By: Karen Joy Pangantihon
Cinephiles Club
The season finale of THE WHITE LOTUS premiered on April 6, 2025, killing off many characters, including the lovers Rick and fan favorite Chelsea.
Upon watching this season I was going through a breakup and heartbreak in a situation with a man I’ve had a relationship with for 9 years. You could say I was somewhat triggered by witnessing this couple which mirrored many similarities to my experience with my guy.
Let’s call my guy Dick, and I’m Kelsey. Dick, like Rick, was significantly older than Kelsey, a secretive, elusive Scorpio, and like Chelsea, Kelsey just worshipped the ground Dick walked on. Kelsey was drawn to the appeal of dating an older man, and dating an older man that had emotional baggage. Kelsey found it sexy that Dick was older, but also endearing that he was like a 50 year old man baby that needed to be saved and cared for.
"He’s like my child”, Chelsea says to friend Chloe.
“He’s 50.”- Chloe
Chelsea couldn’t enjoy her vacation because she was too consumed with worrying about Rick. To be fair, she had every right to be worried. She knew her man wanted to kill this stranger who he believed to have killed his father.
Kelsey was reminded by seeing Chelsea be consumed with thoughts of Rick during that Full Moon party, Chloe’s houseparty, and was even closed off to a possible connection with Saxton, and she too knew the feeling all too well of, quite frankly, spending her youth dedicated to Dick. She recognized the behavior of not living in the moment or living her life because she had made Dick her everything.
Kelsey, like Chelsea, was a romantic. She trusted the universe. She believed that the Universe would support her love for Dick. Kelsey loved Dick, and would’ve followed him to the gates of Hell, if it meant that she could play the role of the light to the darkness that was the unhealed man she longed to break, and fought to heal.
Stop worrying about the love you didn’t get, think about the love you have now.”
-Chelsea to Rick moments before they both meet their fatal together forever.
“I was never too worried, because amor fati. It means you have to embrace your fate, good or bad...Whatever will be will be.''
-Chelsea to Rick
What about accountability? Instead of love of fate, what about love of self? What if Chelsea wasn’t determined to love Rick in the way Rick was consumed with the lack of love of a father figure?
This is not to discount the hard truth that in my experience a toxic situation is not only based on the baggage of one party. And yes, people can and do change. But Chelsea and Rick showed me that we love who we love at times because we are constantly searching for something outside of ourselves, we believe that that person and love can free us and give our life purpose.
But what if we let go and let the universe do some of the work for us? What if we let go of the idea of trying to fix people who we claim to love, instead of suffocating them and just let them be?We are constantly holding on to people and relations because we are more terrified to experience ourselves and our life without them, which is the great unknown.
Chelsea is one of my favorite characters so far from all the seasons of ‘The White Lotus’, not only because Amie Lou Wood is so charming and loveable, but because I saw so much of myself in her, in that I can relate to the wounds of loving an emotionally unavailable man, that you think you can change him, or even save him. To lead with love with the doctrine that there’s something quite romantic in the self sacrifice for the unhealed man, even with the blatant imbalance of energies of one person giving while the other takes.
It was a poetic tragedy for Rick and Chelsea, and a stark reminder to me that loving a unhealed man to the point of self sacrifice can kill you.
