We tuned in to find out who died, but the moment in The White Lotus finale that truly killed was Laurie’s monologue on the complexity of female friendship. After a season of triangulating and passive aggression, the trio of ladies we loved to judge sat for their final supper, where two of them pretended the week had been a total dream. While Jaclyn, the smug actress nailed by Michelle Monaghan, compares the tense trip to floating on a cloud, Kate, Leslie Bibb’s Trump-voting Texan belle, contentedly muses that, after years of tending, her metaphorical “garden is in bloom.” But our ever-real and biting Laurie (my new favorite actress, Carrie Coon), a divorced lawyer for whom contentment is much more elusive, is having none of it.
“That’s funny, ’cause if I’m being honest, all week I’ve been so sad,” she says, her voice starting to waver. “I just feel like my expectations were too high, or… I just feel like as you get older, you have to justify your life, you know? And your choices… and when I’m with you guys, it’s just so transparent what my choices were, and my mistakes.”
I’d expected a stinging final indictment from Laurie, a character prone to truth-telling over rosé—calling out her friends for being fake bitches, specifically. Instead, she is brutally honest in a whole new way. She concedes that she has no belief system; that the markers society has sold her, from marriage and motherhood to career success, haven’t brought her any closer to enlightenment. Yet the epiphany she’s had in Thailand—a place so rooted in sprituality—is that it’s time, including the longevity of her friendship with Jaclyn and Kate, that gives her life meaning.
“We started this life together. I mean, we’re going through it apart, but we’re still together, and I look at you guys, and it feels meaningful. And I can’t explain it, but even when we’re just sitting around the pool talking about whatever inane shit, it still feels very fucking deep,” Laurie says, fully breaking down. After sincerely acknowledging Jaclyn’s “beautiful face” and Kate’s “beautiful life,” the things that arguably matter most to each of them, Laurie delivers the most gutting line of all: “I’m just happy to be at the table.”
