Even though it probably doesn’t need saying, especially since I already gave you a heads-up earlier today, this piece and others like it are absolutely packed with SPOILERS about the final episode of The White Lotus season three. This season, Mike White and his team whisked viewers off to Thailand, where we got a deep dive into fate, privilege and a love story that overcomes tragedy, with both newcomers and returning faces delivering some truly knockout performances.
As critics started forming their opinions on the latest installment of White’s HBO juggernaut the morning after, many also revisited a crucial fruit that, as fans had guessed before the finale, played a major role in the Season 3 finale “Amor Fati.” While the Ratliff family managed to survive the season without any deaths, they nearly met a much darker end after Tim, portrayed by Jason Isaacs, mixed up poisoned piña coladas for everyone (except young Lochlan) to mark their final vacation night.
Tim, as we’ve seen throughout the season, was deeply suicidal after learning about money laundering accusations that threatened to bankrupt his family once they headed back to America. Though a gun initially seemed like Tim’s escape plan, what almost happened instead was his blender-powered use of seeds from a so-called “suicide tree” growing on the resort grounds.
Let’s take a closer look at the real facts about this tree, and what would actually happen if someone drank one of those signature Ratliff piña coladas.
What happened in The White Lotus Season 3 finale?
In short, Tim damn near offed his entire family, save for Lochlan, by serving up a blended concoction of poison. A last-minute change of heart, however, saw the character thinking better of his urges, though any sense of peace was short-lived when he awoke to find that Lochlan had incidentally ingested the poison, leading to a near-death experience that ended up defining the Ratliff family’s time in Thailand and reinvigorating Tim’s sense of purpose.
Are The White Lotus suicide trees real?
Very much so. Cerbera odollam, morę commonly referred to as “the pong-pong tree” or “suicide tree,” is unlikely to be found here in the States. Per a recent WebMD breakdown, the tree is native to India and Singapore and is mostly known for its use as a source of shade and for decorative purposes.
What does the poisonous fruit from The White Lotus do to the body?
While the fruit the tree bears may appear harmless on first glance, the truth is they are anything but. Merely touching the fruit won’t kill you, but ingesting its seeds—as depicted on The White Lotus—boasts a high chance of leading to exactly that. As outlined in a National Library of Medicine-published case report circa 2018, ingesting the seeds “causes disrupted cardiac electrical activity leading to fatal dysrhythmias.” Put another way, eating the seeds causes a potentially fatal reaction in the heart.
Have people actually died from eating the poisonous fruit seen in The White Lotus?
Yes. The aforementioned case study pointed to “hundreds of deaths worldwide,” while an older study cited data showing that the tree was responsible for roughly half of plant poisoning cases in the Kerala, India region. That number is said to jump into the thousands when taking into account Cerbera venenifera, considered a “related species” in Madagascar.
