE ODYSSEY but that’s by the by/not the subject of this newsletter). Rick and Chelsea both get shot and die. It’s horrible. Rick shoots this dude who he thinks killed his father. The dude turned out to BE his father. But the security guards who are protecting said dude shoot Chelsea in the process, as she refused to leave his side even when he told her to get lost.
Rick freaks out (it’s truly heartbreaking, especially because he has barely expressed an emotion other than revenge, if that can be classified as an emotion, all season) and gets shot by Gaitok as he carries her body away. So Chelsea is killed because she refused to leave his side and he gets killed because he couldn’t stop himself from avenging his father (really fumbled that one) and he also wouldn’t leave without Chelsea’s body so that slowed down his escape. It’s a real doomed/star-crossed lovers/Romeo and Juliet situation.
But of course I refuse to give Shakespeare all the credit if I can avoid it so please allow me to give you a rather niche mythological frame of reference and introduce Hero and Leander.
Hero was a virgin priestess of Aphrodite who was spotted by Leander at a festival and they promptly fell in love but, as she was a virgin priestess, they had to meet up in secret. Hero lived in Sestos and Leander lived in Abydos, two ancient cities on either side of the Hellespont (now the Dardanelles). Leander would swim across the strait every night, guided by a light from her tower, until one night there was this massive storm that extinguished the light and Leander drowned as he tried to reach her. When Hero came across his body she was devastated and drowned herself.
Now I can HEAR you saying well Hero and Leander don’t get shot and Rick doesn’t commit suicide but this is where the art comes in (also I think you could plausibly argue that Rick has a bit of the death-drive going on). I’m not quite sure why and I’m fully aware that this is far from a 1:1 comparison but when I saw this:
I immediately thought of this:
There’s something about the water, the tragedy, maybe the way both Rick and Hero are looking up at the sky. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. We see doomed lovers in so many iterations in history/art/etc. but Hero and Leander really are a prototypical example.
Even if you don’t buy that comparison, there’s a bunch of other ancient stuff going on in the finale. Chelsea’s character uses a Latin phrase amor fati, “a love of fate,” to describe them when she’s talking to Rick at dinner the night before (in hindsight I should probably have clocked the ending there and then). In an interview with variety, Aimee Lou Wood discusses her character, saying:
“She’s kind of dismissed a few times as being stupid and silly — and she was right. So everyone should have just listened to Chelsea. For me, I think that was Mike giving Chelsea the status of the oracle — that she was correct [because Chelsea kept warning Rick that bad things were going to happen/bad things happen in threes].”
Another article, written by Alyssa Bailey, reveals that Mike White decided to kill Chelsea, a fan-favourite, because of her devotion to Rick. White states:
“It’s a classic theme of Greek tragedy, of somebody killing the thing that they love [while] trying to get some revenge.”
So we’ve got 1) a Latin phrase 2) Chelsea as an oracle that everyone ignores (insert Cassandra, the Trojan priestess with the gift of prophecy who was cursed to never be believed), and 3) Mike White himself bringing up Greek tragedy.
But wait there’s MORE.
Rick is far from the first guy to accidentally kill his dad without knowing he was his dad. Thanks to Freud (ugh) you’ve almost certainly heard of Oedipus, the poor sod who UNKNOWINGLY sleeps with his mother (Freud literally named the Oedipal complex after him which seems QUITE unfair given that when Oedipus realises what he has done he is so horrified he gouges his own eyes out). Oedipus ALSO accidentally kills his father without knowing that’s who he has killed; the whole reason Oedipus gets sent away is because there’s a prophecy that he will kill his dad and sleep with his mum and his parents don’t exactly love the sound of that. He grows up not knowing who his parents are, runs into a random dude at a crossroads, has a punch-on and kills him (turns out he was King Laius aka his father) and marries Jocasta, the queen of Thebes (his mother. Oof).

There’s also a lesser known myth associated with Homer’s Odyssey, the Telegony, which tells us about Telegonus, the child of Odysseus and Circe, who rolls up to Ithaca and immediately starts plundering it. A battle ensues when Odysseus emerges to defend his kingdom and Telegonus stabs him with a poison spear, unknowingly killing his father.
Circling back to White’s quote, we have a BEVY of examples where characters in Greek myth end up killing someone they love in their quest for revenge.
Of course there’s Medea, the powerful, terrifying, scorned woman who murders her own CHILDREN because Jason steps out on her.
Orestes ends up killing his mother Clytemnestra to avenge the fact that SHE killed her husband/his father Agamemnon.
And Agave rips apart her son Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae - Agave isn’t getting revenge here but the god Dionysus certainly is, using Pentheus’ own mother to do it.

To sum up, Greek tragedy is a treasure trove, mythology is a never ending rabbit hole, and you should read Euripides because he will tear your heart to pieces (not literally, he saves that for Pentheus). If that’s not a good enough reason, I hosted an event with Liv Albert last night who informed me/the crowd that Euripides is the only ancient playwright to present a situation where a sexual assault results in PTSD so he really was before his time.
Now I want to know a) did I convince you with the link to Hero and Leander b) are there any myths I’ve missed that flung themselves into your mind when watching the finale c) are there any other shows that are feeling a bit myth-y that you want me to delve into?
Have a glorious rest of your week xxxx
I also felt major greek tragedy vibes watching the rich finance dad find his dead son as he wakes up from a week of diazepam head in the sand denial. Now that I think of it it kind of reminds me of Agave discovering her son’s body in her hands as she comes to from her bacchic revelry. So yeah I think the tragic reversals happen beyond rick and Chelsea! (And I actually think strictly speaking it was crazy that the horrible father who was going to slaughter his family to prevent them from being poor didn’t get some kind of serious comeuppance…but maybe living with his non-dead family is punishment enough).
I will never remember all this, so I hope there's no quiz! This was worth the wait.