white lotus season 2 yacht scene

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• <i>The White Lotus</i> Season 2 Was About Love as Delusion. In the End, It Fooled Viewers Too

The White Lotus Season 2 Was About Love as Delusion. In the End, It Fooled Viewers Too

Spoiler alert: This article discusses, in detail, the White Lotus season 2 finale. If you’ve yet to watch that, do yourself a favor and don’t read this.

“How was Palermo?” Albie (Adam DiMarco) wants to know, in the penultimate scene of the White Lotus season 2 finale, when he runs into Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) at the airport on their way out of Italy. “Not great,” she deadpans. Even though she’s yet to have her worst fears about Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) confirmed, it’s an understatement for the ages.

It also makes you wonder how this tragic vacation might’ve gone differently if things had worked out between her and Albie—two sheepish dupes who finally exchange phone numbers in the season’s final minutes—when they first met. He might never have let Lucia (Simona Tabasco) con him—or his father Dominic (Michael Imperioli), the original mark—into giving her €50,000. Dominic might never have convinced Albie to run interference with his mom, apparently saving a marriage that she probably should’ve ended long ago. Portia might not have spent her last day in Sicily afraid for her life, because she wouldn’t have fallen for Jack (Leo Woodall), the earthy pseudo-nephew, lover, and henchman of “high-end gay” fortune hunter Quentin (Tom Hollander). 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.

Sure, it’s ultimately Madama McQuoid who kills the gays, not the other way around. But in true self-sabotaging style—and taking full advantage of Coolidge’s unmatched physical-comedy prowess—Tanya manages to shoot her way out of the trap, only to end up in a watery grave of her own making. So central was this character to two excellent seasons of Mike White’s luxury-resort misery-fest that her death was unfathomable to just about everyone (including yours truly ) publicly hazarding guesses as to who the corpses in Sunday’s finale would be. In retrospect, it seems fitting that a season about love as a delusion would end by shocking viewers who ignored what our own eyes told us about Tanya’s fate because we adored her.

In fact, the only eyes that seemed to observe much of anything at the Sicilian Lotus were inanimate. A Renaissance painting of St. Sebastian , 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. Yet the characters themselves couldn’t seem to see anything clearly, least of all the far-from-ideal objects of their affection. 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. And it all happens because everyone is too busy projecting their own selfish desires and insecurities on each other to fix a critical gaze on their own delusions.

The Di Grasso men are a particularly sad case. Dominic essentially has to bribe a sex worker he personally hired to keep his family from falling apart. Watching Lucia exit with the cash while she thinks he’s sleeping, Albie finally grows up a little. 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. Speaking of poor Bert ( F. Murray Abraham ), his big blow came in episode 6, when he discovered that the Di Grasso women of Sicily had no interest in forming a loving bond with a man who’d missed his chance to do right by the Di Grasso women of America.

That’s not to say there aren’t characters who come out of the season better off than they were going into it. Mia got her gig and Lucia got her money; that final shot, in which the two best friends skip off together to make immoderate purchases, might be the closest thing White will ever give us to a happy ending. Jealous Ethan (Will Sharpe) and exasperated Harper ( Aubrey Plaza ) have rekindled their romance by allowing their insecurities to transform them into unfaithful, game-playing rich people like Cameron (Theo James) and Daphne (Meghann Fahy). The latter couple is no worse for the wear because their marriage has always been a farce.

And then, lest we forget, there’s Greg (Jon Gries), whose money-motivated deceptions in the honeymoon suite makes Lucia’s scheme look quaint by comparison. We don’t see what becomes of him once Tanya’s body is pulled out of the sea—probably because it’s so easy to guess his fate. His little Double Indemnity gambit works out even better than (as far as we know) he anticipated. Not only does he inherit Tanya’s hundreds of millions, but he doesn’t even have to share them with Quentin and company.

Of course , given the pessimism White’s shown us about love under heteronormative patriarchy, it’s the middle-aged white guy with two smitten, relatively vulnerable admirers wrapped around his finger who comes out on top. Meanwhile, Quentin might be too dastardly to mourn, but it’s worth noting that he dies, and gets a bunch of his friends killed, doing dirty work for a straight guy. That makes Tanya this modern-day opera’s one true tragic heroine. Doomed by her very existence as a lonely, self-conscious single woman of a certain age with a certain astronomical bank balance, she gets her dramatic, if also supremely klutzy, underwater death scene. Season 3 won’t be the same without her. (Does she have a twin sister Coolidge could play? 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.

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White Lotus Fans Are Convinced That Greg Was on the Boat

You might want to sit down for this take on the finale.

On Sunday night, HBO released the explosive finale of The White Lotus . By now you probably heard that Tanya McQuoid, the ditzy heiress played by Jennifer Coolidge, didn’t survive. In a devastating (... but also kind of funny) series of events, Tanya is seemingly set up by her husband Greg. His suspected lover, Quentin, kidnaps Tanya and traps her on a yacht. Before the credits roll, she manages to kill her captors—but accidentally kills herself while trying to escape.

Despite the absurdity of it all, it seemed like a fairly cut and dry scene. Tanya finds a gun and uses it to defend herself. Then, in an adrenaline-fueled exit, she jumps off the yacht, knocks herself out on a pole, and drowns. While some viewers, like myself, processed her untimely demise, others were busy asking questions—like, where the hell was Greg during all of this? Was he hiding somewhere on the yacht?!

Well, Reddit user Large-Outside-9511 seems to think so. While watching the show, they spotted Greg’s name pop up on screen, which means he could have been one of the many voices yelling at Tanya before she began shooting. Check it out:

The closed captioning said Greg yells, “Tanya,” while she is locked in the room on the yacht. Then we heard people running upstairs and a door slamming at one point. Hugo was hiding behind the couch and the other two were shot. The captain was on the top of the boat so he was one of the footsteps. I’m thinking Greg was on the boat waiting for Tanya to be taken back to the hotel so he could stay the night on the boat and celebrate with Quentin while his wife floats away to her demise.

From there, the user suspect Greg ditched the boat and swam his sorry ass to safety.

He would have had enough time to escape to shore before the morning when Tanya’s body was discovered...Absolutely furious Greg won in this situation. I’m thinking next season he will be at the next White Lotus looking for his next con but gets caught.

As wild as it sounds, I'm on board with this is a theory. First of all, the Reddit fan was right— Greg’s name does appear in the closed captions. It’s quick, sure, but maybe we have a clue for Season Three. Speaking of, if the next chapter of The White Lotus is anything like this one, we can expect one returning character. In Season Two, it was Tanya, but now that she’s dead, Greg could be the throughline for round three. After all, Greg's story is the only one without a neat little bow—and even if he did manage to escape, he has quite the mess to clean up.

Not to mention: series creator Mike White teased that Season Three will tackle death and eastern religion. What if Greg travels to a new location to "grieve” Tanya's demise. In that case, I would be thrilled to see what karma has in store at the next White Lotus resort.

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The White Lotus’s explosive season finale, explained

Who died (and who survived) at The White Lotus.

by Alex Abad-Santos

This article contains spoilers for the season finale of the second season of The White Lotus .

For the last week , White Lotus fans have been losing sleep in stressful anticipation of the series’s season finale and the answer to the show’s ultimate question: Which White Lotus hotel guests are gonna die?

And in Sunday’s finale, we got our answer.

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, new friend Quentin (Tom Hollander) and Tanya’s husband Greg (Jon Gries) had a relationship — Tanya picked up (a poorly photoshopped) photo of the two in Quentin’s bedroom. 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.

Offshore on Quentin’s yacht, Niccolò (Stefano Gianino), Tanya’s mafioso escort from her cocaine-filled night, arrives to bring her back to shore — just the two of them and a sizable black “cocaine bag” in a tiny boat. Tanya is convinced Niccolò and the gays are going to kill her (“These gays are trying to kill me,” she whisper-hisses, perfectly). In a desperate move, she grabs the bag, finds the tape, rope, and gun inside, and locks herself in a stateroom. When the gays come knocking, she blindly shoots her way out, still whimpering, and manages to mortally wound if not outright kill everyone on the yacht. (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.

Tanya went out doing what she loved most, obviously luring in people with her copious amounts of money and then thwarting them last minute. (The murky status of Greg’s inheritance notwithstanding.)

In a cheerier conclusion than the first season, the rest of the guests got relatively happy endings.

How everyone else fared at the White Lotus Sicily

Fatally miserable couple Ethan (Will Sharpe) and Harper Spiller (Aubrey Plaza) recovered their missing intimacy, accepting a little bit of mystery in one another. 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. Ethan reveals the possible indiscretion to Cam’s uncannily zen wife Daphne (Meghann Fahy), who gives Ethan basically the same ambiguously erotic pep talk she gave Harper: Don’t be a victim; get yours. Unlike Harper, Daphne takes Ethan on a walk to a private island. After that, and a surprisingly not-weird dinner with the full foursome, Ethan rekindles his attraction to Harper and the two finally have sex.

The Di Grasso men left the island as they came — all terrible with women in their own unique ways. Dominic (Michael Imperioli) has a sliver of hope his wife will talk to him again, thanks to his son’s semi-extortionist blessing; Bert (F. Murray Abraham) still gets sexually excited from a hug. At the airport, Albie (Adam DiMarco) reconnects with Portia, each having been pretty well and thoroughly scammed by the sex workers they unwittingly ditched each other for. The two exchange numbers, so they can go on to hurt each other another day.

And speaking of sex workers, Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Grannò) got a real happily ever after. Lucia played Albie and his dad for 50,000 euro. Alessio, the man supposedly stalking her, wasn’t a pimp or a disgruntled mob boss but just a doorman at a neighboring hotel. And as a result of accidentally drugging the resident pianist, Mia convinces hotel manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore) to fire him. Good for them!

Men get played. Women get rich. Yachts became death traps. What a surprisingly jaunty ending for our White Lotus guests (save for Tanya) and oddly hopeful cap to the second season of this beloved HBO show.

The season is a well-executed murder mystery

The biggest shift this season 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. Fans were more determined than ever to decode every potential clue . The change in vibe began in the very first episode.

We meet Daphne who, at first blush feels familiar to anyone who’s seen The White Lotus season one. She’s got perfect hair, a perfect swimsuit, perfect teeth. Big, clean, gorgeous teeth. In White Lotus code, this means she’s probably a horrific monster. Daphne chats up the girls next to her, initiating a conversation about how lucky they are to be in Sicily.

“Italy’s just so romantic,” Daphne tells the women, before getting into the Ionian Sea one last time. “Oh, you’re gonna die. They’re gonna have to drag you out of here,” she says.

As Daphne takes the plunge, the water suddenly doesn’t seem as blue or clear as it did in the wide shot. And then it happens: A pair of floating legs (and Tanya’s corpse that they’re attached to) thump into Daphne, and send her screaming for shore. Onshore, we learn that a number of bodies have been discovered, but no final body count given (beach club supervisor Rocco tells manager Valentina that there’s a “few”). All we know is that the unalive people were guests of the hotel.

That’s where the real show starts.

In season one, the possibility remained that the body bag we saw in the very first episode had been the result of natural causes. But since we saw that end with snotty guest Shane (Jake Lacy) stabbing hotel manager Armond (Murray Bartlett), and started this new season with a whole pile of bodies, it seemed all but assured that foul play would be afoot at the White Lotus Sicily. Were these deaths an accident? Were they on purpose? Murder? Manslaughter? And more importantly: Who died? And who killed them?

White’s sneaky move was to let the subtle, even pedestrian betrayals in relationships feel like clues to a murder mystery. A thousand motives flit across the screen, all possible in the characters’ fragile relationships. Over an innocuous dinner or drinks at the beach, the tension between these characters seems like it might boil over — and occasionally does.

Suddenly, it wasn’t so difficult to see a scenario in which Ethan, frustrated with Harper, would kill his old buddy Cam. It wasn’t impossible to imagine Albie killing Lucia after finding out his father also slept with her, or Jack (Leo Woodall) tossing Portia into the sea because she found out Quentin wasn’t his uncle.

The first season took a big swing , giving us White’s ideas about how American greed and pleasure are interconnected and how Hawaii and Hawaiians became the mainland’s victims. The White Lotus ’s second season doesn’t even attempt to tell a similar story. Instead, it’s skewering gender by way of masculinity, sex, and desire. It’s a more sensational, more sordid, more sinister, and more streamlined story. It’s a less ambitious season, maybe, but a more successful one.

Daphne Sullivan won The White Lotus

The White Lotus didn’t invent miserable rich Americans, nor did it create our morbid curiosity with them. Watching the wealthy writhe in emotional displeasure is a long tradition, from The Great Gatsby to the Real Housewives . There’s something comforting in knowing there are limits to financial security, and witnessing people who could afford anything still be unfulfilled in ways that they’ll never be able to solve. There’s something about the rich on vacation that feels like it could go full Hunger Games .

Yet, despite the endless reasons to hate so many of the main guests — Ethan is so terminally insecure, Harper is a horny grump, Cameron’s a slimeball, Tanya is an emotional vampire, Portia has no backbone, and the Di Grassos have never met a woman they couldn’t impose themselves on — there’s one I would die for: Daphne Sullivan.

Obviously, a lot of my affection for the character comes from Meghann Fahy’s brilliant performance. And just as much can be explained by the ancient proverb : “girl does sociopathic shit, her gays [say] work.”

But it’s also what Daphne represents.

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. That’s the common thread among White Lotus guests. Look how they can’t even understand what’s happening around them.

Adding to that impression is that we also meet eternally mordant Harper, who’s crabby the minute she gets to Sicily. Harper does not want to be there. She hates being on vacation with people she hates.

This irritability makes Harper seem like the show’s protagonist. It allows her to point out how out of touch the people around her are, the implicit position of viewers at home. When Harper tells Cameron and Daphne that she’s an employment lawyer, Cameron quickly spouts on about how most harassment lawsuits are fake. When Cameron and Daphne tell her they don’t read or watch the news, she’s shocked at their incuriosity about the world. If Harper, who the show paints as smarter than the rest of the cohort, thinks Daphne and Cameron are idiots, then they must be idiots, right?

But as the show progresses, Daphne shows herself to be much smarter than she appears — and maybe wiser than Harper herself.

In episode 5, Harper, by way of a condom wrapper and emotional warfare, finds out that Cameron and Ethan did MDMA and that Cameron cheated on Daphne with a sex worker. When she tells Daphne as much as she can without spelling out all the details, Daphne doesn’t even flinch.

Instead of shock, Daphne tells Harper about her trainer Lawrence. They spend an enormous amount of time together. Lawrence makes her laugh. Lawrence keeps her fit. Lawrence doesn’t let her get lonely. She describes him to Harper as blond and blue-eyed, and offers to show her a pic. Instead, she hands over a photo of her blond and blue-eyed children. “Oops,” she says, with the smallest point, and we know she’s never made a mistake at all, but that Cameron has in underestimating her.

“I spend more time with him than Cameron sometimes because he’s so busy at work,” Daphne tells Harper, before her face sharpens into a smile that’s all edges. “The point is, maybe you should get a trainer.”

It’s in this moment that Harper realizes Daphne isn’t oblivious to her life but, rather, fully aware of every moment of it. Like her shopping sprees, infidelity to the point of paternity fraud is one of the ways Daphne has carved out happiness in what could be an utterly punishing life. She’s the trophy wife to Cameron’s wheeling, dealing, cheating asshole finance bro, but Daphne plays the game, too. She just happens to be smart enough to never be left footing the bill. She knows being unvalued will get her further.

Daphne puts her slightly mercenary wisdom to practice in the final episode, after Ethan tells her something happened with Harper and Cam. Taking just a beat to let the hurt wash over her, she’s quickly ready to metabolize. While we don’t know for certain what happens when Daphne takes Ethan on a walk to La Isola Bella, it seems to lead to a reset in the natural balance of the group, which had gone perilously lopsided for Ethan since he had reason to be suspicious of his wife. Does Daphne really want Ethan? (No, I don’t think so.) Do they actually hook up? (Yes, I think so.) What matters is that neither of them is a victim anymore.

Daphne’s worldview serves both halves of the Spiller couple well, eventually. Each had felt victimized by the other: Harper by Ethan’s expectations and lack of sexual interest, Ethan by Harper’s moods and frustration, both by the other’s lies. Daphne helps put the couple on equal footing by encouraging each one to take their power back. Honesty is overrated; an appreciation for mystery in yourself and the person you love is a much sexier solution.

“You don’t have to know everything to love someone,” she tells Ethan.

She should know; it’s an answer that has paid off her time and again. It’s also worth noting that Ethan and Harper being on good terms with each other is a good thing for Daphne. If Ethan doesn’t see Cameron as a threat, especially if you read his “walk” with Daphne as more than a stroll, he might be open to Cameron investing his money and obliquely funding Daphne’s lavish life.

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. Striving for something more never works out when you play against the ultra-wealthy. But here, all along, Daphne defied the odds and found a way. Just don’t tell anyone about her trainer.

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The Extreme Pleasures of the “White Lotus” Season 2 Finale

At the beginning of the second season 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. 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. She screams, and soon the police are called, and more bodies turn up. Who are they?

“The White Lotus” is peak spoiler TV (and this might be a good place to say that there will be spoilers in this piece). By starting at the end of the story and only then rewinding to the beginning, the show creates an itch that the audience must continuously scratch, and, by Sunday night’s finale, the scratching had become outright clawing. 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. Murray Abraham). Albie had taken up with a local prostitute, Lucia (Simona Tabasco), who, unbeknownst to him, had also slept with his father, and who was being followed by her apparent pimp. And this was before we even considered the more minor characters (Giuseppe, the disgruntled hotel-bar pianist? Lucia’s friend Mia, the aspiring singer-slash-sex-worker?) It was truly anyone’s guess who the hell was going to die here.

I can’t pretend that there wasn’t something extremely pleasurable, on a plot level, in trying to crack this mystery. And yet the deaths also seemed to me like a bit of a beside-the-point hook: an easy entryway into the deeper business of considering how relationships on the series work—which is what White’s project is really about. “The White Lotus” isn’t a completely cynical show: its characters have feelings and doubts and fears that aren’t entirely subsumed by their baser, more mercenary instincts. 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. Death is significant in the “White Lotus” universe, not because each season has been framed as a murder mystery but because death is the only state in which people can’t jockey for more: more sex, more money, more dominance. As long as you’re still breathing, White tells us, you’re going to keep fighting to get the upper hand, or die trying.

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. This time around, the theme was desire, with most of the battles emerging from the characters’ preoccupation with sex. (“The motivation of sex is always primary, I think,” White told me when I spoke to him, earlier in the fall for the New Yorker Radio Hour .) 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. Portia, meanwhile, is drawn to Jack (Leo Woodall), the supposed nephew of Tanya’s new gay friend Quentin (Tom Hollander). Jack is an Essex boy whose touch is much less cautious than that of Albie, with whom Portia shares a couple of bland kisses early on.

Like the world’s most indulgent couples therapist, White deals with all these conflicts in satisfying yet surprising ways. Yes, Harper admits to some form of a hookup with Cameron, something that the season had been setting up since the very first episode; less expected is the response from these characters’ spouses. An aggrieved Ethan attacks Cameron while the latter is going for a swim, resulting in an underwater tussle that verges on the erotic. After a stranger breaks up the fight, preventing the two men from killing each other, Ethan reveals what he knows to Daphne. In one of the season’s more insightful—or, perhaps, depressing—moments, she responds by asserting people’s essential separateness from one another. “We never really know what goes on in people’s minds,” she tells Ethan, in a chipper but no-nonsense tone. (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. . . . It’s kind of sexy.” Then she and Ethan venture out on what, it is implied, is a sexual engagement of their own, to even the score. (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. But the congress is made possible solely through a complicated calibration whose ante will likely need to be upped.

Lucia, predictably, solicits money from Albie in a roundabout way, implying that it’s the only thing that can save her from her violent pimp. Albie asks his father to wire Lucia fifty thousand euros; in exchange, Albie agrees to put in a good word for Dom with his mother, Dom’s angry ex-wife. “I’ll tell her how sorry you are. . . . and how it seems like you’ve really changed—yada yada,” Albie promises, without much conviction; Dom, he says, should consider the money a “karmic payment” for all the hurt that he has caused his wife, his family, and maybe women in general. Giving your college-age son fifty grand to help out a prostitute might not be the most obvious form of making amends to your wife (and Dom’s main objection to the gambit seems to be animated not by any moral qualms but by the suspicion that Albie is Lucia’s “mark”). In the end, though, the deal seems to work: Dom calls his ex-wife, who agrees to talk to him when he’s back, and resolution appears close at hand. 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. Clearly, becoming a changed man might be more challenging than it looks.

Tanya and Portia’s plotline is the most delightfully twisty of the lot. In the fifth episode, we discover that Jack is hiding a secret; Tanya catches him in bed with Quentin. (This leads to what is perhaps the best line of the show, uttered by Tanya, to a horrified Portia, in the season finale: “Well, he was kinda fucking his uncle.”) When Portia asks Jack about the nature of the relationship between himself and his “uncle,” he explains that Quentin helped him out when he was “in a fucking hole.” “No one’s perfect,” he continues. “Sometimes you do things you don’t wanna do.” Even though this credo rings true of Portia’s oft-demeaning experience of working for Tanya, the idea, once articulated, seems completely unpalatable to her. Her goal in life, she told Jack earlier in the episode, is to be “satisfied,” although she’s not sure if such a thing is possible. The fact that no one is ever satisfied—that everyone endlessly tries to get the most in exchange for the least—is not just her view but also White’s. (Portia’s effective abandonment of her boss in the finale and her choice not to alert anyone to Tanya’s disappearance also suggest that she is looking out for No. 1, and that she is perhaps the worst assistant in the history of the job.)

“The prenup, the prenup, the prenup,” Tanya murmurs, recognizing that Quentin, in an attempt to raise money to refurbish his crumbling palazzo, has made a deal with her husband, Greg (Jon Gries), to kill her off. “He’s gonna pay them with my money so they can decorate their houses or some shit!” Tanya fumes. (As in Season 1, Coolidge is a comedy genius.) According to their agreement, if they divorce, Greg will get nothing of Tanya’s fortune. If she dies, however, he will finally have the upper hand, and her will to live, to win, is too strong for that. Panicked by the realization that, as she says, “these gays, they’re trying to murder me,” she goes out, gun blazing, spraying bullets willy-nilly and killing Quentin and his cohort on the yacht where they were planning to get rid of her. Tanya refuses to be what Daphne calls “a victim of life.” But that doesn’t stop her from eventually becoming a victim of fate. “You got this,” she tells herself, moments before tumbling off Quentin’s yacht, slapstick style, and hitting her head on a dinghy.

The last moments of the finale show Lucia and Mia prancing down the street, arm in arm. As Lucia stops to hug a tall, good-looking man, we realize that he is her supposed terrifying “pimp.” (Albie, after waking up in an empty hotel room to the discovery that Lucia has left without saying a word, admits to Portia, at the airport, that he was “played.”) The karmic debt has been paid, and it’s hard not to feel happy for the two girls, free of the pesky Americans who thought that they held the advantage. The song that plays in the background, however—Sam Cooke’s “The Best Things in Life Are Free”—provides an Opposite Day context to the scene. “All the moon belongs to everyone / The best things in life, they’re free,” Cooke sings. “Love can come to everyone / The best things in life, they’re free.” Wouldn’t it be nice if that were true? ♦

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• Entertainment

'The White Lotus' Season 2 Ending Explained: We All Got Played

It's choppy out there. Let's dive in, shall we?

• Best New Journalist 2019 Australian IT Journalism Awards

Lucia and Mia really turned things around for themselves.

So much for Tanya McQuoid being the connective tissue between the two seasons of  The White Lotus . Obviously, spoilers up ahead for the season 2 finale, in which Jennifer Coolidge's character finds herself on a party boat that definitely isn't a party.

The seventh and final episode of the HBO Max series was a master class in social commentary, witty writing and gorgeous shots from writer/director Mike White. It wrapped up pretty much every loose end, while leaving one dangling strand involving Ethan and Daphne. And keeping that mystery unsolved is the point.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for the season 2 finale of The White Lotus.

But first, Tanya. It was always going to stretch credulity having yet another person die at a White Lotus resort, but White chose the wildest and weirdly most believable option. The wealthy Tanya did indeed find a picture of her husband Greg and bankrupt British expat Quentin in cowboy hats together. (Although this isn't explicitly confirmed.) She and her assistant, Portia, conclude that Greg colluded with his ex-lover Quentin to have Tanya killed, because their prenup prevents Greg from taking any of her money if they divorce.

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. She stalls for as long as possible before Quentin's man arrives to take her to shore and likely murder her on the way. Seizing her one opportunity to save herself, Tanya brazenly grabs her killer-to-be's duffle bag and locks herself in a room. Inside the bag, she finds a gun. As the door is kicked in, Tanya braces herself and squeezes the trigger, shooting anyone who comes at her.

Poor rich Tanya.

In one of many examples of absurd hilarity, Tanya makes sure to ask Quentin before he coughs up blood and dies whether Greg was cheating on her with another woman. Quentin stares at her incredulously, before carking it (dying, that is, in British English). Sadly, as Tanya attempts to climb down off the boat and escape via a dinghy, she slips and smacks her head on the dinghy's railing before crashing into the water, where she drowns. Her colorful dress made it look like the dead body we partially see in episode 1 was wearing bright boardshorts.

Many thought Tanya would be the only character to appear in every season of The White Lotus, which was  renewed for a third outing last month . In one of many smart rug pulls, White has eliminated that possibility. Why would Tanya spend all her time at White Lotus resorts anyway, if they're a hotspot for murder?

Harper and Ethan have fully accepted one another.

He could also potentially use one of the new characters introduced in season 2 as a familiar link. Let's pray it's Aubrey Plaza's Harper, although that seems unlikely. In a bittersweet turn of events, her eye-rolling, at first strongly principled, lawyer assimilates the same performative marriage facade that Cameron and Daphne put on. It's the only way now for her and Ethan to move forward -- whether they believe each other's stories about cheating or not, it doesn't matter. They're both willing to act out a happy marriage and allow each other to hold some level of mystery. 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. The more unexpected turn of events involved Daphne taking Ethan to nearby island Isola Bella -- the shot looks like one of those Instagram pictures of couples leading each other down a path. It's left open to interpretation whether something happened between them, but it seems likely, since Daphne was unfazed by Ethan's worry that Cameron and Harper might have cheated together. She suggestively tells Ethan: "You don't have to know everything to love someone. A little mystery? It's kinda sexy..."

The mysterious leading the mysterious.

In a similarly messy situation, the Di Grasso men leave Sicily 50,000 euros poorer, yet they all seem surprisingly unfazed. Young Albie is momentarily put out by the revelation that Lucia was playing him the whole time, but he's swiftly on to the next opportunity: a changed Portia, who's now had her fair share of excitement and wants to settle for nothing more than the safest, most boring romantic option possible. (At least she looks mortified for one short moment about the fact her boss has just drowned to death.)

Related stories

• 'The White Lotus' Opening Credits: All the Hidden Clues Explained
• 'The White Lotus' Episode 6: Who's in the Mysterious Photo Tanya Picks Up
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Finally, in a nice 180-degree flip, season 2 sees no deaths and an optimistic outcome for the staff of the White Lotus, Sicily. Unlike season 1, this time it's the underprivileged who take advantage of the rich guests. Lucia has had a stellar payday, Mia is living out her dream as a singer and hotel manager Valentina has embarked on her sexual awakening. She's already less bitter in life for it, allowing her previous crush Isabella to work the concierge desk with her grateful fiancé, Rocco.

Best friends Lucia and Mia swirl down the cobblestone streets Elena Ferrante-style, basking in the glow of their accomplishments. Lucia briefly says hello to the now smiling waiter who chased her and the Di Grasso family down in a car, revealing that was all a ruse to convince the three generations of men that she was a hurt puppy in need of rescue.

It was a super satisfying end to an even better season of the genius show, Italy's fountains and volcanoes erupting in perfect climax. Maybe it would have been interesting to see Albie's father's reaction to his son being played, just like he suspected, but other than that, this was a truly immaculate capper to the season.

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'The White Lotus' Season 2 Finale Explained: What Happened to Everyone?

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'Evil' Ruined This Character in the Final Season (and We’re Not Over It)

What is the numenórean sea monster in 'the rings of power' season 2, 'the boys' has officially become the thing it's been parodying.

Editor's Note: The following contains full spoilers for Season 2 of The White Lotus. The much-awaited Season 2 finale of The White Lotus has just aired, and it left a lot of people on the edge of their seats. We have watched the characters go through emotional turmoil and overall trauma over the past seven episodes —and all of it was just strangely good to watch. But the biggest question that I know everyone asked is: Who died?

Created by Mike White , the HBO anthology series focuses on the theme of wealthy people going on a vacation at a White Lotus resort. While the first season was incredible and just plain chaotic, Season 2 somehow upped the ante. For a quick refresher, this tension-filled season follows a group of tourists staying in a White Lotus located in beautiful Sicily. There’s Cameron ( Theo James ), Daphne ( Meghann Fahy ), Harper ( Aubrey Plaza ), and Ethan ( Will Sharpe ) who went on the trip together; Bert ( F. Murray Abraham ), Dominic ( Michael Imperioli ), and Albie ( Adam DiMarco ) who are there to learn more about their heritage; and Tanya ( Jennifer Coolidge ) and Portia ( Haley Lu Richardson ) among others.

Each of these people has their own brewing issues. However, the biggest mystery is trying to find out who Daphne saw on the waters in the first episode. Now that the finale is out, and the burning questions have been answered, let’s unpack what exactly went down.

What About the (Toxic) Couples?

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. Harper eventually tells him the truth: Cameron invited her to go back to the hotel, they went to a room, Cameron latched the door, and he kissed her. Now even more blinded with anger, he rushes to Cameron who was swimming in the ocean and tries to drown him, and the two engage in a fight until a tourist stops them.

Later, Ethan talks to Daphne about the whole Cameron-Harper thing, but she just dismisses it. We know that Daphne knows about Cameron cheating on her with many women, but she just ignores it, refusing to be a victim. Ethan and Daphne then head to a nearby island, but no one knows what they did. After, Ethan and Harpe r have sex, reigniting the passion after days of giving a cold shoulder to each other. Meanwhile, Daphne and Cameron continue their “we have a great marriage” facade, even though it’s clearly not healthy. We see these couples together as they wait in the airport, looking happy. Or are they ?

Keeping Up With The Di Grassos

Albie is completely smitten with Lucia ( Simona Tabasco ), a sex worker. Fearing for her life, he asks his father to wire him with 50,000 Euros to help her out. Of course, that amount is just ridiculous. 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 not much that went down with the Di Grassos in the finale, but Albie certainly left the White Lotus heartbroken when Lucia leaves him.

RELATED: 'The White Lotus' Season 2 Fixed the First's Biggest Issue

What About Portia?

While Portia ’s existential problem is more than understandable, it doesn’t erase the fact that she is, well, a bad assistant. She accompanies Tanya in Palermo. However, she spends time with Jack around town instead of being there for Tanya. She later learns through Tanya that Jack is not the person she thought he was. Again, while she’s not that good of an assistant, she doesn’t deserve to be in this chaos.

Portia was brave enough to confront Jack about it, and he ends up confirming her story. 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. So, she did. She’s now in the airport where she encounters Albie yet again. Albie asks her about her boss, and Portia casually says she doesn’t know. But when he asks if she knows about the dead body, she stops in her tracks.

Checking In With The Italians

Well, at least one group in the show is happy. After spending a passionate night with Mia ( Beatrice Grannò ), White Lotus manager Valentina ( Sabrina Impacciatore ) becomes nicer, now happy that she knows who she is. Mia is brought on as the hotel's new piano singer despite Giuseppe showing up. Then there’s Lucia. After Cameron gives her the money and Albie transfers the money to her account, she’s seen pondering. In the morning, when Albie is still sleeping, she quietly leaves his room before he can wake up. In this season, we can gladly say that the locals are happy and thriving.

Who Dies in The White Lotus Season 2?

When Tanya saw Quentin ( Tom Hollander ) and his “nephew” Jack ( Leo Woodall ) doing it during their time in Palermo, she started to grow suspicious. And then during a party, Tanya saw a photo frame of young Quentin and, well, someone who looks exactly like her husband. Of course, much like any other major red flags that were shown, she basically ignored it and was convinced that it was not him.

In the finale, the Palermo group and Tanya hop into the yacht to go back to the hotel. 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. Tanya asks for help from the one steering the yacht ( “These gays, they’re trying to murder me!” ) but due to the language barrier, her pleas are unsuccessful. Panicked out of her mind, Tanya excuses herself to the powder room. She hastily retrieves Niccolo’s gun and shoots almost everyone. It’s then revealed that she isn’t going crazy after all. These men —including Greg ( Jon Gries )— were really trying to kill her for money .

After killing the men, Tanya hurriedly tries to escape on a dinghy boat. It would have been a really badass ending. But, of course , knowing her clumsiness, she ends up hitting her head and plunging into the water. 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. We next see her floating dead body being discovered by Daphne, and it all just fits together. Plus, those other dead bodies that were mentioned in the first episode? Those are Quentin and the gang.

This whole show is a rollercoaster ride that you just can’t seem to get out of. With the twists, tension, and crazy situations, this may just be better than the first season. Before Season 3 comes , you can watch the first two seasons of The White Lotus on HBO and HBO Max.

• TV Features
• The White Lotus (2021)

The White Lotus Season 2 Ending Is An Unsettled Meditation on Desire

Lingering questions mean there are only two clear winners in this season’s schemes.

Spoilers for The White Lotus season 2 ahead.

The White Lotus giveth, and The White Lotus taketh away. From the first moments of the acclaimed HBO series’ sophomore season, we knew we’d be saying goodbye forever to one—if not multiple—favorite characters by the time the Dec. 11 finale rolled around. It was only ever a question of how they’d end their vacation: in first class, or in a casket? After weeks of fan theorizing, showrunner Mike White effectively delivered a rollicking banger of a send-off—and with it, a surprisingly thought-provoking meditation on desire, and our general lack of control over its whims.

Episode 7, “Arrivederci,” begins with the neurotic devices of a jealous mind. Ethan knows his wife is acting strangely, and that his former college roommate, Cameron, has a notorious “mimetic desire,” always seeking that which others claim first. Might Cameron have slept with Harper, taking advantage of the latter’s anger following Cameron and Ethan’s drug-fueled binge a few episodes ago? Ethan pictures his wife and his friend having sex in bed beside him, even as, in reality, he watches Harper sleep peacefully. Ethan finds he can’t trust Harper, but nor can he trust his own imagination.

Meanwhile, in the adjoining room, similar resentments are left unspoken between Cameron and his wife. As Daphne consoles her children via FaceTime, she calls for Cameron to come talk them back to sleep, and, in the bathroom, Cameron’s face darkens with something like agitation. He layers on the charm when he finally swoops in to fill the iPhone screen, but the close-up on his face is too lengthy to be coincidental. It seems all but confirmed that Cameron knows his eldest son is not actually his biological child, but Daphne’s trainer’s, a byproduct of their relationship’s unorthodox sexual schemes.

The other heterosexual relationships in this series aren’t fairing much better. Albie, halfway in love with Lucia after only a few nights together, wants to save another “wounded, pretty bird” and asks his father for 50,000 euros to do so. Dominic balks at the idea, less thanks to the amount as to whom it’s for. (Remember, Albie still has no idea his father slept with the same woman.) But Albie pulls a trick out of dear old Dad’s own manipulative playbook: He deems the cost a “karmic payment,” and promises he’ll put a good word in with his mother about Dom’s supposed repentance and reformation. The thought of getting clean with his wife—without having to actually do the work of changing his behavior—proves too delicious for Dom to deny. He forks the cash over to Lucia, who slips quietly out of Albie’s room the next morning with only a slightly remorseful, sweet smile. Later, we watch her embrace Alessio, her supposed pimp, who turns out to be her clever accomplice. If there can ever be a real winner in these games, this season it’s Lucia.

Portia, on the other hand, is ready to swear off the Sicilian adventures she supposedly longed for on arrival. When she wakes beside a hungover Jack, whose endearing Essex accent has overplayed its hand, she searches desperately for her missing phone and spirals further when she learns Jack does not exist on Instagram. Only after multiple episodes is she finally seeing the red flags planted at every milestone of her and Jack’s days-long dalliance. She needs to get back to her boss, Tanya, in Palermo, but Tanya is still in the embrace of “the gays,” led by Quentin, who promises to take her back to Taormina now that the cocaine high has worn off. Before they can leave, she steals one last glance at the photograph she spotted the night before in Quentin’s palazzo, the one featuring a man who looks inconspicuously like her husband. Sure enough, a second look confirms the image of a younger version of Greg with a younger version of Quentin, though Quentin denies it when he strolls into the room. That’s “Steve,” not Greg, he insists. “Haven’t spoken to him in decades.”

At breakfast, an ignorant tirade by Cameron prompts Harper to finally call him out as an “idiot,” which gives Ethan all the evidence he needs to conclude they hooked up. He confronts her in their hotel room, and slowly, reluctantly, Harper spills the truth: Okay, yes, she and Cameron did flirt, and yes, they did come up from the pool with the intention of hooking up. But they only kissed before Ethan interrupted their affair. It was nothing. It meant nothing. It was stupid.

Maybe, but Ethan isn’t convinced. The timelines don’t add up. And one thing is obvious, which is that Cameron took the spotlight of his “mimetic desire” and shined it directly on Harper. Furious, Ethan stalks his former roommate out into the ocean, where the two drag each other underwater in a twisted display of male dominance. Ethan gets one last punch in before wresting himself away, and Cameron strokes his jaw with the satisfaction and amusement of the criminally entitled.

But there’s still one variable in this equation: Daphne. Back on land, the perfectly put-together SAHM calls Ethan to her side, consoling him with her gentle eyes and generous spray of freckles. After her affectionate nudging, he shares what’s torturing him: that something might have happened between Harper and Cameron. What that “something” was, he leaves for Daphne to interpret.

For a moment, Daphne’s face loses its careful veneer of control. She looks surprised, then hurt, then, slowly, conspiratorial. Finally, she shrugs, her brows settling. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about,” she tells him. “I mean, we never really know what goes on in people’s minds or what they do, right? You spend every second with somebody and there’s still this part that’s a mystery. You don’t have to know everything to love someone.”

But it’s her final piece of advice that seems to stick with Ethan most: “You just do whatever you have to do to not to feel like a victim of life.” Together, they saunter over to Isola Bella, the island just off the coast, and the slow-motion camerawork heavily implies they do more than take in the sights.

At dinner, the two couples sit together for one last meal (despite Ethan and Harper's attempts at eating alone), and Cameron toasts their friendship while Daphne teases next year’s trip to the Maldives. When Ethan and Harper return to their hotel room, the spark of Ethan’s ambiguous encounter with Daphne is still burning hot, and he and his wife finally have sex. Good for them, I think?!

On the boat back to Taormina, Tanya gets away from Quentin and the gang long enough to field a call from Portia, who’s stolen Jack’s phone in order to warn her boss of his suspicious behavior. She explains what Jack drunkenly admitted last night: that Quentin has no money, but he’s expecting a “giant windfall” soon. And from a delightful line delivery only Jennifer Coolidge could pull off, Portia learns Jack “was kinda fucking his uncle.” Together, Tanya and Portia connect the dots, and realize Jack and his “uncle” are working together with Greg to kill Tanya and collect her prenup payment. Tanya turns immediately wary of “the gays,” and particularly of her lover Niccoló, who plans to ferry her back to Taormina from the yacht.

She has other plans. After stalling during a languid dinner, Tanya races into the yacht’s guest bedroom and snags Niccoló’s bag, in which she discovers rope, duct tape, and—gasp—a gun. As the gays bang on the door, she starts to sob, and closes her eyes as she squeezes the trigger. Then she pulls it again. And again. After shooting Quentin, she begs him to tell the truth of Greg’s involvement in the plot: Was he unfaithful? Did he want her dead? But Quentin can’t speak; he’s leaking blood onto the yacht’s gleaming white floor, and Tanya knows she needs to escape the crime scene. Distraught, she attempts to climb over the rail and jump into Niccoló’s boat, but—in perhaps the most fitting of Tanya’s maneuvers yet—she loses her grip on the rail and flails forward, knocking her head against the rail and plunging into the ocean headfirst. The water around her does not stir, and we intuitively know her body will be the one Daphne discovers the next morning.

Sure enough, Tanya is revealed as this season’s victim, with a handful of the gays accompanying her to the morgue. But that doesn’t mean her storyline is finished. As White revealed in a post-finale interview, Greg is still out there, and Portia made it to the airport safely enough to exchange numbers with Albie pre-departure. There will be enough questions surrounding Tanya’s death that it’s unlikely either of them will escape an investigation un-ensnared. Might one or both of them appear again in season 3, and if so, how might what they know play a factor in next season’s murder mystery?

To learn that, we’ll have to wait for the next installment. In the meantime, we’re left with The White Lotus season 2’s intentionally fluid messaging around desire, and its capability to trap us and set us free. It’d be tempting to interpret Cameron and Daphne as the season’s shining example of a so-called “healthy” relationship, but their mind games and barely concealed secrets speak to an incoming implosion. Even if they navigate these hurdles unscathed as a couple , we can already see how such lies might wreak havoc in the lives of their children. Daphne and Cam’s lack of inhibition might rescue their marriage—or at least their sense of selfhood—but it traps their family and friends in a cycle of resentment and mind games. Meanwhile, Ethan and Harper’s obsessive possessiveness traps them, to the point that they can’t recognize their desire for each other unless it’s been reflected in the eyes of another.

The other characters have their own tortured relationships with desire. There’s the chronically depressed Portia, forever unsatisfied spiritually, mentally and physically, even in one of the most beautiful places on Earth. She initially eschews the quiet comfort of Albie for the “adventure” of Jack, only to return to Albie when the former proves to be an equally disappointing as a romantic partner. Then there’s Tanya, whose unmitigated need for validation might be her single most driving trait as a character. She desires nothing more than to be desired herself, which is exactly how she almost ends up in Niccoló’s grasp.

Of course, there’s also the Di Grasso men, whose desires fall in line with their respective generations. Bert, the eldest, is an unabashed if charming chauvinist who makes no attempts to conceal what he wants from women. Dominic is more subtle, but also more insidious, as he lies and cheats and pays in order to conceal but never change his irksome yearnings. Finally, there’s Albie, who has managed to convince himself that his own desires are not natural, nor are they loathsome, but in fact—when executed properly—they are noble. Remember, he’s a feminist. When Lucia plays him, he’s smart enough to not be surprised, but nor does he rethink his approach when next Portia offers up her cell number. And so the cycle continues.

Finally, we’re left with Mia and Lucia, the Italian sex workers who might be the only characters whose desires this season remained purely practical. Mia wanted to sing. Lucia wanted enough money to live her life freely. They both got what they wanted by taking advantage of the guests’s furiously screwed-up longings and jealousies. In the end, they were not the women of the Sicilian testa di moro legend, in which a traveler falls in love with a Sicilian girl, only for her to cut off his head when she learns he has a family back home. Instead, they are the women who carried on the tradition of these ceramic vases: taking what was once a symbol of betrayal and turning it into a thing of beauty.

Lauren Puckett-Pope is a staff culture writer at ELLE, where she primarily covers film, television and books. She was previously an associate editor at ELLE. 

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Let’s break down that ‘White Lotus’ finale: Our biggest surprises, disappointments

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Warning: The following contains spoilers from the Season 2 finale of “ The White Lotus.”

The season that launched a thousand theories concluded Sunday night with “Arriverderci,” as “White Lotus” creator Mike White and company bade farewell to Sicily in a super-sized 77-minute finale. Neither predicted the ending correctly (not even close), but columnist Mary McNamara and deputy editor Matt Brennan weren’t too ashamed to break down every twist and turn in the episode. Here’s their postmortem:

Hollywood can make you ‘miserable.’ ‘White Lotus’ star Aubrey Plaza just laughs it off

The actor dishes about Italian excursions with her co-stars, being ‘suspicious’ of Marvel and why series creator Mike White is like the ‘Pied Piper.’

Nov. 27, 2022

Mary McNamara : Let’s hear it for Mike White, who churned up the Ionian sea with so many red herrings that we couldn’t believe the corpse in the water would be the obvious choice — Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), with the big fortune and the duplicitous husband. (Though there was definitely some, er, fishy editing in the original discovery scene, because I know there was not a hint of hot pink floral in the water.)

None of our predictions were right, Matt! None! In part, I think, because we didn’t believe White would kill off Jennifer Coolidge.

I admit it blinded me from what I knew to be true: From the moment Tom Hollander showed up in full evil-Tom-Hollander drag I knew he was going to try to kill Tanya — ladies, never get on a boat with a jaded Brit named Quentin who has an Italian villa and no discernible income. When Tanya saw the gun in Niccolo’s bag during the penultimate episode, many people assumed (rightly) that the gun would go off in the finale. But I don’t think anyone saw Tanya’s “Dirty Harry” moment coming.

Honestly, the sight of Coolidge blasting her way through that tastefully appointed yacht was so satisfying that I am officially willing to forgive all the ridiculous plot twists and heavy-handed tension-building of this season. And she killed them all with her eyes closed!

That said, I was disappointed when she fell off the yacht to her death. I kept thinking, ‘Why is she jumping? There must be a better way to get down to the dinghy.’ Now Greg inherits! Which doesn’t seem fair at all.

What do you think?

Matt Brennan: After we published theories from the Times’ “White Lotus” watchers on Friday, an HBO insider reached out to me with a cryptic message: “Remember, it’s a tragedy!”

So perhaps I should have known better — and yet I audibly gasped when Tanya’s head hit the railing of the boat where Niccolo had been plotting to do away with her. I even half-expected her to open her eyes as she floated in the water, so fully had I convinced myself that White and Coolidge would never part. And while I am disappointed in the outcome, largely because it’s been such a thrill to see Coolidge win acclaim, an Emmy and new opportunities from the role, I am a student of the Ned Stark School of TV Deaths: To achieve genuine surprise, as White did here, you have to kill your darlings.

Whether it was in support of the most compelling finale he could have crafted from the ocean of possibilities going in is another matter entirely. Just before Tanya started shooting up that boat — the image that popped into my head was De Niro in “Taxi Driver,” for what it’s worth — I found myself checking my watch, a sign of the episode’s tediously portentous construction. Between the close-ups of paintings and sculptures, the slow-motion inserts of crashing and retreating waves and the thunderous thud of Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s score, I finally felt White straining Sunday to keep the plates spinning after a season that roped me in, bit by bit, with its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. And I ended up feeling deflated by the conclusion of just about every subplot.

In a way, Tanya’s death also killed off any possibility of a dramatically satisfying conclusion to the other story lines: Portia’s (Haley Lu Richardson) culminating confrontation with Jack (Leo Woodall) came out as a sad whimper. Daphne (Meghann Fahy) and Cameron (Theo James) and Ethan (Will Sharpe) and Harper (Aubrey Plaza) decided to let bygones be bygones, or pretend to. And the Di Grassos, Bert (F. Murray Abraham), Dominic (Michael Imperioli) and Albie (Adam DiMarco), appear to be headed home to L.A. more or less unchanged, if out of 50,000 euros. Even the season’s “winners,” Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Grannò), we glimpse only briefly, on a Taormina shopping spree, before the credits.

Then again, my own finale theory emphasized the season’s disaffection and ennui. So maybe I should have predicted my own letdown. Were you satisfied by the finale beyond the Kill Tanya conspiracy unraveling (and accidentally succeeding)?

Who lives, who dies, who commits murder? Our 7 best ‘White Lotus’ finale theories

Who’s dead? Who killed them? And how? Here are ‘White Lotus’ finale theories from the sleuths at the Times.

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McNamara: Although last season also began with mention of a murder, it was much more of a social excavation, and satire. This season leaned hard into the larger whodunit renaissance — “Knives Out” meets one of Agatha Christie’s beach resort novels. Pretty much from the word go, the audience was trying to figure out who killed whom with what and why. I thought it was clever of White to dispose of at least one favorite theory — that Ethan killed Cameron — right up front. But I think cleverness worked against this season most of the time.

At the beginning, it seemed that White was going to disembowel the notion of romance (Italy!) as thoroughly as he eviscerated relaxation (Hawaii!). But with murder so predominant, the characters and relationships were interesting only as pieces of a larger puzzle. Fahy made Daphne the series’ most interesting character in part because she actually seemed to be on vacation, and you could see her existing in a Christie novel. (Darling, I simply must have a pink gin.)

The rest of them not so much.

Did I care if Ethan and Harper reignited their marital spark? As much as I love Plaza and found her performance in the early episodes hilarious, I did not. “Do some more sightseeing,” I wanted to scream. “Go somewhere besides the hotel for dinner.”

Nor did I give a fig, or an olive, whether or not the Di Grassos found their long-lost relatives or, in the case of père and grand-père, their equally elusive consciences. (Though I definitely appreciated any scene in which they were not tediously discussing their views on gender or, heaven help us, “The Godfather.”)

Tanya remained a goddess, but Portia was a drip (though I kind of liked Jack). I’m not sure what we were supposed to think about Mia and Lucia — Grannò was lovely to watch and hear, and I suppose I’m glad they “won,” but I’m never a big fan of story lines that suggest women can get ahead by using their feminine wiles.

I agree that the season felt strangely overstuffed and empty. White seemed to want his “Knives Out” and his seven episodes too. There were definitely bright spots — Coolidge rocking taffetta, Hollander dropping insinuating bon mots, Plaza aggressively eating toast and Fahy offering marital advice. But with all the ominous music and shots of those Moorish heads, White seemed determined to make us anxious for the reveal, i.e., the end, which is never a good thing for a character-led drama.

Brennan : Fahy, as if to illustrate your point, lands the finale’s most potent punch with a mere expression, breaking like a wave across her face, as Ethan details his suspicions about Harper and Cam in a conversation with Daphne on the beach shortly after the boys’ wet T-shirt contest... I mean showdown. That character, and that performance, have supplied what pathos there might be in the plight of the rich this season, and Daphne’s advice to Ethan comes with a subtle ache that I wish White had spent more time searching for amid the bombast. “I think,” she says, clearly speaking from experience, “you do whatever you have to not to feel like a victim of life.”

That, for me, was the high-water mark of the season, along with Daphne and Harper’s stoned night in the palazzo and the dueling dates between Albie/Lucia and Portia/Jack — moments that managed the same feat as White’s enduring masterpiece, “Enlightened,” effortlessly weaving together the comedy of human frailty with its infinite sadness. As for the rest, like many resort vacations, I am already struggling to recall it; it’s not that it was unpleasant so much as unremarkable, each episode blurring into the next as surely as those dinners at the restaurant hotel.

I suppose, in a way, this is the point: The class satire you mention is, fundamentally, of wealthy Americans sojourning thousands of miles in search of a carefully curated facsimile of the “foreign,” not an actual face-to-face meeting with local people, cultures or customs. But unlike, say, Luca Guadagnino’s “A Bigger Splash,” “The White Lotus” goes to no great lengths to suggest the world beyond the resort property — Lucia and Mia are largely treated as the molls in White’s own “Godfather,” and Valentina’s (Sabrina Impacciatore) first queer sexual experience comes with a tacit quid to its quo . The series’ vision of Hawaii at least mentioned colonialism. All the Sicilians get are arancini and a volcano.

In the final estimation, then, I found this season much like its characters: too cynical by half, sometimes frustratingly, sometimes fittingly, always a little shallowly. “How are you going to make it in life if you’re this big a mark?” Dominic asks Albie in “Arriverderci” after the latter requests the “karmic payment” to Lucia, but even the season’s biggest naif has learned how to go for the jugular. “Give me 50,” he demands finally, “and I’ll help you with mom.” Maybe this is the tragedy my source at HBO was referring to — the tragedy of people in stunted, transactional, fundamentally dishonest relationships who nonetheless cling to them, because it’s all they have.

That or Greg getting away with Tanya’s money. That sucks.

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The White Lotus Season 2 Finale: Here’s Who Dies

Spoilers for the season finale of The White Lotus to follow.  

After seven weeks of speculation, theme song dance parties, and close examination of one suspiciously placed photograph of cowboys,  The White Lotus has revealed who dies at the end of what was supposed to be a relaxing week’s vacation. 

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. Niccolo‘s black bag turned out to be exactly as suspicious as Tanya believed it to be, and she pulled out the gun to tearfully shoot Quentin ( Tom Hollander ) and his friends (and still made time to demand, unsuccessfully, that Quentin tell her if Greg was having an affair). 

But it turned out to be Tanya who was the body floating in the water all along. Attempting to make her escape overboard on the dinghy parked next to the yacht, she instead hit her head on the railing, drowning and presumably allowing her absent husband Greg ( Jon Giries ) to get away with taking her money after all. But at least she stopped some would-be murderers in the process. 

In the “Unpacking Episode 7” segment following the episode, series creator Mike White admits he didn’t want to kill Tanya but “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.” And he suggested that Greg’s part of the story might not be done— “it feels like there’s got to be somebody who’s going to track it down to Greg. But maybe you’ll have to wait to find out what happens.” 

The season ends, just as the first one did, with all the major players in the airport and on their way home. 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. Reuniting with Albie at the airport, embarking on what might not be the best relationship for either of them, feels like its own tribute to Tanya, too. 

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. “When that first season became such a water cooler show [that] people were talking about, I was like, had I only known if I'd put a dead body at the beginning of  Enlightened , maybe people would've watched  Enlightened ," he told  NPR . "You realize these kinds of hooks do actually get viewers."

But the magic of  The White Lotus is that the wild theories about bloody endings (Cameron and Ethan jet ski accident? Harper murder rampage?) don’t get in the way of the character drama that’s actually at the heart of the show. In a season devoted to examining the interplay of sex and power, virtually every character has been putting themselves in dangerous situations in the name of love, lust, jealousy, or some combination of all of the above. But even though The White Lotus isn’t about death, it was about Jennifer Coolidge—and with a third season officially coming , it’s time to start reimagining exactly what that might look like. 

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The Ending of 'The White Lotus' Season 2, Explained

Our breakdown of the finale and those shocking deaths.

The second season of the HBO drama The White Lotus has ended, the surviving characters have boarded their planes, and the viewers are left with...a lot of unfulfilled storylines. Many a fan theory has been left floating in the ether after the finale's big reveal of which hotel guest met their demise, and several ticking time bombs simply fizzled out to become a tightly-kept secret. Still, the season finale delivered in stressful scenes and shocked laughter, as each of the plots among the Sicily resort 's guest and staff came to their conclusions.

For anyone who wants to commiserate on the end of this must-watch TV event, follow along as we go through this finale breakdown group by group.

Harper and Ethan make up through jealously and (possible) mutual cheating.

Oh, Harper and Ethan. The spouses came on this strange trip expecting nothing more than general awkwardness, joining Ethan's asshole college roommate Cameron and his fabulous, complex wife Daphne on a couples' trip where the couples barely know each other. Instead, they got a severe test of their relationship as Ethan was suspected for Cameron's cheating and Harper used Cameron's interest in her to give Ethan a taste of his own medicine. 

Early in the finale, after some nudging from Ethan, Harper caves and admits that Cameron did kiss her when they went up to their rooms alone. She describes the moment as a "drunken, stupid nothing," and insists that's as far as it went since Cameron is, as she rightly points out, "disgusting." Ethan doesn't entirely believe her, but he focuses on the one part of the situation where there's no doubt: Cameron tried to sleep with his wife, just like he hooked up with all of Ethan's college crushes.

With no hesitation (like, not even a word to Harper), Ethan goes straight to the beach where he fights with Cameron. The two men alternate in attempting to drown each other, but a good Samaritan breaks up the fight after Ethan lands one great last punch. He then goes for a walk on the beach, where he runs into Daphne, sunning and oblivious.

Sweet Daphne has just been trying to ignore her husband's cheating and enjoy her vacation. Ethan ruins that when he directly tells her of her Cameron's infidelity, informing her not of the night with some random locals, but with her husband's tryst with Harper, the woman she was hoping to befriend. She looks sad for a second, before she rallies and gives Ethan a similar "do what you have to do to make yourself feel better about it" speech that she previously gave to Harper. The pair then go on a walk to a secluded part of the beach, where it's heavily implied that they hook up themselves.

In addition to showing that Daphne could rule a small country with her cunning optimism, whatever happened between her and Ethan may have saved Ethan and Harper's marriage. Later that night, after the foursome have one final dinner where everything goes unsaid, Harper and Ethan return to their room and Harper asks what will happen to them. Instead of a fight or a sad separation, the couple who haven't touched each other all vacation finally has sex! We next see them at the airport, cuddling with small smiles on their faces and the reassurance that their marriage just might make it after all. 

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Mia becomes the permanent lounge singer.

A quick note for Mia and Valentina, another pairing that could've ended in tragedy but instead finds its way. After their night together in one of the hotel's vacant room, they're woken up by a housekeeper walking in on them. Surprisingly, Valentina just goes back to her post in yesterday's clothes and no one says anything. She makes some major personnel changes with disheveled hair, starting with sending Salvatore back to the beach so Isabella's fiancé Rocco can come back to the front desk. 

Later that day, Mia returns to the resort for her lounge shift, and everything's great between her and Valentina. She even offers to take Valentina to the lesbian bars to find her a real girlfriend. Right after they stop talking, with the hopeful smile still on Valentina's face, Giuseppe comes back! Remember the previous lounge singer who was sent to the hospital after Mia gave him something that definitely wasn't Viagra. He has returned with a full bill of health, only to find Mia at his piano. Luckily for Mia, as soon as the drama is introduced, Valentina solves everything by firing Giuseppe and giving Mia the permanent singing gig. Both Mia and Valentina end the night on top of the world, but between the unjust firing and the dead body that'll be discovered the next morning, Valentina probably won't hold on to her job much longer. (We don't see the aftermath, but that's what headcanons are for.)

Lucia scams the Di Grassos out of 50,000 euros(!!).

Though Daphne is the Internet's favorite character, Lucia is the MVP of Season 2, walking away from a man she only knew for three days with a year's salary in her bank account. After "good guy" Albie promised to help her get away from her "pimp" Alessio in Episode 6, the mark wakes up with big plans, telling her she may be able to come visit him in Los Angeles. He goes to meet Dominic at breakfast with a battle plan, asking his father send 50,000 euros(!!!) to Lucia's account. Albie infuses this ask with a level of entitlement that is something to behold, as Dominic understandably refuses. Instead of backing down, Albie suggests that the money could be "karmic payment" for Dominic's history of cheating on his wife, and the son even says he'll put in a good word with his mother to take Dominic back.

This whole season, Dominic has been trying to change his ways and asking Albie to put in a good word with his mom. Because of this, even though he knows his son is being scammed, Dominic actually sends the money to Lucia's account. He tells Albie at dinner, and the 20-something immediately ditches his family to go receive thanks from Lucia. The sucker and the entrepreneur enjoy a sweet night together, and just when you think that maybe they are in love, Lucia sneaks out of the room in the morning, and Albie wakes up to her closing the door.

The last shot of Lucia and Mia is the last sequence of the episode, and it dispels any remaining doubts that Lucia has pulled off the scam of the century. In a parallel to the pair's first walk to the hotel in the premiere, we follow the women as they walk away down the Taormina street, before they stop to greet Alessio at his post (surprisingly as a doorman at another hotel). He was obviously an accomplice in the scam, not a "pimp" from whom Albie has saved Lucia. So the season ends with the two women on top of the world, and Albie doing just fine at the airport (more on that in a bit).

Portia was definitely kidnapped.

Episode 6 ended with only a general vibe that Portia was in danger, as Jack insisted on keeping her away from his "uncle" Quentin's villa. But within her first few minutes of finale screentime, it's clear that Portia's being held against her will, as she discovers that her phone has "mysteriously" disappeared from where she put it to charge. Jack shrugs off its disappearance, pretending that he did not take it, and later at breakfast he reveals that Tanya's heading back to Taormina via yacht, with Quentin and his posse of gays. Jack's going to drive Portia, who's missing her phone and whose luggage is left abandoned back at the villa.

We're about to see throughout this saga that Portia is not the sharpest assistant, but she actually makes a smart move in taking Jack's phone while he's in the restroom. She calls Tanya, they debrief on everything that's going on (including the reveal that Jack and Quentin were sleeping together), and Portia says over and over that she has a "really creepy feeling" about everything that's going on. Before the two women can come up with anything actually resembling a plan, Jack comes back and snatches the phone away. Poor Portia tries to demand that he takes her back to Taormina immediately, but Jack shrugs it off and takes his sweet time getting her to the car to drive her back.

Now, I do get why Portia would feel like she has nothing to do. When Jack's negging is still gentle, he makes some valid points: she probably brought very little money with her, she doesn't speak the language, and her attempts at assertiveness aren't really...assertive. Still, it's hard not to watch and cringe and yell at her to do something as Jack gets more and more frightening. She even confronts him about hooking up with his "uncle," and when he gives a non-response, she still lets him transport her to another location that obviously won't be the hotel. Instead, he drops her on the side of the road near the airport, saying that she shouldn't go back to the White Lotus because the people who hired him are powerful and not to be messed with.

Whether you think she's right to actually listen to Jack's threat, or wrong for not even trying to help Tanya, Portia does walk straight to the airport. We next see her waiting for the flight back to San Francisco, with nothing but her backpack and her ridiculous outfit. There she runs into Albie, who appears to have shaken off the fact that he was taken for literal tens of thousands of dollars. The last we see of them, the duo are exchanging numbers to assumedly date once they get back home. (Mike White, do not let these two show up married next season, I beg you.) 

Tanya doesn't make it off the yacht alive.

And so we've arrived to the last guest of this season and the last person we thought the show would actually kill off. Tanya McQuoid was in the most danger all season, but still, she was the only recurring character. We love Tanya (and Jennifer Coolidge) which is why I was low-key stressed the entire episode. By the finale, the show was toying with the obvious sinister plot, letting Quentin become fully menacing even before Tanya and Portia connected the dots between him, Greg, and the prenup. The strongest fan theory (besides Lucia's plan) was proven true: Tanya's husband was the cowboy Quentin knew from youth and Greg hired Quentin and co. to kill Tanya so he could get all her money. I'm still surprised that the plan wasn't just to blackmail, but I guess the stakes were high this season.

Unfortunately, by the time Tanya figures out that Quentin wants to kill her, she has already gotten onto the yacht. The big boat drops anchor about half a mile offshore, and Quentin lets Tanya know that Niccolò, the mafia-connected dealer she slept with in Episode 6, is arriving to personally take her to the shore that night. It'll just be the two of them, and she won't make it to the shore. Trapped, Tanya makes a solid attempt to ask the captain to help her, but he doesn't speak English, and he's gay too! (Lots of gay villain jokes in this season, not all of them great.) That's when Niccolò arrives, with his trusty black bag that Tanya already knows carries a gun.

Tanya is a lot more enterprising than Portia in trying to escape. (Seriously, Portia, you at least didn't get your phone back in the three-hour drive?!) She knows to stall out the dinner, and she gets eyes on the bag. When Quentin says that it's time to go, she excuses herself to the restroom, and successfully grabs the bag! The next sequence is jaw-dropping, with Tanya pulling up her inner strength and arming herself with the gun, shooting Niccolò, Quentin, and Didier through tears. It's a scene that'll earn Coolidge another Emmy, as she then confronts Quentin not about the murder plot, but with a question that is sooooo unimportant: "Is Greg having an affair?" Tanya's gonna Tanya, but I was so proud of her for escaping her death...until she can't figure out how to get down to the dinghy. Not knowing to look for the stairs, she climbs over the railing in heels, slips, falls, and drowns.

So it was Tanya's body all along that floated to the White Lotus beach. It's a very classic Tanya way to go, and just like the Season 1 ending, fans are left with nothing to cheer for, feeling conflicted on how every character will move on after their trip to Sicily (except Lucia and Mia, who are living their best lives). There's also just so much that could've happened this season that didn't. Albie never found out that both he and his dad slept with Lucia, and Harper and Ethan ended up moving past their issues without a real discussion. For all the Sicilian characters, it feels like we're leaving them before the really interesting stuff happens. There could be a whole Lucia, Valentina, Mia sequel and a Quentin, Jack & co. prequel made out of my lingering questions, but that's not the way White operates. Instead, we'll now have to wait for a third installment with a new cast that might be a look at "Eastern religion and spirituality." Whatever happens next, we'll be watching.

Quinci is a Culture Writer who covers all aspects of pop culture, including TV, movies, music, books, and theater. She contributes interviews with talent, as well as SEO content, features, and trend stories. She fell in love with storytelling at a young age, and eventually discovered her love for cultural criticism and amplifying awareness for underrepresented storytellers across the arts. She previously served as a weekend editor for Harper’s Bazaar , where she covered breaking news and live events for the brand’s website, and helped run the brand’s social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Her freelance writing has also appeared in outlets including HuffPost , The A.V. Club , Elle , Vulture , Salon , Teen Vogue , and others. Quinci earned her degree in English and Psychology from The University of New Mexico. She was a 2021 Eugene O’Neill Critics Institute fellow, and she is a member of the Television Critics Association. She is currently based in her hometown of Los Angeles. When she isn't writing or checking Twitter way too often, you can find her studying Korean while watching the latest K-drama , recommending her favorite shows and films to family and friends, or giving a concert performance while sitting in L.A. traffic.

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‘White Lotus’ Season 2 Finale Gives Us the Mighty Jennifer Coolidge and the Meme-able Lines of the Year

By Alan Sepinwall

Alan Sepinwall

This post contains spoilers for the Season Two finale of The White Lotus , which is streaming now on HBO Max .

“Arrivederci,” the finale of The White Lotus Season Two, was in many ways nothing like “Departures,” the conclusion to the first season of Mike White ‘s acidic comedy about One Percenters run amok on vacation.

Yet in the most important way, the two closing chapters felt very much of a piece. Where the episodes until now made for a largely disappointing sequel season , White at the end managed to recreate the delicate combination of tones and themes that had made the first season so special.

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Yet for the most part, those scenes felt scary and almost unbearably tense. That Tanya is able to make like John Wick and gun down three of her would-be assassins should seem silly. But White keeps our POV entirely on her terrified face — which is more expressive in that moment than it so often seems when she’s floating through life — as she keeps popping off rounds until she is finally safe. Do a murder-for-hire plot and a burst of gun violence entirely fit the tone of this show? That’s hard to say, even after two full seasons. 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.

We can make reasonable assumptions: the kid looks much more like the blonde trainer than he does Theo; the looks Ethan and Daphne were trading along the isthmus were not those of people looking to admire nature together. But the ambiguity made it more interesting than if White had spelled it all out(*). Whatever happened between Daphne and Ethan, the overall experience of the trip finally pulled him out of sexual neutral, leading to a passionate night with the lonely and frustrated Harper. 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.

(*) It helps that Meghann Fahy was sending out enough heat in that isthmus scene to melt a glacier, and also that she was able to say so much with the change of expression as Daphne absorbed what Ethan had just told her. Just a fantastic performance from Fahy, previously best known for Freeform’s The Bold Type .

Daphne’s philosophy that “We never really know what goes on in people’s minds, of what they do” doesn’t really apply to the season’s least successful corner, regarding the toxic masculinity of the Di Grasso men. Everyone behaves exactly as we would expect them to: Bert (F. 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. And Albie (Adam DiMarco) is too caught up in his Good Guy fantasies to recognize that Lucia (Simona Tabasco) is scamming him. It’s all predictable and flat, with Abraham’s jubilant line deliveries providing that subplot’s only real life. 

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It’s a satisfying inversion of how Season One functioned, and arguably a necessary one, as it would be hard to imagine coming back to this show year after year if it was always going to be about the guests blithely ruining the lives of the poorer people around them.

But even a memorably violent and sexy finale can’t entirely cover for the rest of the season’s flaws. A third season has already been announced, and Cameron makes reference to taking his “friends” to the Maldives next year. Moving past Tanya will definitely help, as White had nothing new to say about her, despite Coolidge’s comic genius. Can White recapture Season One’s perfect balance of satire and pathos? And, if not, can his ability to craft big moments like Tanya on the yacht, or Daphne and Ethan’s long walk, be enough to make The White Lotus a destination worth revisiting again and again?

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The White Lotus Season 2 Episode 5 Recap: That’s Amore

In the second season of ’ The White Lotus ,’ HBO’s biting satirical anthology drama series about the social elites, the setting has changed from Hawaii to Sicily, and the narrative focus has shifted from wealth disparity to sexual politics. In episode 5, titled ‘That’s Amore,’ Ethan (Will Sharpe) confesses to Harper (Aubrey Plaza) about what happened the night she and Daphne (Meghann Fahy) were in Nardò. Albie (Adam DiMarco) and Portia’s (Haley Lu Richardson) paths fork away from each other, as the latter accompanies Tanya to Palermo with Quentin (Tom Hollander) and Jack (Leo Woodall).

Mia (Beatrice Grannò) finally convinces Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore) to let her sing for the guests, and Dominic (Michael Imperioli) tries to make his father understand that the rose-tinted view the latter has about his marriage is a creation of the man’s self-delusion. Here is everything you need to know about the ending of ‘The White Lotus’ season 2 episode 5. SPOILERS AHEAD.

The White Lotus Season 2 Episode 5 Recap

As with all other episodes, episode 5 begins at sunrise. This is the second day since Ethan has been in Italy that he doesn’t go out for a run. Instead, as he walks into the bathroom, he finds the condom wrapper that Harper has placed there. Baffled, he speaks to his wife and quickly realizes that she knows. He tells her what happened that night and why he didn’t tell her before, indignantly adding that she should be glad as he didn’t cheat even under those circumstances, as if Harper must applaud him for doing the bare minimum. Harper and Ethan later meet up with Daphne and Cameron (Theo James) and go to Edna for wine tasting, during which Harper’s biting, suggestive remarks make Cameron realize that she knows about that night.

Meanwhile, Albie wakes up with Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and discovers she is a sex worker. However, they still decide that they will keep seeing each other. When Dominic tries to speak to his son about this, Albie brushes it off, ignoring his father’s words of caution in favor of naive idealism.

Dominic finally speaks to Bert (F. Murray Abraham) about the impact the older man had on him. He doesn’t blame his father for his sex addiction, but he knows he can. If one of the parents is a chain smoker, the chances are that their child will begin smoking as a teenager. The same rule applies here. Bert might have thought otherwise, but everyone knew about his infidelity, including his wife, who remained bitter about it until her death. Even now, when Dominic tries to be as honest as possible with his father, the man doesn’t listen and clings to the presumption that he had a happy marriage.

Valentina doesn’t like that Rocco is flirting with Isabella and transfers the former to beach duty. Mia correctly deduces that Valentina is a lesbian and proposes that she (Mia) will sleep with her if the other woman lets her sing. Stunned for a multitude of reasons, Valentina allows Mia to sing until Giuseppe returns from the hospital. Almost predictably, Mia gives an impressive performance.

The White Lotus Season 2 Episode 5 Ending: Are Jack and Quentin Actually Related?

In this episode, Tanya remembers Belinda, the spa manager in Hawaii, and wonders whether she should have invested in the business plan of the other woman. It’s not that she’s feeling guilty about her behavior, but rather, she fears that Belinda, as a healer woman, has put a curse on her. Tanya and Portia join Quentin, Jack, and Quentin’s posse as they travel to Palermo on a yacht. Upon arrival, Tanya is genuinely impressed by the sheer show of wealth that is lazily scattered around her. As she tells Portia, she also feels relieved because her experiences have taught her that people generally want to be her friends because of her wealth. However, with Quentin, that wouldn’t be a problem as he already seems to be ridiculously wealthy. That night, the older members of the group go to see an opera while Portia and Jack visit the town for dinner. Tanya, as disconnected from the rest of the world as she is, thinks that the woman on the box beside them is Sicilian royalty.

It is not entirely convincing that Quentin has no motive to be friends with Tanya. His lifestyle and the mansion in Palermo must require a steep upkeep. Quentin virtually radiates with the old money vibe, and old money tends to dry up as years go by. It’s very possible that the yacht, the mansion, and the opera are all part of a long con.

However, that doesn’t explain what Tanya sees when she wakes up in the middle of the night: Quentin having sex with Jack, his supposed nephew. Admittedly, that scene has lost much of its surprise value because of ‘House of the Dragon,’ which has successfully romanticized incest to a degree.

There is no reason for Jack not to be Quentin’s nephew, even if they are indeed trying to scam Tanya. Quentin’s monologue about beauty and his incessant desire to possess it is likely there to shed some light on this matter.

Is Daphne Cheating on Cameron?

After Cameron learns that Harper knows about the molly and the sex workers, he puts his hands on her legs. Later, Harper tries to speak to Daphne about what happened at the hotel during their absence, but the other woman refuses to listen. She claims that she has found her own way to get back at her husband and has a blonde trainer as her lover. But she shows her children’s photo when she tries to show Harper what the man looks like.

It seems that Daphne is trapped in a situation very similar to that of Dominic’s mother. She is aware of Cameron’s infidelity and believes she should get back at him but hasn’t yet. The story about the trainer is most probably a made-up one.

Read More: The White Lotus Season 2 Episode 4 Recap and Ending, Explained

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Jennifer coolidge on the real tragedy of ‘the white lotus’ finale.

"[She] was so close to having a victory — and, an unlikely victory, for someone like her," says the Emmy-winning actress about the conclusion to the second season of the hit HBO series.

By Jackie Strause

Jackie Strause

Managing Editor, East Coast

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[This story contains major spoilers from the season two finale of HBO’s The White Lotus , “Arrivederci .”]

The White Lotus opened its second season with a dead body to tell viewers that someone they will meet at the HBO show’s resort dies. But after seven episodes of getting to know the ensemble in Mike White ‘s anthology return — this time, set in Sicily, Italy — the ending remained unpredictable.

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The only main character to return from season one, Tanya had moved on from the grief of losing her mother and was vacationing as a newlywed with husband Greg (Jon Gries) at the Sicilian resort at the start of season two. But Greg, who was overtly miserable and possibly having a secret affair, left Tanya mid-vacation for business, which led her to spend out the rest of her days with a group of “high-end gays,” led by Quentin (Tom Hollander). After a night of partying and a cocaine-fueled romp with another man, Niccoló (Stefano Gianino), Tanya came upon a picture of a young Greg and Quentin, which was the first clue that pointed viewers to the theory that Greg and Quentin were carrying out an extortion plot so Greg could divorce Tanya over an affair, which would nullify their prenup.

“I wondered if Mike White was reading [these theories] because he would be so impressed with people coming up with these incredibly smart analyses of the possibilities,” Coolidge tells The Hollywood Reporter of the online fervor that built week-to-week as the audience tried to figure out creator White’s whodunnit.

Her final question for a dying Quentin: “Is Greg having an affair?” When she gets no answer, she nervously attempts to get off the yacht and climb down into the dinghy, but her heel catches the railing, and she is flung overboard, hitting her head on the boat and sinking to her death in tragic and operatic fashion — just like the visit to the opera to see Madama Butterfly in the penultimate episode had foreshadowed .

“Tanya was so close to having a victory. And, an unlikely victory for someone like her, that she would have been able to manage a gun and save herself. She’s such a sad character, wouldn’t it have been cool if she survived?” asks Coolidge, when chatting the day after the finale.

Below, in a conversation with THR , the now Emmy-winning star of Legally Blonde , American Pie and Best in Show fame reveals how Tanya’s utterly tragic ending was inspired by a trait that friend White noticed in her. She also shares one possibility for her to return in the already announced third season of The White Lotus and reflects on the wild last two years of her career: “My mind is blown every day.”

When I reached out for this finale interview, I really didn’t think your character was going to be the one to die.

Aw, thank you.

It’s so weird because I thought maybe my friends were faking it when they were all asking, “Who’s going to die?” I was just really surprised that it hadn’t been leaked, or that people hadn’t figured it out. But my friends called me this morning, and actually last night, they were like, “I can’t believe you wouldn’t have told us this. I thought we were going to have a fun night. We didn’t know we were going to have to feel weird at the end of the night.” So I’m glad that people didn’t know; I’m glad.

Creator White crafted this role for you a while back with the first season. And he now explains that he knew he wanted to center season two around Tanya’s death after you spoke the season one finale line about death being the “final immersive experience.” At what point did he clue you in about Tanya’s fate?

Did you have all of the scripts at once, so you were able to see Tanya’s full and tragic arc? Or, was it episode by episode?

I think I had a lot of the script. I think I had the whole thing. It’s so weird because I was doing another job at the time, and to be honest, I feel like my brain is a little fried [in remembering]. The other job, I was definitely getting the scripts sort of dribbled; I was doing The Watcher [with Ryan Murphy for Netflix] right before White Lotus 2 . I think Mike must have had all the scripts done, and I guess I did have the whole thing. That first phone call, he hadn’t figured out how he was going to kill me. But, he did figure it out.

What was the most interesting part about playing out this whodunnit, where you know all along, but Tanya and the viewers are the last ones to figure it out?

What I like about all the theories on Twitter and the different explanations that everyone had, a lot of it was so smart. I would read them and think, “I guess Mike White did leave that clue.” And other things where the clues made such sense. I wondered if Mike was reading this, he would be so impressed with people coming up with these incredibly smart analyses of the possibilities. It was riveting to read this stuff. I would send it to my friends, and they would send me back something they’d seen, and it was like you’d spend the whole day reading this stuff. But it was so entertaining, and some of the stuff people were saying was so funny.

White described Tanya’s ending as a “derpy death,” which is such a great word to encapsulate how she accidentally dies, after becoming a near-hero in her own tragic heroine story. How did you react when you read her death scene and saw how she goes out?

It’s terrible that Tanya dies. Greg [her husband] gets all the money, and he doesn’t even have to share it with Quentin [who was carrying out the hit on her], because Quentin is dead. So it has a sad taste in your mouth. I guess I didn’t like that I was so close to prevailing. But I heard Mike White tell someone else in an interview that he sort of felt like that was stolen from stuff he’s seen about me. When he says, “Jennifer, you can handle the big stuff, but then some small thing will be the unraveling of you. Some small thing that someone else can handle.” He’s fascinated by my inability to navigate technology a lot of the time. We’re all looking at some app, and I can’t get into it. There’s something with me and technology. So it makes sense because I think he stole it from my own ability to ruin something.

What was it like to film her ending, where she is so desperately trying to figure out how to get off this yacht, and then falls into the dinghy to her death?

But it’s sort of funny when you’re an actress. The things that really mess you up are things you don’t think about. Like, “Can you leap from here to here?” That seems easy. And then it’s some other thing that ends up being the biggest challenge of the project. But we had to shoot a lot, it was seven episodes in a very short amount of time in Sicily, and then ending in Rome. And I have to say, I’m amazed Mike was able to make that all happen. To write it all and direct it all, and then be involved in the editing. I don’t know how he did it. But, he did it.

It’s sad to think you wouldn’t be a part of the third season . Have you and White spoken about a way you could still be involved in the show?

Yeah, I mean, Mike is someone where you can’t just talk him out of things. Most of the decisions he makes, I have to say, later I look back and I’m like, “Oh my God, Mike White was right again.” Who knows if people were going to get tired of Tanya? Who knows? My only bummer is that I guess any way to bring back Tanya would have to be a prequel to White Lotus 1.

Or, in flashbacks.

White did hint that perhaps the murders would get traced back to Greg in the third season. Would that bring you some solace, if Greg doesn’t get away with it?

Yeah. I think Greg should get it. He should definitely have to pay for all the misery he caused Tanya. He should definitely get his comeuppance. But I wouldn’t even mind coming back as someone different. You know, you never know.

You’ve had such a successful year after winning an Emmy (for White Lotus ) and coming off of Netflix hit The Watcher — another part that was written specifically for you, by creator Ryan Murphy. And, congrats on your Golden Globe nomination this morning .

I read in your EW “Entertainers of the Year” interview that you felt like your Hollywood offers were “flatlining” before Ariana Grande put you in her  Thank, U Next video in 2019 . How does it feel to be having such a moment at this point in your career?

The petition starts today for you to return to White Lotus 3 in a new role.

( Laughs ) Aw, thank you so much!

RIP, Tanya.

Interview edited for clarity.

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The White Lotus Season-Finale Recap: Dead in the Water

The White Lotus

Finally, after weeks of speculation and theorizing, we know exactly whose body Daphne bumped into on the  last swim of her Sicilian vacation . We had to say farewell to our sole holdover from season one: Jennifer Coolidge’s Tanya McQuoid. But since this is  The White Lotus , her death was, of course, anything but straightforward. And because of the endlessly expanding web that Mike White weaved over the last six episodes, that was just one of the many loose ends that this finale was tasked with tying up.

When our day begins, Ethan is still haunted by the thought of Harper and Cameron sleeping together, Daphne is FaceTiming her blonde and blue-eyed children, and Dominic is staring longingly at a photo of his absent wife and daughter (the photo they use for his wife, unfortunately, is not Laura Dern, but we can just pretend). Meanwhile, their son Albie is pillow-talking with Lucia and making big plans for her to come to Los Angeles. Such big plans, in fact, that he asks his father for 50,000 euros to give her. Dominic balks at this truly insane idea until Albie calls it a karmic payment and promises to put in a good word with his mother if Dominic agrees.

Elsewhere, in Ethan and Harper’s room, Ethan finally confronts his wife about her (real or imagined) tryst with Cameron that’s been occupying his mind for every waking moment. The pair go back and forth about who’s telling the truth about each of their respective suspicions, but finally Harper caves. She admits that they drunkenly came up to the room, where Cameron latched the door, but assures him that they just kissed. “So it wasn’t for the hat?” Ethan asks, referring to Harper’s original excuse for coming up to the room. “No, it wasn’t for the hat.” It was a drunken, stupid nothing, but the real issue, Harper says, is that Ethan isn’t attracted to her. This deflection doesn’t work because Ethan still doesn’t believe that she’s telling him the full story, and he’s convinced that more happened. Either way, one thing is for sure: Cameron tried to fuck his wife.

With this hunch now confirmed, Ethan storms out of the room in search of Cameron, who he finds and confronts while taking a swim at the beach — uh-oh, the scene of the crime. Years of resentment over Cameron’s “mimetic desire” and constantly being treated as less than erupts as Ethan attacks his old roommate. The pair start brawling in the water like they’re Denise Richards and Neve Campbell in  Wild Things , taking turns holding each other down under the water and flirting with a drowning. Finally, it ends when Ethan delivers a swift punch squarely to Cameron’s face and calmly exits the ocean.

His post-fight walk eventually leads him to Daphne lounging on the beach, who asks if he’s doing okay. He tells her that he thinks something happened between their spouses, and her face drops for a moment, but in true Daphne fashion, she bounces back. She tells him that she doesn’t think he has anything to worry about, before delivering yet another ethereal take about dealing with infidelity and how it’s impossible to know what really goes on in people’s minds. “You don’t have to know everything to love someone,” she says, before echoing the same words she told Harper earlier in the trip about doing whatever you have to do to make yourself not feel like a victim. What does that entail in Ethan’s case? Well, a walk they take. just the two of them, implies that having sex themselves might be the thing that does the trick —  Trading Spouses  style.

Daphne could and should start a cult. I want to see her give spiritual advice to Oprah every week on Super Soul Sunday. She should wear flowing white gowns for healing retreats held in a field and black turtlenecks for corporate TED Talks. I want to read the book her ghostwriters put together after three stream-of-consciousness interviews over arugula salad. She should run for office. She should lead a country, for all I know! In saying good-bye to all of our guests, I’ll miss her the most.

As Tanya prepares to head back to the hotel, she suddenly remembers the picture she found last night during her cocaine-fueled sexscapades. She understandably thought it might have been a dream, so she returns to the room to find that it was, in fact, real. As she examines it, Quentin walks in and tells her that the man in the photo’s name is Steve and he worked on a dude ranch. “He looks just like Greg,” Tanya says, noting the uncanny resemblance.

Tanya has been willfully blind to every red flag that has come her way since we’ve met her — it’s a part of her charm! And she isn’t snapped out of that habit until she’s on the yacht and gets a call from Portia, who stole Jack’s phone to call her while he used the bathroom. When Portia tells her about her missing phone, Tanya finally fills her in on what she saw. “He was kinda … fuckin’ his uncle,” she says, reminding us all how lucky we are to live in a world where Jennifer Coolidge gets this kind of dialogue.

Portia thinks something bad is happening (no shit) and tells Tanya what Jack let slip the other night about Quentin not really being rich and how he’s supposed to come into a windfall. Suddenly Tanya’s rose-colored glasses are shattered and it all hits her. Greg was the one who insisted they come to Sicily, and if they were to get divorced, he’d get nothing, but if Tanya were to die … that’s another story. But when Jack returns, their call is cut short and they have to return to their respective captors.

“Can you just cut the shit? Have I been kidnapped?” Portia asks Jack outright. She tells him that she knows something is up and confronts him about fucking his “uncle.” This takes the wind out of Jack’s sails, who’s no longer in the mood to follow through with the plan of showing her around town to keep her occupied. He frighteningly tells her to just let him do his job, and Portia doesn’t understand how she’s a job to do.

Tanya, now anchored at the resort, has been informed that she won’t be leaving the yacht until later when her Mafia-connected one-night stand, Nicolo, comes to fetch her via dinghy. Absolutely panicked, she scurries around the yacht attempting to call for help but drops her phone overboard: The sea’s first casualty. But ah! She spots the captain in his little knit cap; maybe he can help her. “Do you know these gays? Do you know these gays?” she urgently asks him, explaining everything and begging to be brought to shore. But of course, he doesn’t speak English, and the language barrier makes this whole conversation completely unfruitful. Worst of all, here comes Nicolo, who Tanya is convinced is her soon-to-be assassin.

A much different scene is playing out over dinner in the hotel restaurant, where all loose ends are tied up in neat little ribbons. Cameron finally slips Lucia the money he owes her before toasting his travel companions as if he wasn’t just pummeled in the ocean. Mia excitedly tells her No. 1 fan, Bert, that she got the job as the pianist. And Dominic tells Albie that he made the karmic payment, and he goes to excitedly tell Lucia to check her bank account. For his part, a good word has been put in with his mother, so much so that when Dominic calls her that night, she actually answers (more Dern!).

Back in their room, Harper asks Ethan what’s going to happen to them, and suddenly they start having sex (finally!). Lifting her up onto the table, they knock over and shatter the  teste di moro  vase that, as a symbolic omen of infidelity, has been haunting them the whole trip. Did Dr. Daphne’s advice and/or services actually work?

Things look bright for a moment, until we return to the yacht and remember that poor Tanya is being held captive. She’s haunted by Nicolo’s duffel bag, knowing from last night that it contains a gun — and now she’s trying to stall. She wants another glass of wine first, until the thought of it being poisoned seems to cross her mind.

Even though the paranoia is completely warranted, it’s such a great emotion to watch Jennifer Coolidge play with. It makes me mourn the never-made Mike White–Jennifer Coolidge project,  Saint Patsy . Coolidge would have played a paranoid actress who begins to spiral when she starts to believe an awards ceremony is really a ruse from an ex-boyfriend trying to kill her. It seems like we’re getting notes of that concept this season, but I hope that doesn’t stop White from eventually making it happen one day.

Meanwhile, Jack has driven Portia to some creepy, abandoned locale. “Why have we stopped?” Portia asks before he gets out and lights up a cigarette. “Where are we?” Instead of going to the resort, Jack brought her to the airport, advising her not to return to the White Lotus and get right on a plane. He warns her not to mess with these powerful people and tosses her missing phone out the window as he drives away.

While Portia has been miraculously spared from her grim situation, Tanya is still in the thick of it, excusing herself to use the bathroom and snatching Nicolo’s duffel on the way. She locks herself in a room and empties the contents on a bed to discover rope, duct tape, and a revolver — like this is some kind of life-size Clue board. Soon enough, the men are all pounding on Tanya’s door. Sobbing, she points the gun at the door. She’s been cornered. They break down the door, and she begins shooting her way through the yacht.

Bloodied bodies sprawled about, she sees that a wounded Quentin is still alive. “Is Greg having an affair? Tell me, I know you know,” she asks. Even in a world where Greg has orchestrated her murder, the thought of him cheating on her still consumes her. It’s so brilliant and classically Tanya. What happens next is also classically Tanya.

All she has to do is board the dinghy and escape to land, but as she heaves herself over the yacht railing, she loses her balance, plummeting onto the side of the boat and into the sea. Drawing one last parallel to Madame Butterfly, booming opera music plays as Tanya McQuoid drowns off the coast of Italy. Of course her downfall, no pun intended, would be her own doing.

Morning comes, and we see our guests one last time before checkout time. Lucia leaves Albie, taking the money and running. Daphne bids our  Survivor  contestants farewell before discovering Tanya’s body. The police swarm. At the airport, the Di Grasso men gawk at a passing woman, each more like the other than ever. Our now-happy couples sit at their gate wrapped in each other’s arms. Portia buys an elaborate disguise that somehow makes her look less insane than her real clothes.

Despite her airport gift-shop hat and sunglasses, Albie recognizes her as they wait for their flight and these two crazy kids reunite, bonding over their misguided rendezvous. Albie breaks the news that somebody died, all but confirming Tanya’s fate to Portia, who doesn’t let the bad news stop her from finally making a good decision and exchanging numbers with him. Another happy ending? Lucia and Mia joyously galavanting through the streets of Sicily, having had the best week out of everyone staying at the resort.

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5 White Lotus Filming Locations You Can Visit in Sicily

What makes a good vacation the second season of “the white lotus” says murder, mystery, and a beautiful hotel in taormina..

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Sure, there was a lot of drama on this season of The White Lotus . But did you see the hotel?

Courtesy of HBO

If you are alive, awake, and on the internet (or at least know a netizen who is), chances are you’ve heard of HBO’s The White Lotus television series. Two seasons of the anthology show have been released so far (the first in 2021, the second in 2022), and each focuses on the very wealthy but highly neurotic guests who visit the fictional White Lotus hotels, and the equally zany staff who keep the whole shebang running. But the stunning real-life settings where The White Lotus is filmed? They steal almost every scene.

While the first season was shot in Hawai‘i, the second season moved abroad to Sicily , where it follows a fateful week filled with infidelity, villainous schemes, and murder. Throughout all the drama and intrigue, characters spend time lounging on the beach, venturing outside the hotel walls, and even sailing on a murderer’s yacht. The locales may vary, but the thread that connects them is obvious—they’re all gorgeous. Their appearances on The White Lotus sparked an almost immediate “ set-jetting ” trend (where travelers go to destinations specifically to visit filming locations).

For your next Italian getaway, here are five White Lotus filming locations that you can visit, including a couple of ancient villas and one of the most eye-catching hotels in Sicily:

This season, San Domenico Palace stood in to be the Italian White Lotus .

Photo by Fabio Lovino/HBO

1. San Domenico Palace

Location: Taormina

The hotel that served as this season’s sumptuous White Lotus digs was actually the San Domenico Palace , a Four Seasons Hotel (the first season was also filmed at a Four Seasons, the Resort Maui at Wailea ). Originally constructed in the 15th century as a monastery, the San Domenico Palace is situated on a cliff overlooking the Ionian Sea and offers views of Mount Etna and the Greek theater. In 1896, the convent was transformed into a luxury hotel that later saw Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Sophia Loren, and Audrey Hepburn as guests.

Today, the hotel counts 111 suites (some are converted monk cells), two bars, an outdoor infinity pool, and courtyards and gardens that date back to when monks still roamed the grounds. The interiors of the San Domenico were designed by celebrated Naples-based architect Valentina Pisani —visitors can expect smoked mirrors, lots of marble surfaces, bronze detailing, and both historic and contemporary art. Recommended activity: Grab one of the hotel’s signature cocktails and lounge by the pool next to your can’t-be-bothered husband with a scarf tied around your hair while pretending to be Monica Vitti.

The beach featured in The White Lotus isn’t located outside of the San Domenico Palace—it’s Cefalù Beach.

2. Cefalù Beach

Location: Cefalù

Every season of The White Lotus begins with a death. This time around, Daphne (Meghann Fahy) finds a body floating in the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean in the first episode. Though the hotel scenes were shot at San Domenico Palace, the hotel beach scenes were not filmed there but rather at Sicily’s famed Cefalù Beach, with its Norman Cathedral often peeking out in the background. Cefalù, a northern Sicilian coastal town, is located about a 2.5-hour drive from Taormina and is famous for its sandy beaches, dramatic cliffs, and ancient palazzos and temples, including one dedicated to the Roman goddess of the hunt, Diana .

In real life, Villa Elena is owned by French interior designer Jacques Garcia.

Photo courtesy of Fabio Lovino/HBO

3. Villa Elena

Location: Camastra

This gorgeous property served as the home (and metaphorical albatross) of the scheming Quentin (Tom Hollander), and it nearly overshadowed the characters in every scene with its colorful paintings, frescoes, busts, and antiques. In the show, Quentin tells hapless heiress Tanya (the award-winning Jennifer Coolidge) that he inherited the grand estate from his father, and when Tanya arrives at the villa and sees the lavishness of its interiors she fatefully remarks, “Oh, my God. You must have dumped a fortune into this place.”

In reality, Villa Elena is currently owned by French interior designer Jacques Garcia , who did indeed dump considerable time and cash into restoring the storied estate to its modern-day level of opulence. “This 17th-century monastery is built on a 12th-century Norman villa, which replaced a 10th-century Moorish palace, which replaced a fifth-century Roman house, which replaced a Greek villa of the third century before Jesus Christ,” Garcia said in a 2019 interview with Architectural Digest . Good news for White Lotus fans: Villa Elena is available to rent for your own dastardly Italian vacation plans (price available upon request).

Although The Godfather was filmed at Castello degli Schiavi, there is no Godfather -themed gift shop on the premises.

4. Castello degli Schiavi

Location : Fiumefreddo

In the third episode, Albie (Adam DiMarco), his father Dominic (Michael Imperioli), grandfather Bert (F. Murray Abraham), and his new friend Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) visit Castello degli Schiavi , the iconic castle that served as Michael Corleone’s (Al Pacino) refuge in the 1972 film The Godfather . Castello degli Schiavi, which is about 10 miles south of San Domenico Palace, was originally constructed in the 1800s and has an interesting legend associated with its name, which literally translates to “Castle of the Slaves.” In the 1700s, it’s said that a doctor from Palermo saved the Prince of Palagonia’s son and in return, the Prince gave the doctor some land. The doctor constructed a castle for himself and his wife, Rosalia, but they were soon raided and kidnapped by pirates who intended to sell them into slavery. However, they were later rescued by a group of militants led by Rosalia’s lover (in a White Lotus –like turn of events) and the two were saved. The castle was known as Castello degli Schiavi thereafter.

These days, Castello degli Schiavi is privately owned, but the property is available for tours . In real life, however, there isn’t a Godfather -themed gift shop or café located in front of the castle.

Villa Tasca is available to rent on Airbnb.

5. Villa Tasca

Location: Palermo

OK, so your husband’s best friend’s wife (who you don’t even really like) just whisked you away from your weeklong vacation and charming hotel for a surprise girls’ trip without telling you. But can you really be that mad if your accommodations for the night are the Villa Tasca ? Located in sunny Palermo (on the opposite side of Sicily from Taormina), this 16th-century gem is sited in a 20-acre park dotted with citrus trees and has decked interiors featuring lively frescoes, Murano chandeliers, and majolica tiles.

However, Villa Tasca’s appearance on The White Lotus isn’t the property’s first brush with celebrity. Guests like Jacqueline Kennedy and Otto, Prince of Bismarck, have stayed at the dashing palace, and it’s said that Villa Tasca has even inspired the music of classical composers like Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner. Happily, you don’t have to let your palatial Italian dreams be just dreams: the Villa Tasca is available on Airbnb for $5,900 per night.

Screen Rant

The white lotus s2 finally explains why greg didn’t want portia in sicily.

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Warning: This article contains spoilers for The White Lotus season 2, episode 6.

The White Lotus season 2, episode 6 finally revealed the true reason Greg didn’t want Portia in Sicily. Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) and Greg (Jon Gries) met in season 1 on vacation in Hawaii, and season 2 confirmed they got married sometime in between. Unfortunately, their argument about Tanya’s assistant Portia in the season 2 premiere revealed Greg’s suspicious behavior.

Greg’s anger when insisting Tanya get rid of Portia felt out of place. He married a woman who, mid-make-out, panicked and tried forcing him to take her mother’s ashes. Greg knows who he married, so his needy wife wanting her assistant available on their vacation should be something he’s used to. Season 2 ruined Tanya’s happy ending because this argument was just the beginning of Greg’s odd behavior. Greg constantly looked at Tanya like he was repulsed by her, fat-shamed her, and was caught having a shady phone conversation. After episode 6, it’s clear Greg didn’t want Portia in Sicily because she could ruin his plan for Tanya.

RELATED: Cameron Vs. Shane: Which White Lotus Character Is The Worst?

How Is Greg Involved In Quentin’s White Lotus S2 Plan

In The White Lotus season 2, episode 2, Greg told Tanya he’d be leaving for work - on coincidentally the same day he realized Portia was still in Sicily. The night before Greg left, Tanya overheard him on the phone saying, “ Yeah, she’s clueless as usual. I’ll be home tomorrow; give you a call when I get in. All right, yeah, I love you too. ” Once Greg left, Quentin and Jack showed up, gained Tanya and Portia’s trust, then took them to their home. Episode 6 confirmed Tanya’s in danger because of Greg and his complete devotion to Quentin, who he'd do anything for. It’s also suspicious that Greg mentioned Tanya making him sign a prenup, only for Quentin to get Tanya high and in a scenario that may break the prenup terms.

How Portia Could Ruin Quentin’s Plan In The White Lotus

The timing of Greg’s exit and Quentin and Jack’s entrance cannot be a coincidence. Jack is there to keep Portia occupied. Every time Tanya and Portia go with Quentin and his group, Jack manages to sneak off with Portia. The White Lotus season 2, episode 6 made it obvious Jack was trying to keep Portia away from the party, likely because she could’ve prevented Tanya from doing so much coke and cheating on Greg, which could make Greg and Tanya’s prenup void. Jack’s involvement became clear when Tanya caught Jack and Quentin having sex because they lied about his relationship with Quentin to ensure Portia was interested in Jack.

The White Lotus creator Mike White said, “ I think Sicily is the perfect place for romance and sexual politics .” (via HBO ) White’s vision for season 2 is very present in Tanya’s storyline this season. Whether Greg and Quentin are working together to get proof of Tanya cheating so he can get more money in the separation - or they’re trying to kill her and take all of it - it’s clear Portia is in the way. Greg will betray Tanya in whatever direction the story goes in, and it’s been foreshadowed all season long. The Testa Di Moro legend , Daphne’s comment about husbands killing their wives on Dateline, the Opera, and Tanya’s tarot reading all prove she is in danger. NEXT: Harper Is Right About Cam & Daphne In White Lotus S2 (But Will It Matter?)

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The White Lotus Finale Has Come & Gone, But The Memes Are Forever

It's the only way to process Season 2's ending.

Half the fun of watching The White Lotus is scrolling through Twitter at the same time. Every time a new episode dropped, social media would light up with some of the funniest memes, jokes, and reactions to the latest quotable line or unexpected twist. That went double for the highly anticipated finale. Here are all of the best White Lotus Season 2 finale memes you might have missed while you were glued to your TV screen.

As always, The White Lotus fans delivered laugh-out-loud jokes throughout the night as the Season 2 finale aired on Dec. 11. The Sicily-set season had already provided a treasure trove of internet-enveloping moments leading up to the last episode, including Valentina’s “Peppa Pig” comment about Tanya , a mass-dragging of Ethan , and of course, Portia’s tragic wardrobe . Of course, the climactic conclusion was going to go hard with instantly meme-able scenes. Spoiler alert: Don’t read on if you haven’t yet seen the White Lotus Season 2 finale. From Tanya’s unexpected plunge to Lucia and Mia’s victorious scam, the ending of Season 2 was meme gold for fans, and these hilarious posts prove it.

Obviously, Tanya’s yacht scene was the primary source of internet humor from the finale. Her hero-to-zero turn from shooting up her would-be murderers to drowning after accidentally falling off the boat inspired some of the funniest memes.

Diehard fans also couldn’t help but wonder how Belinda, the Season 1 spa manager whom Tanya ghosted after promising to fund her wellness center, would be reacting to finding out about the passing.

Tanya wound up being the season’s victim, but there was also a clear victor: Lucia. Fans celebrated Lucia and Mia’s ability to seduce and scheme the people around them to end the season rich, employed, and stronger friends than ever.

On the other side of things, White Lotus viewers had a great time clowning Albie and Portia for their questionable decisions in the finale. Portia discovered the plot to murder Tanya, but ran away when given the chance to save herself. And Albie coaxed his dad into paying Lucia 50,000 euro, an obvious scam that was finally made clear to him when he woke up alone the day after giving her the money.

Daphne’s nonchalant cool-girl attitude charmed viewers all season long, and that was especially true in the finale.

Basically, the whole White Lotus experience can be summed up by this meme:

And now, fans will wait for the next scandal-heavy, back-stabbing, murder-filled vacation when The White Lotus returns for Season 3 .