Aimee Lou Wood's Chelsea knew from the beginning. 'Bad things come in threes,' she kept parroting to her disengaged, disinterested and disappointing partner Rick (Walton Goggins). Indeed they do; in the finale of the third season of The White Lotus, a trifecta of deaths left jaws slack with shock, something this series has been decidedly short on. Chelsea had also evaded death twice — once with a near-death injury at a robbery and then with a poisonous snake bits — before dying in the crossfire that was meant for Rick.
Chelsea, the most enlightened, spiritually at least, of this season's helter-skelter cohort of guests also whispered to her fate when she explained to Rick in the season finale the Latin concept of 'amor fati', which was popularised by philospher Friedrich Nietzsche, that suggests you have to embrace your fate, good or bad. 'If a bad thing happens to you, it’ll happen to me,' she adds ominously. She believes they’re going to be together forever. Rick says 'that’s the plan.' Oh, Chelsea. We've all been there — well, perhaps not at the lapping shores of a five-star resort before meeting our bloody end — but emotionally with a partner, who leaves a trickle of empty promises in their wake. If there was one thing, besides his receding hairline, that Rick imparted in all of us, it ought to be the dangers of breadcrumbing.
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For those unfamiliar with the term, it's not a reference to trails of Jason's sourdough crumbs, but rather a form of manipulation that, according to Simply Pscyhology, 'refers to a behavior in which one person sends intermittent and often vague messages to keep another person interested or engaged, without any intention of fully committing or entering into a relationship.' The White Lotus' third season was full of Chelsea schooling Rick, as Rick stares vacantly back at her. 'Stop fixating on the love you didn't get and start thinking about the love you have. I'm right here,' she tells him. The trope of their relationship was familiar: a chirpy, larger-than-life girlfriend with a gloomy, grumpy boyfriend riddled with angst, yet where Chelsea was lead astray — much to her detriment — was that she filled in Rick's silences with what she wanted to hear, rather than what he was actually saying, which was nothing.
'Chelsea has this kind of romantic fatalism about their relationship, and you want to buy into it,' The White Lotus creator Mike White explained in the show's official podcast after the season three finale aired. Indeed, she does. Yet if she'd been more attuned to Rick's breadcrumbing — to him not providing her with the validation or affirmation she so blatantly craves — you can't help but feel that she might not have become the victim of his choices, but rather the heroine of her own decisions.
Rick's shortcomings, White explained, were very much intentional. 'Rick has this person who really loves him, and he just can’t experience the love in the present because he is just so fixated on the lack in himself and the lack of love he had in his past,' he said, adding that theirs was 'a classic theme of Greek tragedy: someone killing the thing they love while trying to get some revenge.' Why, oh why, didn't Chelsea protect herself from this man?
Audiences aren't told where Rick and Chelsea met, yet anybody who's experienced dating in the modern world will recognise the glimmers of a digital mismatch in their union. The way Chelsea can never truly see past the veneer that Rick displays, the way she chooses to feast on the breadcrumbs of hope that he gives her, without any actual assertions. She doesn't know her partner, let alone know how he operates. Their ending might have been tragic, White says, but there's a little hint to 'a life beyond.'
'Love transcends this life. Even as they’re wheeled out to the plane together in their symmetrical coffins, their love transcends this in some bittersweet way,' he said. Perhaps Chelsea will meet Rick in the afterlife, after all. 'I like the idea of giving her a lot of prattle that seems like nonsense, but that ultimately, you’re like, "oh, maybe," and at the end, she talks about the groups working divine goal, so, whether I believe all that, it’s nice to have a voice of that because she has this deep sense of belief – amor fati – and that things happen for a reason. Maybe somehow that takes off the edge of the sadness of her death in some way because it feels like she has some kind of higher power to what happens next.'
Yes, we might believe that Chelsea will live on in some way, but any person who's been the recipient of figurative carbohydrate crumbs from a partner will know that she should've been protected from Rick's nonsense in the first place. While fictional, Chelsea's is a cautionary tale, one that people who have a partner who leaves them yearning and wanting more ought to take heed of.
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Naomi May is a seasoned culture journalist and editor with over ten years’ worth of experience in shaping stories and building digital communities. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard, where she worked across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Digital Editor at ELLE Magazine and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others. Naomi is also the host of the ELLE Collective book club.
