This article contains spoilers for the season three finale of The White Lotus.

How to describe Rick (Walton Goggins), the dark enigma at the centre of the third season of The White Lotus? He’s cold. Insufferable. He’s a narcissist and navel-gazer: so attached to the trauma of growing up without a father that he remains blinkered to the possibility of actually enjoying his life, so convinced that no one in the history of the world has been dealt worse cards than him. He has won the devotion of the effervescent Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood), but cannot bring himself to offer her a shred of affection in return. All in all, he’s pretty terrible.

But there’s also a quality in him – a quality that Chelsea recognises – which makes you want to forgive him for all his flaws. He’s not straightforwardly an asshole; it’s clear there’s a complex emotional world lurking underneath the icy exterior and garish Hawaiian shirts. He’s still fleetingly capable of tenderness (as in that scene where he’s in bed with Chelsea) and vulnerability (as in his session with Amrita, the hotel’s meditation coach); as a result, he never seems entirely past redemption.

All season, many female viewers have seen Rick just as Chelsea sees him: as a tortured, misunderstood antihero. It’s a popular trope – Rick is arguably just the latest in a long line of male characters who fit this kind of mold. In recent years, troubled TV characters from Succession’s Kendall Roy to The Sopranos’ Christopher Moltisanti have been affectionately dubbed ‘babygirls’ by female fans on the internet; but the ‘emotionally unavailable yet alluring protagonist’ is a much more longstanding archetype, stretching back to Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Darcy, Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff, the eponymous Hamlet, and beyond. 

It’s a character type which many women can’t help but feel drawn to – especially as this is by no means a trope which is confined to fiction (who among us hasn’t wasted precious time pining after a distant, detached man?). These types are often compelling: it’s tempting to regard their withholding dispositions as a sort of challenge to be risen to. Chelsea explicitly feels this way about Rick. “He has this sadness. It really touches me. I want to heal him,” she tells Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) in one episode. 

Wrestling just a crumb of fondness from men like this can often feel like an intense, potent high: in another scene, over breakfast, Rick tells Chelsea he’s reluctant to go to a party hosted on Greg’s boat as he’s anxious not to miss his flight to Bangkok. When he finally acquiesces and agrees to join her on the boat, she’s ecstatic. In the season’s final episode, she is similarly elated to see Rick return from his trip to Bangkok when he comes to find her on the beach. “I missed you,” she gushes, showering him in kisses. “Yeah,” is all he can muster in response.

Many viewers – myself included – have rooted for Chelsea and Rick all season. Like Chelsea, I saw Rick’s potential; like Chelsea, I willed him to “stop worrying about the love you didn’t get [and] think about the love you have”. Show creator Mike White revealed in the White Lotus official podcast that he wanted fans to support Chelsea and Rick too. “I was just like, it’d be interesting to do kind of a stealth move where ultimately you suddenly find yourself really rooting for this couple,” he said. But the finale brutally yanked off the rose-tinted glasses.

Chelsea’s fatalistic prophecy that “if a bad thing happens to you, it happens to me” ultimately comes true: she is fatally wounded in the shootout between Rick and Jim’s (AKA Rick’s father’s) bodyguards. Rick scoops her into his arms after assuring her that she’s going to be OK (still stopping short of telling her he loves her) and attempts to carry her to safety, but moments later Gaitok shoots Rick dead, sending the couple crashing into the water.

The camera lingers on their lifeless bodies: Rick is face-up, Chelsea face-down, one of her arms outstretched above her head. Their positioning evokes the yin-and-yang symbol, no doubt an intentional hark back to an earlier conversation Chelsea has with Saxon about her relationship with Rick: “It’s like we’re in this yin and yang battle, and I’m hope and Rick is pain. Eventually, one of us will win.” Ultimately, of course, it’s Rick who wins.

On first viewing, Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) might have sounded cold and unfeeling when she told Chelsea not to “waste [her] whole life trying to rescue [Rick]”. But in hindsight, this was solid advice. Perhaps this is even one of the morals of the third season of The White Lotus. You can’t save a man from himself. He’s not your child. You can’t fix him. Try at your peril.