What a thrilling adventure The White Lotus has been. After keeping us on the edge with compelling tales for seven whole weeks, the finale is here, and boy, do we have questions!
Who finally dies in The White Lotus S2 finale? Does Ethan kill Cam? Does Lucia truly love Albie?
Well, as it turns out, after killing Quentin and his friends for plotting to murder her, Tanya succumbs to an accidental death. In the other storylines, Lucia fleeces Albie of $50,000, Mia gets a permanent gig at the hotel, and Harper and Ethan forgive each other by adopting Daphne and Cam’s style of marriage.
This is just the tip of the iceberg—the finale is just as intense and dramatic as you’d expect it to be. So let’s get into the nitty-gritty of it!
Mia Gets Her Dream Job
At the beginning of the season, Mia is the one who questions Lucia’s profession and whether or not it’s okay to sleep one’s way to the top. After getting a small taste of success, Mia embraces this new way of getting ahead by offering to sleep with Valentina.
Although poor Valentina becomes a victim of manipulation of sorts, she rewards Mia by offering her Giuseppe’s singing job in exchange for helping her in her sexual liberation. I’m not sure if this will come to bite Valentina in the back or if she will go through another heartbreak—but let’s trust Mia enough that she won’t be cruel to Valentina.
Harper and Ethan Turn into Daphne and Cam
To say that Ethan went completely off the rails would not be an understatement. But it’s not for nothing—after confronting Harper several times and pushing her to the edge, she finally confesses that she and Cameron did actually kiss.
Ethan still doesn’t believe that’s all they did, and as the audience, we don’t get a confirmation about whether or not Harper is telling the truth, either. What she does admit is that her cheating does not really matter because Ethan had already lost interest in her, and their relationship was fractured before the cheating.
Ethan, of course, confronts Cam about this as well. When he denies any involvement, they break into a fight in the ocean. While this may seem to allude to the dead bodies found in the water in the first episode, the fight thankfully ends with everyone alive.
After not getting a satisfactory response from Cam, Ethan goes on to tell Daphne about what happened. For a split second, Daphne appears instinctively betrayed—perhaps, more so by Harper, with whom she thought she had developed a new friendship. But she immediately composes herself and tells Ethan that he shouldn’t read into things too much.
This segues into a scene too open for interpretation: Daphne asks Ethan to come with her to a nearby island. The glances the two share indicate that they may indulge in an affair themselves. But the scene cuts away, never revealing what exactly happened. Did Ethan and Harper sleep together? Did they simply take a walk?
Whatever it is, Ethan returns a changed man. That night after their last dinner with the Sullivans, Ethan finally has sex with Harper as a response to her question, “What is going to happen to us?” In fact, the next day, the Spillers look quite in love and happier than they’ve been on the whole trip.
The commentary is plain as day. In a twisted way, Ethan and Harper have realized that to keep the magic alive, they may need a marriage that’s more like Daphne and Cam’s—the exact thing they despised in the first place.
Lucia Fleeces Albie of $50K!
I don’t think it surprised anyone that Lucia was actually lying about being threatened by her pimp. While some fans expected that her ultimate con would be getting Albie to take her to LA, she settled for a healthy sum of $50,000 instead!
Albie tells Dominic to transfer Lucia the money in exchange for sweet talking his mother into forgiving him. Dominic warns him that Lucia is simply taking him for a ride, but Albie, in all his goodness, refuses to believe it. Sadly, in the end, Lucia leaves Albie once he informs her that the money has been transferred.
This last episode seals the deal that the Di Grasso men may never grow past their mistakes. Grandpa Bert continues to be a sexist womanizer, making a comment about how Lucia arouses him. Dominic checks out yet another girl at the airport, while Albie naively forgives Portia when they reunite.
Thank god they have that big bank balance for whenever they get into trouble!
Tanya Says Goodbye to the White Lotus
The White Lotus superfans will be extremely sad to find out who the main death of this season is. Tanya McQuiod becomes a victim of an accidental, “derpy” death, as show creator Mike White puts it.
As it turns out, everyone’s hunch was right—Quentin and Greg did know each other, and the latter had hired the group to kill Tanya.
These suspicions are first confirmed when Portia confronts an increasingly erratic Jack about it. He finally admits that Quentin is up to something nefarious and even helps Portia out by dropping her off near the airport instead of taking her to her death sentence.
While Portia manages to call Tanya in time and warn her for what’s to come, the assistant doesn’t really risk her life to go save her.
But there’s very little that Tanya can do. Even after being upfront about how the cowboy looks like Greg, Quentin denies all coincidences. She’s now at Quentin’s mercy to get back to Sicily, and so she gets on the boat taking them back to the hotel. There, she realizes that Quentin has arranged for Niccolo to kill her under the guise of taking her back to the hotel.
So, she quickly gets to her room to look for Niccolo’s gun. When the group senses her panic, they bang at her door, beseeching her to come out. The cinematography here is splendid—we see Tanya almost haphazardly shooting at the camera, but once it zooms out, it’s revealed that she’s managed to shoot almost everyone on board.
One last time, she asks Quentin if Greg is cheating on her, but the dying man only spits blood in response.
This should’ve been a victory, the happy ending to it all. Sadly, Tanya, being the emotional wreck she is, foolishly tries to climb off the ship’s rails instead of taking the ladder down to the rowboat. She slips, falls, and hits her head on the row boat. And the rest is history: It is Tanya’s body that Daphne finds in the ocean.
About The White Lotus
The White Lotus is an American satire comedy television miniseries created, written, and directed by Mike White that premiered on HBO on July 11, 2021. Season 1 was set in Hawaii, and season 2 in Sicily.
The White Lotus follows the vacations of various hotel guests over a week as they relax and rejuvenate in paradise. But with each passing day, a darker complexity emerges in these picture-perfect travelers, the hotel’s cheerful employees, and the idyllic locale itself.
Jennifer Coolidge and John Gries star in both seasons with a rotating cast in the two seasons. The series was renewed for a third season.
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