‘White Lotus’ blossoms in Season 2 finale
Spoiler alert! The following contains details from the Season 2 finale of “The White Lotus,” “Arrivederci.”
All is fair in love and war. Except absolutely nothing is fair in either.
Sunday’s Season 2 finale of HBO’s Sicily-set satire “The White Lotus” landed with a startling thunk on the side of a boat, as a bombastic episode of television with a murder spree that may not have even been the biggest moment of its 80 minutes.
The “Lotus” finale comes together like a symphony, each scene falling into place like a cascade of musical notes, inevitable yet surprising at the same time. The exquisite finale was impeccably acted and scripted, a fitting ending to a breathtaking story. It is akin to the tragedy of the Season 1 finale, although in many ways Season 2 has outshone its predecessor.
While the first season was an apt exploration of class in a five-star upstairs/ downstairs drama, it still was a version of a story we’ve seen before. In Season 2, creator Mike White molds something all his own, an examination of sexual politics and norms that have radically changed – but also depressingly stayed the same – since the #MeToo movement. Ever astute in his observations of modern life, White offers no answers to tough questions, or even much hope for our flailing attempts at human connection. But he does provide a ruthless mirror in which to examine ourselves, and a breathless hunger for a third season.
Who died in the finale?
At the end of the week in the stunning Sicilian resort, we learn the body floating in the sea was Tanya’s (Jennifer Coolidge), who fell to her death off the side of Quentin’s (Tom Hollander’s) yacht while trying to escape what she believed was a murder-for-hire plot and
left a trio of dead bodies in her wake. It was a stunner, but it also felt inevitable, as Tanya seemed trapped by each move Quentin and his compatriots made on his yacht.
At the beginning of the episode, her assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) remains stuck far from Tanya, with Quentin’s fake nephew Jack (Leo Woodall), but the pair manage to speak on a brief call that convinces both that their generous companions have been conspiring with Tanya’s husband Greg (Jon Gries) to murder her.
Fumbling and bumbling through the motions of socialization after this realization, Tanya tries to save herself through desperate measures: exclaiming to the non-English speaking captain, delaying tactics and eventually shooting her captors before falling to her death in an ill-conceived attempt to get from the yacht to a dinghy. These scenes ricochet from slapstick to startling to violent, and Coolidge plays it all easily, with Tanya’s trademark haplessness.
Jack leaves Portia scared and suspicious, by the side of the road, but she takes his advice not to get involved. She hears about the deaths at the resort only after running into Albie (Adam DiMarco) at the airport. After the terror Jack put her through, Portia is more amenable to boring, safe Albie, asking for his number before boarding her flight.
Who was conned?
Albie and the other DiGrasso men (F. Murray Abraham and Michael Imperioli) don’t seem to learn much from their time in their homeland. In the end, Lucia (Simona Tabasco) was conning Albie, and never was stuck in her life of sex work. She gets 50,000 euros out of him before she leaves him in his hotel room to live with the fact that his father was right; Albie was an easy mark.
Albie’s father Dominic (Imperioli) gets what he wanted: an open line of communication with his estranged wife by placating his son, rather than by engaging in any meaningful acts of remorse. And Nonno Bert (Abraham) is the same old lech, unable to congratulate Mia (Beatrice Grannò) on her gig as the White Lotus lounge singer without commenting on his arousal.
The lack of growth from the DiGrasso men is underlined at the airport, where they’re in line for a budget airline, when they turn in unison to leer at a woman.
Who cheated?
We may never know what happened between Cameron (Theo James) and Harper (Aubrey Plaza), although Harper tries to convince her husband Ethan (Will Sharpe) that the only thing that happened was a drunken kiss.
After his argument with Harper, an enraged Ethan confronts Cameron in the ocean, and almost makes his socalled friend the dead body, before their fight is broken up by a bystander. Ethan eventually finds his way to Cameron’s wife Daphne (Meghann Fahy), and tells her of his suspicions about their spouses. Fahey proves herself the star of the series in a 30-second, silent reaction to Ethan’s revelation, in which Daphne runs through the stages of grief in quick succession. Her happy, playful facade returns, and she lures Ethan to a small island. What they do there isn’t clear, but when Ethan returns to Harper later, he suddenly reconnects sexually with his wife, all indiscretion forgiven.
Who got a happy ending?
In the end, it’s just Lucia, Mia and hotel manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore) who are unabashedly happy at the end of the week at The White Lotus in Taormina.
After finally getting over her sexual frustrations, Valentina is able to see other sexual harassment in her workplace, if not that she too was behaving inappropriately. But it’s as if her whole body has unclenched after acknowledging she is a lesbian, down to a slightly unbuttoned blouse and frizzy hair.
Mia and Lucia, meanwhile, are 50,000 euros richer and strutting through the streets of town in the designer clothes they craved at the beginning of the season. Maybe they deceived and drugged their way to their new positions, but they did it to guests who aimed at exploiting them.
The “Lotus” finale raised as many questions as it answered, but the loose ends aren’t especially bothersome. White is singularly accomplished at filling his writing with satisfying ambiguity. There are vagaries and injustices in the messy worlds he creates, but just as in the real world, the characters must just move on or be trapped.
Tanya, for instance, will leave Sicily only in a coffin.