The White Lotus Season Two Finale Review

The holiday from hell from beginning to end, who would end up dead was genuinely anyone's guess.

The opening scene introducing the second season of Mike White’s hit HBO show “The White Lotus” highlighted a startled strawberry blonde with striking blue eyes named Daphne (Meghann Fahy) divulging her Sicily tips to fellow resorters before taking a final dip in the ocean as her week in the White Lotus’ Italian resort came to an end, only to discover a dead body floating before her. Chaos erupts and more bodies are detected. The question on everyone's mind? Who's dead?

The White Lotus’s triumphant first season was immersed in class and the clash that followed as the guests slowly unravelled their inner demons.  Basically attractive, rich people being terrible. This season was wrapped up in desire, and some would say shone a light on masculinity. The fact it opens with one of the last scenes, then jumps back to a week before highlights the show's sense of mystery and gives us, the viewers, the chance to come to our own conclusions.

There was no end to who could have ended up face down in the water, the conflicts that arose with these entitled people staying at an all inclusive resort were bizarre, yet entrancing. There was Daphne's husband Cameron (Theo James), the self-obsessed psychopath who came to physical blows with Ethan (Will Sharpe) raging with jealousy over a potential liaison with his wife Harper (Audrey Plaza). Then there was of course Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), the naive heiress in an estranged marriage, who with her assistant Portia (Hayley Lu Richardson) had gotten involved with a bunch of shady Palermo based gay men who appeared determined to steal her riches by any means possible. Not to mention Albie (Adam DiMarco), a fresh college graduate travelling with his father and grandfather who got romantically involved with a local prostitute Lucia (Simona Tabasco) , who unknowingly to him had slept with his father and was being hunted down by a pimp.

The seven episode series wasn’t all thrills and excitement but that is the very nature of the show, the simplicity in White’s depiction of certain people’s reality was captivating. Forget a week away in the Sicilian sun, these people need intensive therapy. 

The finale, not unlike season one, wrapped things up entirely. We see the outer breakdown of an already broken marriage between Harper and Ethan. Plaza’s vulnerability comes through as her character's realisation consumes her. Neither of them truly knows who cheated on who, (Yes, Harper admits she shared a kiss with Cameron, something the majority of us predicted from the first episode but her defensive mannerisms may lead one to conclude something else happened.) Later on in the episode Ethan confides his suspicions to Daphne, who in one of the season's more intuitive moments, shrugs him off with “We never really know what goes on in people’s minds, You spend every second with somebody, and there’s still this part that’s a mystery. . . . It’s kind of sexy.”

And then we come to discover who Daphne finds. Not all that surprising when you think of her character, but it still manages to somehow incorporate that shock element that really sums up ‘The White Lotus’. Once Tanya discovers that the gay men she randomly met in the hotel weren’t all that random, she comes to realise her husband is in on it and it was all an illusive plan to steal her fortune through their prenup. Knowing she was to be killed, she in typical Tanya style beats them to it and opens fire running around the yacht, shooting anything in sight (with her eyes closed). Managing to escape her death sentence, she tells herself “you got this” attempting to climb into the dinghy below in an effort to get back to shore, only to tumble and smack her head on the way down.

The last scene shows the guests minus Tanya at the airport and all seems as it was before their stay at The White Lotus. The only triumphant was Lucia who managed to bag 50 grand from Albie. Being free of the bothersome Americans who believed they had the upper hand makes it difficult not to feel happy for the girl.