White Lotus

After weeks of fervent speculation and close examination of costumes and props, viewers finally got their answer.

[wild theories about bloody endings](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/12/who-will-die-in-the-white-lotus-season-2-finale) (Cameron and Ethan jet ski accident? But even though The White Lotus isn’t about death, it was about Jennifer Coolidge—and with a [third season officially coming](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/12/the-white-lotus-season-3-everything-we-know-so-far), it’s time to start reimagining exactly what that might look like. White has been frank that the dead body conspicuously placed at the beginning of each White Lotus season is a tool for luring in audiences. The rich and privileged are, once again, escaping with all their privileges intact, and the spirit of Tanya lives on in Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), who escaped whatever role was intended for her in the murder plot and wears a very Tanya-worthy head scarf for her flight home. The season ends, just as the first one did, with all the major players in the airport and on their way home. The body count began on Quentin’s yacht, where Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) sussed out what viewers had suspected: those gays, as she told the boat captain, were trying to kill her.

Mike White's HBO show offers a few answers and a whole lot of questions in the Season 2 finale.

Nonetheless, “The White Lotus” remains something of a triumph. He eventually convinces Dominic Di Grasso (Michael Imperioli), calling it a “karmic payment” to make up for all his dad’s ills and by promising to try to urge his mother to take him back. The character of Tanya already strained credulity to some degree, such as when she finds a photo of Greg in Quentin’s home and allows herself to be convinced it’s actually of an acid-dropping cowboy fisherman named Steve. Earlier in the season Cameron has sex with a prostitute, while he and Ethan are having a guy’s night out. He and his band of art-loving friends weren’t the rich world travelers they claimed to be. In lesser hands, the dead bodies might feel like a cynical carrot leading the viewer to the final episode.

The seventh and final episode of the HBO Max series was a masterclass of social commentary, witty writing and gorgeous shots from writer/director Mike White. It ...

It was a super satisfying end to an even better season of the genius show, Italy's fountains and volcanoes erupting in perfect climax. Best friends Lucia and Mia swirl down the cobblestone streets Elena Ferrante-style, basking in the glow of their accomplishments. Resting in each other's arms at the airport, they look a picture of peace and solidarity. This is all after Ethan and Cameron have their inevitable showdown in the sea, but maybe it would have been too obvious and extreme if one or both of them died. In a truly frightening sequence, a shaking Tanya loses Portia on the phone, and has to face a boatful of people who want to kill her. Seizing her one opportunity to save herself, Tanya brazenly grabs her killer's duffle bag and locks herself in a room.

The second season finale of HBO's acclaimed Sicily-set series gave us tearful confessions, scams, and several dead bodies. All hail Aubrey Plaza.

That series creator Mike White managed to not only cook up a second season of The White Lotus a year and a half after the first one premiered, but have it surpass the first, tackling more complex topics like desire, intimacy and fidelity with grace and a surfeit of style, is a testament to his ingenuity. Just when you think she’s made it to safety, however, she slips off the railing, hits her head on the side of the dinghy, and slowly sinks to the bottom of the ocean. The former is slowly, painfully piecing together that Quentin and her estranged hubby Greg (Jon Gries) are after her fortune as she once again observes their framed Brokeback Mountain-esque photo. Portia, meanwhile, is slowly, painfully piecing together the fact that her weepy Essex lover Jack (Leo Woodall) is nothing more than Quentin’s rent-boy henchman. [Mike White](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/mike-white/)’s series this season has been Ethan’s refusal to bed [Aubrey Plaza](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/aubrey-plaza/)’s looks-serving vixen. [Michael Imperioli](https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/michael-imperioli-sopranos-emmy-scorsese-first-time-1266650/)) transfer him 50,000 Euros—“a karmic payment… [Jennifer Coolidge](https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/jennifer-coolidge-white-lotus-interview-1234622497/)) and Portia ( [Haley Lu Richardson](https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/haley-lu-richardson-first-time-video-1076695/)). It appears that this chaotic trip, and the intervention of Cameron and Daphne, has helped these two more than they’d like to admit. Her admission leads Ethan to attack Cameron, airing out years of frustration with a sharp right hook, and confide in Daphne (Meghann Fahy). That scholarly revelation is perhaps the least surprising one in the [HBO](https://www.rollingstone.com/t/hbo/) limited series’ nerve-wracking finale, which saw not two, but four of these miserable rich bastards wind up dead. One of the more implausible parts of It was a drunk, dumb nothing!” she exclaims, adding, “And the real issue is, you’re not attracted to me anyway!”

"The White Lotus" just wrapped up its second season, but creator Mike White already has his eyes set on Season 3.

White continued, “I was thinking, it’d be so fun to bring Tanya back because she’s such a great character, but maybe that’s the journey for her, a journey to death. “The first season kind of highlighted money, and then the second season is sex,” White said. And she says, ‘I’ve had every kind of treatment over the years, death is the last immersive experience I haven’t tried.'”

In 'The White Lotus' season two finale 'Arrivederci', we learn who was dead in the water, and the answer uses Mike White's favorite symbolic image to ...

And why else would Niccolo be taking her back to shore with a bag full of rope, duct tape, and a gun? She’s different from a character like Daphne, who sees the storm and swims parallel to it, charting her own path through the chaos. [Mysterious Monkeys](https://www.vulture.com/article/the-white-lotus-episode-3-recap-mysterious-monkeys.html),” she is hysterically upset — her face frozen in a mask of agony and resentment. In The White Lotus, there’s something comforting about our personal irrelevance in tension with other people’s choices, Daphne seems to say, because it gives us freedom to decide for ourselves how we act and react. [95 percent of it](https://oceanliteracy.unesco.org/ocean-exploration) that remains uncharted and unexplored by humans, entire ecosystems in which we have no part. One of the final scenes of “Departures” is Quinn on a Hawaiian-style outrigger boat paddling far away from the shore (and his old life) and moving toward the sun and something new. Those opening-scene deaths signaled a different approach: Gone was an aquatic environment as restorative or welcoming, and in its place was the ocean as mysterious and impenetrable — not too far off from what Daphne says to Ethan about marriage in “Arrivederci.” When Daphne observes, “We never really know what goes on in people’s minds or what they do … Water is a well-established symbol of rebirth in art and literature, and White has recurrently evoked that meaning in his own work with additional layers of fantasy and surreality. [Arrivederci](https://www.vulture.com/article/the-white-lotus-season-2-finale-recap-arrivederci.html),” it is returning White Lotus guest Tanya who is found drowned, marked for death by her frilly, pink, floral dress — so similar to the one worn by the dummy version of Michael Corleone’s first wife, Apollonia, at The Godfather tourist attraction visited by Portia. The first time she tries to scatter her mother’s ashes while on a chartered boat in “ And at the end of “ [The White Lotus](https://www.vulture.com/tv/the-white-lotus), Mike White has made us wonder: Who’s in the water?

Speculation on where The White Lotus season 3 will be set has begun online, with fans wanting a ski lodge season. Mike White wants to look at Eastern ...

[TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRVhjvJt/) is [awash](https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRVh2CJ1/) with The White Lotus ski lodge dream casts. “I think the third season, it would be maybe a kind of satirical and funny look at death in Eastern religion and spirituality, it feels like it could be a rich tapestry to do another round at White Lotus.” So are we looking at Asia? puts Carmen Sandiego behind bars figures out where Mike White is setting The White Lotus season 3 will get a free trip anywhere in the lower 48 states!

Will cocaine-addled Tanya's (Jennifer Coolidge) raunchy dalliance with an Adonis come at a price? Does Cameron (Theo James) want his green-eyed tech bro ...

This documentary captures the high-end version of this pressure-cooker atmosphere as the swanky London hotel prepares a Christmas Day tasting menu and summons a 13-year-old opera singer. For the hospitality industry, Christmas 2021 was do or die – after the cancelled festivities of 2020, pubs, hotels and restaurants badly needed a shot in the arm. And will hotel manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore) run wild with lust after spending the night with a woman for the first time?

This story contains spoilers for the Season Two finale of The White Lotus. Please give Chef White my compliments. Few people can successfully run back an ...

Here's what he said in the after-episode interview: "I think as far as like, what happens to Greg and the conspiracy of Tanya's death, it's possible that I think Portia is scared enough to just leave it alone, but the fact that all of those guys die on the boat, it feels like there's gotta be somebody who's gonna track it back down to Greg. In his post-episode interview, White nods toward the camp of critics who long speculated that Harper and Ethan would need to introduce a level jealousy to their relationship to keep it alive, just as Cameron and Daphne do. Her legs smack against the railing of the boat—not her head. A strong contender for Esquire's MVP of the finale. After Albie rebranded to Mark (get it?), Dominic caved to his son in the name of fixing his long-broken marriage, and Bert is just kinda horny. And this is the obvious big one leaving the finale: what the hell happened between Daphne and Ethan on the island? (More on that later.) We see that Tanya is the body Daphne finds in the water. Portia confronts Jack, who so kindly dumps her on the side of the road in the middle of the night. Trying to escape to a getaway boat, Tanya falls into the water—to her death. Jetting to Sicily this time around, White slowed down the pace of the series to the sludge of lava working its way down the side of Mt. The plan: have Jack whisk Portia away on a Sicilian adventure, get Tanya on a boat headed back to Taormina, kill Tanya. We saw how Lucia wins; we said goodbye to our beloved Tanya; and we watched Ethan and Harper go down as some of the few guests of a White Lotus property to leave in better shape than they arrived.

Another installment of the buzzed-about HBO anthology is coming, but who are the new crop of islanders and where could they be heading next?

[Entertainment Weekly](https://ew.com/tv/the-white-lotus-season-2-preview-mike-white-aubrey-plaza-theo-james/) that he originally centered season two around politics and power, rather than sex and relationships. But [Jennifer Coolidge](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/07/jennifer-coolidge-the-white-lotus-interview), returning from the Emmy-winning first season, had another standout showing—the question of whether she could she reprise the role of Tanya again, however, was [answered in the season 2 finale](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/12/white-lotus-season-2-who-dies). What will [the credits sound like](https://www.vanityfair.com/preview/articles/63936881081d9a38b8646aa3?status=draft&t=1670605153247)? So I need to figure out how to unplug and refresh or something.” May we suggest…a vacation? And will the guests venture beyond the resort [to eat](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/12/the-rich-people-on-the-white-lotus-have-terrible-dining-habits)? “I don’t have a lot of gas in the tank. “I need to reboot a little bit,” White told Couric A piece of casting didn’t work in the second season and we’re hoping to [do] that in the third season. “I felt like it should be more focused on men and women and relationships and adultery and have an operatic feel to it, so I pivoted.” Still, the writer-director maintains he could still do his initial idea “down the road maybe, if they give us a third season.” [twist-filled second season of The White Lotus](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/11/the-white-lotus-season-2-easter-eggs) (and shocking answers to the question of [who dies](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/12/who-will-die-in-the-white-lotus-season-2-finale)) yet another edition of [Mike White’s anthology series](https://www.vanityfair.com/style/photos/2022/11/white-lotus-gift-guide-2022) is on the itinerary. “He wanted me to be in the second season, and there was an idea that I loved for the character,” she told I have to beg off to be honest because I don't really know.”

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers up through Episode 7 of “The White Lotus,” airing Sundays on HBO and streaming on HBO Max.

White continued, “I was thinking, it’d be so fun to bring Tanya back because she’s such a great character, but maybe that’s the journey for her, a journey to death. “The first season kind of highlighted money, and then the second season is sex,” White said. And she says, ‘I’ve had every kind of treatment over the years, death is the last immersive experience I haven’t tried.'”

Ben Lee Made a White Lotus theme song/Megan Thee Stallion “Thot Shit” Mashup, because tonight is the finale, and we demand body-ody-odies.

And Albie would respectfully muse on the sex-positive feminism of Meg. But do you have a sun-room DJ setup to help process those feelings of excitement? We don’t know who’s going to die, but we can guess who would vibe with this mashup.

Which would've made it tough for Quentin to get Tanya alone on a yacht with a bag containing half the murder weapons from Clue. Adam DiMarco and Haley ...

Maybe season 3 can take place at the White Lotus in purgatory?) But would we want to keep coming back if The White Lotus didn’t manage to shock us every time? Like Cam and Daphne and Ethan and Harper, the show needs an element of uncertainty to keep the spark alive. [White Lotus season 2](https://time.com/6223583/the-white-lotus-season-2-review/) finale, when he runs into Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) at the airport on their way out of Italy. Jealous Ethan (Will Sharpe) and exasperated Harper ( Not only does he inherit Tanya’s hundreds of millions, but he doesn’t even have to share them with Quentin and company. The latter couple is no worse for the wear because their marriage has always been a farce. That’s not to say there aren’t characters who come out of the season better off than they were going into it. Just about everyone got scammed, from Tanya and Portia and the Di Grassos to Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore), who’s crushed again when newly hired lounge singer Mia (Beatrice Grannò) confirms their obviously transactional relationship as such, to the two young couples constantly performing romance and jealousy for each other’s benefit. Now that his feminist facade has been shattered by a genuine gold digger, he’s ogling hot girls at the airport right along with his dad and grandpa. He might never have let Lucia (Simona Tabasco) con him—or his father Dominic (Michael Imperioli), the original mark—into giving her €50,000. Sebastian](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/the-white-lotus-artwork), that creepy fresco from the title sequence, those macabre Testa di Moro statues peeking out from every corner—they were all watching the guests’ every misguided move. Even though she’s yet to have her worst fears about Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) confirmed, it’s an understatement for the ages.

The White Lotus has blossomed into a truly massive hit for HBO, as gripping each week as any episode of Game of Thrones ever was, and now after last night?

While we have no direct link between them and Greg, I do wonder if there is literally some sort of evil Legion of Doom being built behind the scenes of The White Lotus with Greg at the apex, which does not seem like such a wild theory after last night. Also, we still don’t know who Greg was talking to on the phone, saying he loved them. Portia, however, was the wrench thrown into the plan, as you’ll recall Greg was agitated that he brought her assistant along. But we do know he’s either somewhat wealthy himself or has wealthy-appearing friends, given his past relationship with Quentin, which was revealed in the past two episodes. These friends, in theory, could have been the group of gays from season 2. In season 1, Greg says he’s in Hawaii on a fishing trip with friends, rich friends, you would imagine, if they can afford to go fishing in Hawaii.

Though his character Christopher Moltisani died a few episodes before the finale, producer David Chase told the actor how it would all end, that it would just ...

When Imperioli and I spoke in November, he was preparing to go the next day to the funeral for Abraham’s wife of 60 years who died earlier that month. “Maybe it's good because it keeps you honest and keeps you from phoning it in because you still have a drive to be good.” [a new series](https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/michael-imperioli-alec-berg-hbo-1234898249/) with [Barry](https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a40322202/barry-season-4/) and [Curb Your Enthusiasm](https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a30731009/curb-your-enthusiasm-better-with-larry-david-ex-wife-cheryl/) writer Alec Berg for HBO—they just got back notes on their second draft and he hopes the momentum of White Lotus will help move it along. The practices helped and the cast became close—particularly Imperioli and Abraham, who often went out to dinner with Imperioli and his wife during filming. Imperioli was in his early 30s when he was cast as Christopher Moltisani, the pugnacious nephew figure to mafia boss Tony Soprano; the actor is 56 now and his signature coiffed hair is silver, but he is recognized for that role more than ever thanks to a new generation [he first season of ](https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a36973013/white-lotus-hbo-review/) [White Lotus](https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a36973013/white-lotus-hbo-review/), which was an instant sensation in 2021—until his manager insisted he binge it after seeing the actor’s first attempt at his audition tape. “I needed to find someone who is a great actor and grounded, credible, and honest, and, at the same time, likable to men and to women, who is somebody that you're gonna want to be in his company, even though you know these things about him. “I don’t get why people want to know—why they want to have you spoil the whole thing,” he says with a shrug. “I tend to take a while before I look at stuff that I do know, like maybe a long time,” he says. But at the same time, I think what [writer and director] Mike [White] is saying is that you can't deny sexual attraction, but that doesn't mean you have to act on it all the time. He was privy to the end of the most talked-about, most polarizing finale in television history: [The Sopranos](https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a38145579/sopranos-ending-tony-fate-explained-david-chase-interview/). [the finale of The White Lotus](https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/a42166307/white-lotus-season-2-finale-theories-killer-predictions/) and Imperioli will absolutely not budge, no matter how I try to coax him, into giving me a clue about who ends up dead in the final episode.

The White Lotus season 3 creator Mike White plans to plant his next resort further east.

In the same interview Jake Lacy, who played a raging newlywed irked by his suite status, said that he and White had batted back and forth ideas about future Lotus episodes. In a clip unpacking the explosive and surprising season finale, he revealed his thought process behind the decision in a post-finale featurette for [HBO](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/the-idol-hbo-trailer). Our intention is to do it in the third season. A piece of casting didn’t work in the second season and we’re hoping to [do] that in the third season. [season one](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/white-lotus-review) jetted us to Hawaii, and [season two](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/the-white-lotus-season-2) planted us amongst the storied palazzos of Italy, White thinks heading even further east could be the resort's next expansion. A third season has officially been confirmed by HBO, and creator Mike White has given some hints about where his next luxury resort could be planted, as well as what themes the series will address.

After weeks of fervent speculation and close examination of costumes and props, The White Lotus season 2 viewers finally got their answer.

But even though The White Lotus isn’t about death, it was about Jennifer Coolidge—and with a [third season officially coming](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/12/the-white-lotus-season-3-everything-we-know-so-far), it’s time to start reimagining exactly what that might look like. White has been frank that the dead body conspicuously placed at the beginning of each White Lotus season is a tool for luring in audiences. [wild theories about bloody endings](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/12/who-will-die-in-the-white-lotus-season-2-finale) (Cameron and Ethan jet ski accident? The rich and privileged are, once again, escaping with all their privileges intact, and the spirit of Tanya lives on in Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), who escaped whatever role was intended for her in the murder plot and wears a very Tanya-worthy head scarf for her flight home. The season ends, just as the first one did, with all the major players in the airport and on their way home. The body count began on Quentin’s yacht, where Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) sussed out what viewers had suspected: those gays, as she told the boat captain, were trying to kill her.

Another edition of the much-anticipated HBO anthology is on the way, but who are the new islanders, and where may they go next?

[HBO](/topic/hbo)original series. [Eastern](/topic/eastern)religion and spirituality. [Will Sharpe](/topic/will-sharpe), Adam DiMarco, Haley Lu Richardson, and a slew of other disturbing males.

Creating a season finale for an anthology is often a lot more difficult than for a serial. The last episode of an anthology resembles the makings of a series ...

There is one item that requires no interpreting, though: The White Lotus is a hell of a ride, and we can’t wait for the next group of rich misfits to arrive at the hotel chain! We can see from a mile away that everyone involved is being played like a piano by Lucia, and it’s great to see someone outside of the elites get a win in this show. Jack won’t confirm Portia’s suspicions or let on what he was going to do to her, but he has the decency to let her go on her merry way, advising her to skip a reunion with her now-dead boss and go straight to the airport. One storyline that was quite a bit more blunt in its approach, but still wasn’t completely resolved, is that of Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) and Quentin (Tom Hollander). Her penchant for vengeance leads to what we can assume is the two of them hiding under the Italian sun, getting it on without the knowledge of their spouses ever becoming tangible. Series creator Mike White went with the latter choice for most of his characters in the second season of his hit dramedy.

Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) met her watery demise in the season finale, as did practically a full yacht's worth of conspiring gay men. As episode six hinted at, ...

But here, all along, Daphne defied the odds and found a way. Upward mobility isn’t usually rewarded in The White Lotus, as we saw with Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) from season one, and Quentin and his cohort this year. [ biggest shift this season](https://www.vox.com/culture/23425402/white-lotus-review-credits-explained-murder) was how The White Lotus transitioned from feeling like a show about unaware and unchecked privilege with a little murder mystery hanging over it, to murder mystery with a bit of unaware and unchecked privilege on the side. When we first meet her on the beach chatting up the two women on vacation, there’s a sense that she’s kind of a rich dumb-dumb. When she tells Daphne as much as she can without spelling out all the details, Daphne doesn’t even flinch. When Cameron and Daphne tell her they don’t read or watch the news, she’s shocked at their incuriosity about the world. Knowing that his college roommate at the very least kissed his wife, Ethan tackles Cameron (Theo James) in the ocean and punches him in the face. (No, I am not making this up.) Tanya Wick just has to make it to the attached dinghy, but instead of taking the stairs, she decides to jump — whacking her head on the side of the boat and drowning. We never find out what exactly that relationship is, but Tanya — after a frantic call from the subtly abducted Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) — believes that Quentin and his crew were in cahoots with Greg to kill her and cash in an inheritance. And as a result of accidentally drugging the resident pianist, Mia convinces hotel manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore) to fire him. Tanya is convinced Niccolò and the gays are going to kill her (“These gays are trying to kill me,” she whisper-hisses, perfectly). And speaking of sex workers, Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Grannò) got a real happily ever after.

It also reminded us that not all subplots are created equal, and that the sophomore season of Mike White's hit show was destined to run out of steam.

But even a memorably violent and sexy finale can’t entirely cover for the rest of the season’s flaws. Quentin and two of his friends die, and while Greg may inherit Tanya’s fortune, the manner in which she died was messy enough to warrant a further investigation than if the killing had gone as planned. Murray Abraham) proudly talks about how the family’s “Achilles Heel is an Achilles Cock.” Dom (Michael Imperioli) again tries to recommit to his wife, but can’t stop himself from gawking at a younger woman at the airport. It remained a highlight in the finale, creating more questions than answers, but in a way that perfectly fit the themes of that subplot about the compromises that go into any relationship, even when you’re impossibly rich. And Daphne and Cameron’s unspoken agreements about their marriage — coupled with hints of pure sociopathy from Cameron — allow them to power through infidelities, brawls in the Ionian Sea, and whatever other bumps they hit. Do a murder-for-hire plot and a burst of gun violence entirely fit the tone of this show? But as a set piece, it was bravura in a way that much of this Sicilian jaunt had proven to be before now — simultaneously a thriller parody and the genuine article. Though Dern had cameoed in this season as the voice of Dom’s wife on the phone, when we see him in the finale looking at an image of the whole family, his wife looks nothing like Dern. (Or, at least, it made us understand them.) In a similar fashion, this whole set-up, where Quentin (Tom Hollander) and his pals are planning to murder Tanya on behalf of her garbage husband Greg as a way around his prenup, is kind of ridiculous. Though both finales featured the death of a central character — last year it was Armond the contempt-filled resort manager, this time it’s Tanya the narcissistic heiress — and the bloody end of Jennifer Coolidge’s character was played much more for suspense than the Lotus employee’s excremental escapade in the Pineapple Suite. Once “Departures” had revealed her apparent depths as affectations to be cast aside along with the people she uses, there was simply nothing more to be said about her as a character. If anything, it sent her out as even more of a joke, since she dies of a head injury after foolishly trying to jump from Quentin’s yacht onto a dinghy, rather than looking for the ladder or stairs(*).

"The White Lotus" has finally revealed which characters die in the finale, and Tanya doesn't go down without a fight.

Albie swiftly transferred the funds to Lucia (Simona Tabasco), a local sex worker he caught feelings for and was worried she was in danger from another local after he followed them on a trip to explore their family's heritage. “The first season kind of highlighted money, and then the second season is sex,” White said. The next day, Daphne (Meghann Fahy) is the one to find her body in the water, just as depicted in the first episode. She locks herself inside of a bedroom on the yacht, and grabs the gun out of the bag in tears. She miscalculates the jump, and bangs her head against the side of the boat before falling into the Ionian Sea. “It is somewhat of a happy ending although there’s dark clouds on the horizon too.” At the same time, there’s some time that isn’t really accounted for and I think that’s why it’s eating at Ethan,” White said. Quentin begins knocking on the door, and eventually breaks it down. Tanya begins to fear for her life, and the anxiety increases as the vessel slowly makes its way back to Taormina. Meanwhile, Tanya's assistant, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), cannot find her phone in her hotel room, despite plugging it in to charge the night before. Episode Seven, the Season Two finale, begins the morning after a wild night for Tanya partying at a palazzo in Palermo. She asks for more wine to delay the end of dinner, before she runs to the bathroom and grabs Niccolo’s bag.

The British actor dishes on the thrilling finale of HBO's anthology satire, Cameron's fetish for “dominating” Ethan, and why that kid may not be his.

That’s how he operates in the world, in his work, and how he tries to operate in his marriage. You got a taste of fame early on in your career with the Divergent series, but then that underperformed and fizzled out. Cameron and Daphne are deeply in love but there’s an open element to their relationship, and that may work for them, and who are we to judge that? We got some dinners and drinks because Ethan and Cameron are supposed to be old friends, and Cameron and Meghann have to be in love and have an ease about them. He wants to isolate Ethan and control Ethan, and one of the best ways he can is to try to manipulate his wife sexually. It’s gently touched upon—the suggestion that perhaps the coloring of the second child is completely different from Cameron’s and identical to that of the trainer. With Will and with Meghann, over the first few weeks I was trying to pack in as much time to get to know each other as possible. He wants to dominate him, he wants to control him, and he wants to win. The way he handles Ethan, his wife, the people around them—he physically holds them and is dominant in conversations—but in the end, it’s an emotional manipulation with the gaslighting. Daphne’s ultimate manipulation of that is a commentary on that type of masculinity being defunct because Cameron loses in the end. He loves his wife wholeheartedly, but he’s also so privileged and toxic that he thinks he should be allowed to do these things because of how successful he is. Their Four Seasons Taormina getaway ends with the most awkward of dinners wherein Cameron rubs everyone’s noses in his misdeeds one last time, toasting, “And Harper, it has been fantastic to finally get to know you properly.”

Theo James on what he thinks really happened between Cameron and Harper in season two of 'The White Lotus' and whether his children with Daphne are actually ...

There are videos making the rounds of you all dancing behind the scenes and generally having a good time. We wanted to make you think, Is it just a combination of Ethan’s paranoia and jealousy? But then I even forgot about the yogurt, so when you just said that, I was like, Jesus Christ, he’s unapologetically such a bad person. That’s why we ultimately wanted that fight to come from a place where Cameron gets confronted and is like, No, what the fuck? They’ve evolved away from each other as friends and now have basically polar opposite visions of the world in front of them. I haven’t seen the episode yet, but Cameron doesn’t give a shit. We did that scene toward the end of the shoot, and we did different versions. He does love his friend, even though he’s competitive with him and wants to dominate him, and he does love his wife. He’s trying to own his friend and own his wife in a search for control. Is that why Cameron was pushing Ethan to get with Mia and Lucia? Although Cameron has elements of being controlling and domineering, he is also loving in his own way, which, for me, made him compelling. “When you do a character, you have to find some way to identify with them,” he tells Vulture.

In an interview with NPR's Fresh Air last week, the writer and director Mike White suggested that his hit HBO series The White Lotus had less in common with ...

The impulse to follow in the footsteps of high-status people, emulating their experiences and then, by sharing, being emulated in turn? Week by week, The White Lotus achieved what only HBO series, [Taylor Swift ](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/10/taylor-swift-midnights-album-review/671811/) [album drops](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/10/taylor-swift-midnights-album-review/671811/), and Florence Pugh’s Instagram seem to be able to manage these days: taking over the discourse and leaving very few unsatisfied. (Even Mia and Lucia walked down a busy shopping street arm in arm, jubilant in floral dresses, waving at the notably nonviolent Alessio, just as they had in the first episode.) Meanwhile, Jack, the muscle-bound Essex boy charged with distracting (and possibly doing away with) Portia while Tanya was being dealt with, dropped her on an empty street by the airport instead, his COCK baseball cap seeming to linger unnervingly in one’s memory like the Cheshire Cat’s smile. [Season 2](https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/10/white-lotus-season-2-review/671938/), including the questions of why Lucia and Mia, the sex worker and the wannabe pianist, seemed physically stuck at the hotel, sleeping on sun loungers instead of going home; why every guest at the White Lotus went to Sicily—Sicily!—only to eat all their meals in the same anemic on-site restaurant; and what happened to Tanya in the finale. Season 2 of The White Lotus, in particular, felt like an aggregation of different source materials, many as fascinatingly cerebral as they were delightfully familiar.

Season 2 of The White Lotus came to a chaotic ending and managed to finally answer some vital questions, and most importantly, it revealed who died.

In the finale, the Palermo group and Tanya hop into the yacht to go back to the hotel. While it’s sad to know that Tanya dies, seeing as she was also in the first season, how she died is somehow on brand for her character. Portia, a not-so-responsible assistant, calls her and that’s when it just clicks for the both of them: They are both in a dangerous situation. When Tanya saw Quentin (Tom Hollander) and his “nephew” Jack (Leo Woodall) doing it during their time in Palermo, she started to grow suspicious. After Cameron gives her the money and Albie transfers the money to her account, she’s seen pondering. In the finale, we see Ethan losing his mind just thinking about the possibility of Harper and Cameron hooking up to the point where he gaslights his wife. In the morning, when Albie is still sleeping, she quietly leaves his room before he can wake up. But at the last minute, Jack drops her off at an airport and warns her not to go to the hotel and just leave Sicily right away because Quentin’s group is very dangerous. [Daphne knows about Cameron cheating on her](https://collider.com/white-lotus-season-2-daphne-storyline/) with many women, but she just ignores it, refusing to be a victim. However, the biggest mystery is trying to find out who Daphne saw on the waters in the first episode. But Albie convinces his father to give it in exchange for helping him out with his mom —and, desperate to connect with his wife and daughter again, Dominic agrees. There’s Cameron (Theo James), Daphne (Meghann Fahy), Harper (Aubrey Plaza), and Ethan (Will Sharpe) who went on the trip together; Bert (F.

Other times, they seem to warn people to stop talking. In the season finale, when she speaks to Ethan (Will Sharpe) about their respective partners, her eyes ...

[the show.](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/the-white-lotus-season-2-deaths-ranking) She doesn't need to say much, but when she does, the subtext is loud. [The White Lotus](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/the-white-lotus-season-3). In the [season finale](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/white-lotus-season-2-finale-who-dies), when she speaks to Ethan (Will Sharpe) about their respective partners, her eyes appear to calculate a situation in real time and covertly offer him a [slice of revenge](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/the-white-lotus-season-2-reviews). In the final episode she tells Ethan there's a part of her husband she'll never know, but rather than become consumed by paranoia she acknowledges this is key to her attraction to him. At points, they appear to [observe](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/the-white-lotus-books-season-2) more than she lets on. Inviting him into her philosophy, she then walks off with him to a deserted bay across the water. The inference is that they slept with each other, and, if appearances are to be believed, her school of thinking saves Harper and Ethan's marriage. Has Mike White pulled the rug on us again? [Theo James is done being put in a box](/culture/article/theo-james-the-white-lotus-interview) Rather than fight these truths, Daphne has opted for finding her own happiness and version of justice. [good time](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/the-white-lotus-season-2-horny-old-man-2022). But the only fool in writing her off was us.

Will Sharpe, who plays Ethan, sat down with Variety to reflect on the season.

I’ve written a film script, which is a love story set against a period of American history that I think is slightly underexplored and that I wanted to write about for a while. I think he realizes that he wants to fight for the marriage, and that he has to fight for the marriage. I think there is a sort of innate competitiveness in Ethan, and he probably tells himself that he’s someone wants to have status because he’s earned it, and not to sort of go around demanding it. This fear of infidelity and the consequences have sort of hung over this — particularly Ethan and Harper, but all four of them — in different ways across the series. I do find that so funny that after the day that they’ve had, they just come over and sit down with Ethan and Harper. And so I was mindful of that, in the playing of him through the series, always having an eye on the endgame, which for me was that ultimately, all of his actions, whether they’re kind of questionable or laudable, are kind of motivated by love and wanting to get back to a place with Harper that he thinks they should be in. The friendship he has with Cameron is so interesting and fraught. We choreographed it a day or two before with the stunt coordinators, and had a lot of fun trying to work out what’s the best sort of level of trying to make this feel real, and exciting, but also, kind of like two people who don’t really know how to fight going at each other. Ethan seemed to be bubbling up all season, and finally snapped in the finale. And I guess initially, Harper is the one who, as you say, is kind of a little bit judgmental of them. It was such a pleasure to be a part of that. That is exacerbated by the company of Daphne and Cameron, and all the different ways in which that matrix kind of interacts with itself.

First, the plot. In L'Avventura, Vitti plays Claudia, who joins her friend Anna and Anna's boyfriend on a yachting jaunt in the Mediterranean. During a brief ...

And while we don’t know if Greg is cheating on her, we know that Tanya’s preoccupied with that question even after she’s discovered he hired people to kill her for her money—tragically, they are too full of the bullets she’s just pumped into them to answer—which does seem like a kind of madness, perhaps even enough to distract her when she makes her slip-and-fall plunge off the boat and kills herself. You don’t have to let your partner sleep with someone else, but you can’t expect them not to want to, and if you can’t handle the answers, there’s nothing wrong with not asking the questions. In the finale, tensions between the season’s two married couples come to a head as Ethan, whom Harper suspects of having had sex with a prostitute while she was away for the night with Daphne, comes to suspect Harper of having had sex with Cameron. [Eros is sick](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/100-lavventura-cannes-statement)” and humanity was in the grip of a “rigid and stereotyped morality.” For all of their intellectual ideas and formal majesty, Antonioni’s movies have endured in part because of—not to put too fine a point on it—the extreme hotness of their leading actors. Daphne has some experience in these matters, and she gives Ethan the same advice she gave Harper: Do whatever you need to do to feel as if you’re even. But the shift from her customary passive aggression to open hostility—she calls Cameron “an idiot” over dinner—sets Ethan on edge, and he presses Harper until she confesses: The two did get drunk, and they did go back to their rooms, and they did kiss. (Tanya, as well as a bunch of “these gays.”) We find out that Lucia (Simona Tabasco) was definitely playing Albie (Adam DiMarco) and the man who played the part of the pimp she needed 50,000 Euros to escape is just a doorman at a nearby hotel. [hot to trot](https://slate.com/culture/2022/10/white-lotus-season-2-aubrey-plaza-jennifer-coolidge.html), but they can’t seem to get on the same page, sexually speaking. Uncertain whether their spouses have had sex but knowing for sure that they came close, Daphne (Meghann Fahy) and Ethan (Will Sharpe) walk across the low-tide sand to Isola Bella, disappearing into the forest as the camera watches from a distance. It’s Plaza’s Harper who gets the charged looks in that L’Avventura pastiche and Tanya who ends up disappearing off a boat, even if it doesn’t take that long for her body to be found. The scene in which a woman walks through a Sicilian courtyard and is menacingly leered at by a gathering crowd of men was re-created in the same location and reenacted shot for shot, with Aubrey Plaza standing in for the iconic Monica Vitti. As she and Anna’s boyfriend search for Anna, who it’s speculated may have died by suicide, they develop an attraction to each other and eventually have sex, although Claudia is consumed with feelings of betrayal toward her missing friend.

Who died in the "White Lotus" finale? What mysteries were left lingering from the Sicilian escapade? What do we already know about Season 3?

“The first season kind of highlighted money, and then the second season is sex,” White said. “Did they have some kind of dalliance on the island?” White said of Ethan and Daphne. “It is somewhat of a happy ending, although there’s dark clouds on the horizon, too.” Albie eventually realizes he got played, as Lucia silently slips away from his room in the morning, but he still thanks his father and puts in a good word to Abby, his mother and Dominic’s estranged wife. After dwelling on his “blond hair and big blue eyes,” she shares a photo of her two kids in which her older child sports, you guessed it, blond hair and blue eyes that very much do not resemble her husband’s darker features. After a devastating moment of introspection from Daphne, in which she processes the betrayal in real time and promptly calculates her retribution, she leads Ethan to the isolated island of Isola Bella before the scene cuts away. It felt like she needed to give her best fight back and that she, in a way, had some kind of victory over whoever was conspiring to get rid of her. Even if Portia is rattled enough to stay quiet, Italian police quickly came across the blood-soaked yacht, and White hinted that the fallout of that investigation could find its way into a future season. “I think probably that’s just all that happened,” White said. “But I just felt like, you know, we’re going to Italy, she’s such a diva, larger-than-life female archetype — it just felt like we could devise our own operatic conclusion to Tanya’s life and her story.” Sensing the danger aboard Quentin’s yacht, as she wined and dined with his band of accomplices off the coast of Taormina, Tanya grabbed a bag meant to bring about her demise — filled with rope, duct tape and a pistol — and shot Quentin, Didier (Bruno Gouery) and Niccoló (Stefano Gianino) in a teary-eyed rampage. Having seemingly escaped the assassination attempt, she gets spooked by the yacht’s fleeing captain, then slips while trying to jump to a smaller boat below, knocking her head on the railing and drowning under the Sicilian moonlight.

Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore, in a pink suit) and her staff turn out to greet guests in the second season of HBO's “The White Lotus.” (Fabio Lovino / HBO).

And it depends as much on the open-mindedness of the traveler as on the magic embedded in any given location. And the second season wastes the talents of Impacciatore as the tough Valentina, a sexually frustrated woman who takes out her anger on everyone around her — until she comes to terms with her lesbian desires in the arms of a kindly prostitute. The protagonist in this stage play, of course, is the traveler. [her review](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2021-07-18/the-white-lotus-hbo-tourism-colonialism) of the show, “The White Lotus” does a far better job managing the storylines around the resort’s guests than it does with the staff members who must serve them. expat once summarized the country’s appeal to me over a beer and a stuffed ashtray: “It’s all about fishing and f—ing.” And what “The White Lotus” gets right is that tourism is theater, the ultimate immersive experience in which everyone and everything has a role to play. The travel industry contrives all manner of ways to objectify the locals for the benefit of tourists on a quest for the extraordinary or the “authentic.” In Belize, I once wrote about a hotel on a private island where I was greeted on a boat dock by smiling staff members all decked out in matching pith helmets — so colonial! The country is regularly billed as one of the happiest places on Earth, based on [studies](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/sun-sea-and-stable-democracy-what-s-the-secret-to-costa-rica-s-success/) that purport to rank national contentedness. Functioning as stage is the locale — which the travel industry set-designs into a hyper-quaint version of itself for the purpose of tourist appeal. “Across the United States, towns devastated by capital flight, technological shifts, or union-busting make spectacles of themselves desperately framing and reinventing their histories to make the picture appealing to those who might buy a hamburger, T-shirt, suntan lotion, Indian jewelry, a plastic sea gull, a shell ashtray, or a boat ride.” But I have been intrigued by the ways it depicts tourism — especially the high-end part of the business. “Greet them together,” she commands, “with the same right hand.”

Jennifer Coolidge sits on ornate bench by luggage. Jennifer Coolidge plays Tanya, a hapless heiress in a loveless marriage. As in Season 1, Coolidge is a comedy ...

1, and that she is perhaps the worst assistant in the history of the job.) At the airport, however, we see his head—and Albie’s, and Bert’s—swivel in the wake of a pretty young woman who is passing by. (“The motivation of sex is always primary, I think,” White told me when I spoke to him, earlier in the fall for the (Daphne: “You just do whatever you have to do not to feel like a victim of life.”) Later, Ethan and Harper, each recharged with the sexual attention of someone other than their spouse, finally fuck. In the fifth episode, we discover that Jack is hiding a secret; Tanya catches him in bed with Quentin. The first season of the show focussed on class, and the conflicts that emerged between the haves and the have-nots at the White Lotus resort in Maui. (Fahy is fantastic in the role, but especially in this scene.) “You spend every second with somebody, and there’s still this part that’s a mystery. Still, to my mind, the central point made in the series is that no relationship is detached from the transactional and that power always plays a role in how people deal with one another. [New Yorker Radio Hour](https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/russell-moore-on-christian-nationalism).) Ethan and Harper are experiencing bed death; Cameron and Daphne have a de-facto don’t-ask-don’t-tell cheating policy; Albie is horny but doesn’t want to be like his father, whose marriage is in ruins owing to his sex addiction. [the second season](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-television/more-deadly-decadence-in-the-white-lotus) of “The White Lotus,” Mike White’s hit HBO dramedy, a bright-eyed, slim-hipped strawberry blonde named Daphne (Meghann Fahy), a guest at the White Lotus luxury resort in Sicily, decides to take one last dip in the Mediterranean before her vacation ends and she heads back home, to the U.S. Certainly, in the course of the season, we saw no shortage of conflicts that could have yielded perpetrators and victims: there was the newly rich Ethan (Will Sharpe), seething with jealousy over a possible dalliance between his wife, Harper (Aubrey Plaza, brittle and excellent), and his dick-swinging finance-bro friend, Cameron (the brutally handsome Theo James), who is married to Daphne; there was Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), a hapless heiress in a loveless marriage who, along with her assistant, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), had fallen in with a number of sinister, Palermo-based gay men seemingly intent on stealing her fortune by any means necessary; and there was Albie (Adam DiMarco), a wide-eyed, romantically minded Stanford grad travelling with his philandering father, Dom (Michael Imperioli), and still amorous grandfather, Bert (F. But as she swims in the perfect azure waters, her dreamy immersion is shattered by the sight of a dead body, floating on the waves.

After 'The White Lotus' finale, “Arrivederci,” we know who died and who killed, but all the guests behaved badly during this Sicily vacation.

How guilty is she? How guilty is he? Her dress is awful. Of kidnapping/abducting Portia, aiding and abetting Tanya’s murder-that-turned-out-to-be-an-accidental-suicide, of “uncle”-fucking, and also of running out on that check that time, which is rude. Is Bert slipping her a $50 for that hug? Well, according to Dominic, Bert is guilty of setting the mold of womanizing and delinquent husbandry that has doomed generations of men in this family to misery. I guess it’s good for her that she gets to be the piano girl at what is apparently the only hotel in all of Sicily? Is he guilty? And I could’ve happily gone my whole life without hearing the phrase “Achilles cock.” He seemed to have a really lovely time on this trip, didn’t he? The speed with which Albie transferred the money to Lucia’s account is totally implausible (he just had her routing number??) but the fact that he was so eager to do it, and not even in installments, made me write “He actually deserves to die for the crime of being such an idiot.” It’s also funny that he is so bent on being a good person who helps a damsel in distress that he could not recognize the actual vulnerability of Portia (going to an island with her psychotic boss and a drunk she’d never met) because he was too distracted by the over-the-top performance of helplessness Lucia put on for his benefit. [It was only a kiss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGdGFtwCNBE)” confession, do you?) But I have a hard time with this whole thing where Ethan, with very little evidence, gets to have the moral high ground, while Harper, who found the condom wrapper, is scrambling to regain his trust. Like, I don’t want to tell someone how to be abducted, but I sure wouldn’t do my big confrontation after I was trapped in a car with my assailant.

As riveting as it's been to tune into The White Lotus and keep up with its twistier-than-the-Italian-coast plot updates every Sunday night, ...

To honor your privacy preferences, this content can only be viewed on the site it There was certainly plenty to talk about after the White Lotus Season 2 finale aired on Sunday; I’ll refrain from going too deep into plot synopsis here for the sake of those who are still catching up, but consider this a spoiler warning (unless, of course, you’ve already been brave enough to log on to Twitter today). Twitter content

Early in the episode, Ethan accuses Harper of cheating on him with Cameron. After confronting Cameron—and nearly drowning him in the process!—he finds Daphne to ...

Maybe just the thought of Harper sleeping with his friend (which, for the record, she swears didn’t happen) was enough to reignite the flame. Do Ethan and Daphne go there to decompress, or do they sleep with each other in a fit of revenge? The camera cuts away before we see what happens next, but boy, do they leave a lot to the imagination. Maybe she simply feels for Etha—who is experiencing that level of betrayal for the first time? After confronting Cameron—and nearly drowning him in the process!—he finds Daphne to deliver the news. Early in the episode, Ethan accuses Harper of cheating on him with Cameron.

If you've been part of the cultural moment that is "The White Lotus," you've most probably inhaled this weekend's Season 2 finale already and are eager for ...

“The first season kind of highlighted money, and then the second season is sex,” White said. You know, we did Europe, and maybe Asia, something crazy like that, that would be fun,” White told But maybe you’ll have to wait to find out what happens,” he teased. [staggering events of the finale](https://www.cnn.com/videos/entertainment/2022/12/12/white-lotus-season-finale-cprog-cnntm-vpx.cnn), creator Mike White – who shepherded the at-first one-off limited series to a multiple Emmy-winning show that’s captured the zeitgeist and created [cringeworthy moments aplenty](https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/10/entertainment/white-lotus-cringeworthy-moments) – gave a post-credits interview that unpacked the episode. (CNN and HBO are both part of the same parent company, Warner Bros. It feels like it could be a rich tapestry to do another round at ‘White Lotus.’” (Season 1 of the show took place in Hawaii, followed by this season’s bawdy action set in Sicily.)

The show has experienced a ratings boom since its Oct. 30 Season 2 premiere, which garnered just over 1.5 million viewers across HBO and HBO Max on its debut ...

For Season 2 Episode 6 of “The That’s up a whopping 46% from the series’ previous best, which was the sixth and penultimate episode of the Sicily-set second season on Dec. The first season of “The White Lotus” closed with 1.9 million multiplatform viewers for its August 2021 finale. Discovery’s proprietary viewership data for streaming on HBO Max. Mike White’s dark comedy has experienced a ratings boom since its Oct. 30 Season 2 premiere, which garnered just over 1.5 million viewers across HBO and HBO Max on its debut night, up 63% in comparison to the “White Lotus” series premiere’s audience in July 2021, which also aired on HBO and HBO Max.

Jennifer Coolidge sits on ornate bench by luggage. Jennifer Coolidge plays Tanya, a hapless heiress in a loveless marriage. As in Season 1, Coolidge is a comedy ...

1, and that she is perhaps the worst assistant in the history of the job.) At the airport, however, we see his head—and Albie’s, and Bert’s—swivel in the wake of a pretty young woman who is passing by. (“The motivation of sex is always primary, I think,” White told me when I spoke to him, earlier in the fall for the (Daphne: “You just do whatever you have to do not to feel like a victim of life.”) Later, Ethan and Harper, each recharged with the sexual attention of someone other than their spouse, finally fuck. In the fifth episode, we discover that Jack is hiding a secret; Tanya catches him in bed with Quentin. The first season of the show focussed on class, and the conflicts that emerged between the haves and the have-nots at the White Lotus resort in Maui. (Fahy is fantastic in the role, but especially in this scene.) “You spend every second with somebody, and there’s still this part that’s a mystery. Still, to my mind, the central point made in the series is that no relationship is detached from the transactional and that power always plays a role in how people deal with one another. [New Yorker Radio Hour](https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/the-new-yorker-radio-hour/russell-moore-on-christian-nationalism).) Ethan and Harper are experiencing bed death; Cameron and Daphne have a de-facto don’t-ask-don’t-tell cheating policy; Albie is horny but doesn’t want to be like his father, whose marriage is in ruins owing to his sex addiction. [the second season](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/on-television/more-deadly-decadence-in-the-white-lotus) of “The White Lotus,” Mike White’s hit HBO dramedy, a bright-eyed, slim-hipped strawberry blonde named Daphne (Meghann Fahy), a guest at the White Lotus luxury resort in Sicily, decides to take one last dip in the Mediterranean before her vacation ends and she heads back home, to the U.S. Certainly, in the course of the season, we saw no shortage of conflicts that could have yielded perpetrators and victims: there was the newly rich Ethan (Will Sharpe), seething with jealousy over a possible dalliance between his wife, Harper (Aubrey Plaza, brittle and excellent), and his dick-swinging finance-bro friend, Cameron (the brutally handsome Theo James), who is married to Daphne; there was Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), a hapless heiress in a loveless marriage who, along with her assistant, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), had fallen in with a number of sinister, Palermo-based gay men seemingly intent on stealing her fortune by any means necessary; and there was Albie (Adam DiMarco), a wide-eyed, romantically minded Stanford grad travelling with his philandering father, Dom (Michael Imperioli), and still amorous grandfather, Bert (F. But as she swims in the perfect azure waters, her dreamy immersion is shattered by the sight of a dead body, floating on the waves.

Yet again, this show has proved that it is possible to make outstanding TV that both plays to the crowd and refuses to sing the classics.

Jack became the villain he was always going to be, and it was frightening and tense, though perhaps his warning to Portia, to flee and not ask questions, was a sort of kindness. The marriages of Ethan and Harper and Daphne and Cameron found their way towards a sort of chosen and hard-won contentment in the end. It is surprisingly invigorating to watch a drama and know that it is not going to end in easy resolution or happiness. They’re trying to murder me!” – but it was a chef’s kiss to have her almost get away, having shot her way through her enemies, only to be undone by her own poor aim, and possibly the fact that she didn’t take off her heels before jumping. It wrapped up its storylines with decreasing levels of subtlety, from Albie being “played” by Lucia, moving through the resilience of Daphne’s determined denial, ramping all the way up to Tanya the destroyer, and ultimately the destroyed. Wanting to preserve the magic for another season, it ekes it out just enough to satisfy while dangling a carrot for the next go around.

Leo Woodall talks about the life-changing moment he found out he landed the role of Jack in Mike White's award-winning series 'The White Lotus.

“He did the right thing, but he’s not that nice of a guy. Woodall also explained that Jack's decision not to kill Portia is about who he is as a person, more than his feelings for her. Though Jack decided not to kill Portia, he dropped her off in a deserted and dangerous area. The series will return for a third installment following a new group of guests at another White Lotus property. The fans don’t know much of his backstory other than Quentin helped him when he was in a dark place. He does the right thing in the end.” He gives you just enough so that you are fulfilled and satisfied.” When it got to that bit, I started to think about his backstory, but there’s something so genius about Mike’s writing that I didn’t want to compromise what he’d done.” In one scene, he told Haley Lu Richardson’s Portia that she was his “job.” It was terrifying for her; she even asked if she’d been kidnapped. White doesn’t spoonfeed his audience, and though he answers many questions, he still leaves some things unsaid and undone. For Leo Woodall, who portrayed Jack in the second season, landing this role was life-changing. He had been through a few rounds of Zoom auditions and had battled Covid more than once.

In the first-season finale of The White Lotus, Tanya McQuoid tells Belinda, the manager of the spa at the show's titular hotel, that she's determined to ...

Instead of getting played or demeaned like the staff and locals in season one, the locals team up with White Lotus staff to stick it to the Establishment. Only those who understand that they could be a mark as well as a beneficiary in their own transactional relationships get to live to see another day and, presumably, another stay at a White Lotus. Then there’s the person who doesn’t emerge at all from the events that happen in Sicily: Tanya McQuoid, whose story is evidence all by itself of the importance of understanding the transactional nature of relationships. The characters who enjoy the most notable moment of triumph in the finale are Mia and Lucia, and it’s not an accident that they also happen to engage in the most blatantly transactional relationships. They both get what they came for, so to speak, and stroll happily through the streets of Italy as if their cares have completely dissolved, which, for now, they have. Ethan was never really friends with Cam in the first place; he was just engaged in a yearslong competition to prove his own worth. But it also signals that these men are on the same page now, incapable of hiding their sexual desires but also more comfortable with their similarities in that regard. And when we last see the two couples in the airport, they are sitting separate from each other as if they are two sides of the same dysfunctional marital coin. White communicates the idea that Harper and Ethan have something akin to real intimacy through visual language. While one might assume naïve Albie still doesn’t grasp that Lucia took advantage of him, he disabuses us of that notion when he reconnects with Portia at the airport and tells her that he got played. But when you consider which of the guests comes out of that weeklong experience unscathed — you know, relatively speaking — it’s the ones that have accepted that partnerships involve negotiation and are honest with themselves about that. “The Best Things in Life Are Free” is the song we hear as the season-two finale concludes, and it is definitely deployed ironically.

Haley Lu Richardson, the actor behind TV's most chaotic personal assistant, discusses the finale, Portia's clothes and manifesting a Season 3 reprise.

And then a couple months later, I got the audition for Season 2, and then I got the job. And he was like, “I want you to dye your hair blond.” And he was like, “Well, I think Portia is a mini Tanya in a lot of ways.” And I think Portia saw glimpses of that, too, even if it was the last thing she wanted to admit to herself. I was like, “Oh, wow, I hope to experience that kind of freedom in my career at some point because it looks just like a blast.” And then as totally unhinged as the final outfit at the airport is, with her disguise with the hat and the big sunglasses, it just makes so much sense for me. So within the confines of that and this worst-case-scenario situation, I really think that she is doing the best that she can. And the costumes were a huge part of that for Portia, figuring out this eclectic ... I had to just think about Portia and her fear and how scary that is for her. Something that’s such a helpful part of the process for me as an actor is creating what this person looks like — the hair, makeup and costume. And I think that was really intentional. I understood her deepest insecurities, and that’s all I really needed to bring her to life. By the end of Sunday’s finale, Portia had narrowly escaped a kidnapping and made her way to the airport, where she learned that others were not quite so lucky. She makes some very bad choices, like getting in the car with Jack, and clearly seems to be ignoring her accurate intuition that something is very wrong.

Now that we know who dies in the finale, let's go over the clues laden in the opening titles.

- A woman being seduced by a swan -- this seems to be a reference to the story of Leda and the swan in Greek mythology, where the god Zeus transforms into a swan and rapes Leda, the queen of Sparta. In episode 4, he buys his wife a piece of jewellery as a gift and in the finale, he's willing to pay 50,000 euros in exchange for his son putting a good word in for him with his wife. It also looks like the maid has her back turned to the lamb -- the lamb could represent Albie, the man Portia found overly gentle, innocent and unexciting in comparison to Quentin's charismatic and cheeky nephew Jack (Leo Woodall). This could be interpreted in a couple of ways -- if the woman is meant to represent Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge's name appears in this section of the credits), then the monkey could be her husband Greg (Joe Gries), who feels indebted to Tanya after she paid for his medical bills and essentially saved his life. Here, we also see a dog peeing on the statue -- a show of disrespect toward everything it represents. Then the camera zooms in and reveals a woman spying on the lovers. Maybe Mia's innocence is supposed to be the little dead bird in the cat's mouth. Actor Michael Imperioli's name appears here -- his character Dominic, a sex addict and father of Albie, has been desperate for the forgiveness of both his son and wife, who are disgusted by his affairs and betrayal. [opening credits](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fN7JGL0Pzc) shows a man bowing to a curtseying woman -- a scene of what appears to be traditional Renaissance lovers (the style of art that [emerged in Italy in the late 14th century](https://www.history.com/topics/renaissance/renaissance-art)). It's not hard to deduce which three men are being referenced here in The White Lotus -- the Di Grassos. In the other: two wedding rings run through by a dagger. In the bottom left corner, a shield shows two rings connected by healthy branches.

Season 2 of The White Lotus is rich with visual art references that provide clues and symbolism to the deeper meanings of the show.

Clues to her fate are linked to the tragedy of Madame Butterfly. Her tears are symbolised in the painting of a hunched over weeping woman grasping a dagger. It’s clear the artworks personify the characters in the show, serving as an entry point into their inner turbulent worlds. The placement of art in the show is both masterful and purposeful. She is the drama’s ultimate tragedy and her vulnerability and mortality connect most powerfully with art historical references. We see the painting in the background of a scene where Albie is being brought to orgasm by a woman, Lucia, who he doesn’t know is a sex worker. As Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) says to Quentin in the final arresting episode, “What a life you have. The legend is amplified in a scene when Harper’s husband, Ethan believes his wife to have cheated on him in revenge for his own close encounter with sex workers. While there has been intense focus on the Renaissance art in the show, there are also filmic and literary references. There are also references to Elena Ferrante’s novels adapted to television show, [My Brilliant Friend (2018)](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7278862/), through the “escorts” Lucia and Mia (Beatrice Grannò) who bear striking resemblance to the “good” and “bad” girl characters, Lenù and Lila. While packing her bag to leave, she notices her namesake, Saint Lucy in a painting by Domenico Beccafumi (1521). In season 2, it’s the artworks that have drawn attention.