The second season of “White Lotus” takes place at an Italian resort.
Courtesy | Wikimedia Commons
The most interesting thing about HBO’s “The White Lotus” was its ability to transform relaxing TV downtime into 50 minutes of stressful, nail-biting cringing — and still bring a viewer back next week for more.
The eccentric theme song will set anyone’s teeth on edge, and after multiple episodes of little action and many inflammatory personalities slowly reaching a boiling point, the finale had a full season of anxiety-inducing social interactions weighing on it. Since the show began by informing the audience that multiple people would die, each scene tried to convince you, “Surely, this person is the one who’s going to die — surely, this person is the one who’s going to snap and kill someone.”
But the finale took a spin on the victim-attacker mindset. In the final twenty minutes, Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) attempts to defend herself, sobbing as she shoots and kills three men. In her subsequent escape attempt, she falls off the edge of the yacht, knocks her head on the getaway boat, and accidentally adds herself to the death tally.
It was hilarious at first — chilling in the next moment, as the music quieted and Coolidge’s bumbling character murdered her creepy pseudo-captors — and then perfectly humorous and bitterly sad when she toppled off the yacht instead of taking the stairs that swaited only a few steps away.
Before men could do her wrong, she turned on them. Yet still, she didn’t win.
Back on the beach, Daphne (Meghann Fahy) and Ethan (Will Sharpe) talk about their spouses’ suspicious behavior. Ethan brings his concerns to Daphne, confiding in her that he worries something happened between Harper (Aubrey Plaza) and Cameron (Theo James) back at the hotel.
A hundred thoughts cross Daphne’s face, shifting from surprise, sadness, resignation, and landing back at her typically breezy, softly smiling expression. She processes the information and draws her conclusion in a moment — strongly implying this isn’t the first time she’s compartmentalized this kind of information.
“I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” she tells Ethan.
She explains to him that he should do what he has to do to make himself feel better. Without ever explicitly addressing what both characters are implying, the camera watches them walk off together. The viewer never gets to find out what happened between them, if anything did, but Daphne’s easy-going nature doesn’t falter again.
She plays her cheating husband at his own game, evidently without his knowledge, and gets to keep maintaining what she likes about her life with him. To fly in the face of his wrongdoings, she does what she pleases. Yet still, Daphne doesn’t truly win.
“The White Lotus” works because of its ability to subvert the viewer’s expectations. Tanya gets the best of her hosts but cries as she does, her genuine and horrifying fear for her life overshadowing the glory of her victory. Not only that, but her untimely death-by-clumsiness means her conniving husband will still inherit her great fortune. His mercenaries hardly had to do a thing: she delivered it into his hands.
Daphne doesn’t cry or seek revenge when she hears her husband has likely been unfaithful. As quickly as her emotions fly up, she tethers them back to the ground. She mimics his behavior in a manner that removes any moral superiority she might have held over Cameron before. At the end of the show, Harper and Ethan are happily entwined at the airport — the mirror image of Cameron and Daphne at the start. The shiny, smiling couple has reproduced, generously adding their toxic behavioral patterns to Harper and Ethan’s already highly dysfunctional relationship.
That’s one thing “The White Lotus” does so well and likely will continue to in the coming seasons. Those dead bodies off-screen in the first episode? It won’t just be the anticipation of the victim that keeps you watching — it’ll be the manner of demise and all the relationships and people that come together and fall apart in the meantime, dancing to an intensely chaotic melody.
