Review: White Lotus Season 2

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The White Lotus is, in my opinion, an excellent show. The first season is a well-executed class satire. It’s entirely set at a luxury hotel in Hawaii due to early COVID era filming constraints. Rich vacationers trapped in a luxurious palace of their own financial making, served by indigenous locals who run the hotel. The way they portray the hotel workers versus the privileged guests at the hotel is refreshing, the satire is funny. Each of character is memorable: Pagliapilled Red Scare listener daughter, incel Nintendo Switch son, girlboss tech exec mom, impotent masculine dad, naive journalist wife, coddled rich heir husband. The result of the first season is the wealthy guests leave their vacation with their problems still intact, surfaced by the vacation and then reburied, while the workers of the hotel are all betrayed and exploited, including the hotel manager, who dies at the end of the last episode. 

In the second season, the setting moves to Italy. It uses the higher austerity of Italian culture to do a sexuality satire. Characters travel to old Italian villas, there’s often beautiful Italian paintings on the walls, and there's lots of sex and talk about sex. More than thematic links to the first season, it reuses the narrative structure of the first season. Like the first season, the first episode begins at the end of the linear plot, revealing that there has been a murder of someone at the hotel and then rolling back in time. Some of the other narrative structure defined in the first season, specifically how much time characters spend at the hotel, feels a bit silly in Italy where there’s tons of restaurants to try, but it’s fine. The character dynamics are still great and that’s what the show is all about.

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The heart of the second season is the interplay between two couples vacationing together, Harper and Ethan and Daphne and Cameron. Cameron and Ethan were roommates in college, with Cameron as the much more sexually successful one in their college days. Cameron has been a longtime bigshot banker but Ethan has just struck it even bigger selling his tech company. Harper and Ethan are both politically conscious and well-read, Daphne and Cameron are shallow and politically uninterested. Harper and Ethan have a tense marriage, each of them struggling with sexual interest in the other, struggling with the power dynamics of Ethan’s newfound wealth. Cameron often cheats on Daphne, and Daphne knows that he cheats, but despite that, their marriage is playful and positive. Daphne and Cameron are more attractive than Harper and Ethan, which the show doesn’t state but makes clear in the way they costume. When Harper and Daphne leave on a girls day trip, Cameron hires prostitutes for him and Ethan, but Ethan doesn’t sleep with them. Cameron leaves a condom in Ethan’s room which causes Harper to believe Ethan has been unfaithful. As Ethan and Harper’s relationship is fraught, Cameron begins to sexually desire Harper which Ethan calls “mimetic desire”, that Cameron wants Harper because Ethan wants Harper. Cameron and Harper most likely have sex, but we as the viewer don’t see it as the camera pans away.

Tension builds, Ethan and Cameron fight. Ethan leaves the fight, having let his anger out, and has a conversation with Daphne where he reveals his suspicions about each of their spouses. Daphne tells him that he needs to “do what he needs to do to not feel like a victim in the world”. He and Daphne go to a romantic island just off the coast of the hotel, alone, and the camera pans away again, while they possibly have sexual interaction. Ethan comes back to Harper renewed, and they have sex that shows his desire for her, resolving his commitment to their marriage. Daphne and Cameron’s marriage is never threatened, despite their infidelity. It’s a very interesting version of the cheating wife plot in how it continues it deeper and finds redemption for every character. Daphne is a particularly compelling character, as the wife who is being cheated on by her husband. She has almost no agency but is the moral heart of the show, for the grace with which she handles the infidelity, her commitment to her marriage in spite of it. 

The hotel workers are less central in the second season. The hotel manager, Valentina, is a closeted lesbian but committed to her job. She has her first female sexual experience with one of the prostitutes, after which she becomes more lighthearted. The other hotel workers are minor characters. One worker Valentina disdains and treats poorly, sending him to work at a worse area of the hotel for no reason, which we eventually learn is because of Valentina’s attraction to a female worker that he is flirting with. Eventually after her sexual experience with the prostitute she treats him better and brings him back to the front of the hotel. 

Two italian prostitutes, Lucia and Mia, play the role of the hotel workers in the first season. This is a satire on sex so sex workers are prominent characters instead of regular workers. They have sex with many of the characters: Cameron, Valentina, having sex with Valentina, a minor character pianist. Their most heavy interactions are with the son/father/grandfather family the DiGrassos. The family is ostensibly from Italy, before they immigrated to America, and wants to return to their roots. Bert DiGrasso is the grandfather, who makes many sexually innappropriate comments about women around him and feels despondent when he doesn’t find his roots on the trip in any meaningful way. Dominic is the father, whose wife recently divorced him due to his infidelity, and no one in his family will speak to him or go on the vacation to Italy he’s paying for besides his son Albie.

Albie is recent Stanford graduate and liberal about gender, but in a pathetic way, expecting that his values will turn into him receiving sex from women. He flirts poorly with Portia, a character I’ll get to talking more about, until he is drawn to the prostitute Lucia. He’s unaware that she’s a prostitute and she takes advantage of him with that, with the irony that Albie’s father Dominic already slept with Lucia as a prostitute in one of the early episodes. Lucia stages a need for $50,000 from Albie, saying she needs it to escape her life of prostitution, and Albie asks Dominic for the money in exchange for putting in a good word with his mother. Lucia takes the money and betrays Albie, but Dominic’s wife seems encouraged by the word Albie put in for her unfaithful husband and the show ends with some hope that their marriage will be rekindled. The joke of these three characters is that they’re all sort of the same, just at different phases of their life, holding themselves to different generational standards. They all don’t treat women very kindly or thoughtfully but all think they treat women the best of the three. They’re also all three attracted to women that are the same age, women that are Albie’s age.  Oftentimes they are all attracted to literally the same woman, turning their heads at once to look at a beautiful Italian girl. The characters here are interesting but they don’t progress. Albie starts sexually weak and is gradually revealed to be even more sexually weak. 

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The final plot is one that I found odd in immediate reaction. Tanya is a wealthy older woman, heiress to a large fortune, but she’s ditzy and not always there during conversation, and is prone to retreating into her shell. She’s married to a man named Greg. They have awkward dates at the beginning of the show, attempting and failing to evoke the heights of romantic movies set in Italy, but then Greg leaves, for urgent business in America. Tanya has an assistant named Portia, who’s a Gen-Z youth who talks about “doomscrolling” and “being in her room for past two years”. Portia first flirts with Albie early in the show, but isn’t very excited by him, in the way that he’s so passive. She meets a suave tattooed British chav named Jack who excites her more and has a fling with him.

In the middle of the show, Portia and Tanya meet Quentin. Quentin is a wealthy and very well-spoken gay man, with a massive Italian villa full of art where he hosts parties. He grows fond of Tanya. He takes her to the opera, takes her on his yacht, does cocaine with her, introduces her to a beautiful young Italian man who Tanya has sex with. Jack, who turns out to be Quentin’s nephew, takes Portia on similarly idyllic and romantic adventures around Italian cities. He’s confident, capable, and desirable to her, unlike Albie. 

Something is off about Tanya’s situation, but you don’t quite know why. Why are these very wealthy and interesting gay men giving so much to this old woman who isn’t that interesting to talk to, isn’t sexually desirable to them in any way? The answer is money. Quentin knows Tanya’s husband, and together they planned to kill Tanya to get her fortune, for Quentin to continue to live his lavish lifestyle. While on Quentin’s yacht, anchored outside the hotel, Tanya realizes the plan, and she takes a gun from their hired killer and shoots everyone on the boat. But now she’s stuck on the yacht alone, having just murdered three people. She attempts to jump to a smaller boat, the boat on which they planned to kill her, but she falls into the ocean and drowns. Meanwhile, Portia confronts Jack about the plan, and he silently takes her to the airport, tells her “these are powerful people that you shouldn’t mess with” and abandons her. 

I had no clue where this arc was going, but I did not expect a premeditated murder conspiracy. But thinking about it more I think it’s good, just poorly executed. How Quentin and Greg know each other isn’t specified beyond hints that Quentin used to do exotic drugs in America and met Greg there. Tanya’s murder rampage also doesn’t quite make sense. It’s a huge tone shift out of nowhere, and feels like a brutal set of killings without much narrative reason. And the plot never brings back Greg, the mastermind husband, to connect him to what’s happened. 

Setting aside the poor execution, I think what they were doing with Tanya was really interesting and central to the themes of the show. Tanya is an older woman, lacking sexual power, and is taken interest in solely for her financial power. That’s strengthened even more by the fact that the people running the scheme are homosexual males; they don’t even have the chance of being attracted to her. She loves that people are paying attention to her, taking her seriously, but they’re doing it in a cynical way that undermines all the respect they gave her. The casualty in the class satire first season is the hotel manager, but the casualty in the sex satire second season is the older woman who has no sexual economy left. It’s very sad. 

Why was the execution bad? The simple answer is that they wanted to keep the viewers on their toes and not reveal who would die until the last episode because that was so successful last time. The death in the first season of White Lotus, hotel manager Armand, comes unexpectedly to the viewer but it’s perfectly done. You’re paying attention to the rich guests, and expecting one of them to do something horrible, but it’s the hotel worker who lashes out and pays the price for it. Armand’s death in retrospect seems perfectly organized as the endpoint of his actions throughout the first season: he’s relapsed on drugs, he’s been abused by and abusing one particular guest, he’s working in an exploitative industry. Armand dies in the last episode, but while unexpected it feels central and like a logical continuation of the plot. 

The problem is that this time, by waiting for the big reveal, they hide Tanya’s character arc and then reveal it all at once in a messy way. They tried to hint that something sinister is going on when Tanya catches nephew Jack having gay sex with Quentin, with Jack having just had straight sex with Portia, but that doesn’t tie into the murder they’re conspiring towards, it’s just shows Quentin is a messed up guy. They start to unveil the conspiracy at the very start of the last episode, with Portia waking up in bed with Jack with her phone stolen, and one of the foreign gay men poorly speaking English about Tanya “nearing the end of her life” and another crying to her, but even then they’re just foreshadowing tone, not explaining the plot. They hold off on the plot until the very end of the episode. To complete her thematic arc in the final half of the last episode they had to both explain that Tanya was being taken advantage of, and then give her a moment where she could react against the fact that she had been taken advantage of. They half-explain a grand conspiracy to murder her, and then pivot to Tanya having her moment of personal actualization, A24-style female character murdering her oppressors. And then she falls off the boat, because she really is weak, she’s an old lady, not a female action hero. While it’s very interesting, it’s a tonal shift from the rest of the show, and doesn’t land what could have been an interesting central moment.

It also cheapens Portia’s arc. She had some genuine heartfelt moments with Jack, coming out of her zoomer quarantine isolation with him. They were an interesting couple, not long term but as a vacation fling. But the relationship is ruined by him being in a conspiracy to literally murder her boss. I don’t think it completely fails, but a normal breakup would have fit her arc more than a random plunge into a murder plot and a total betrayal by someone she trusted. It does lead to the cute final moment of the show where Portia and Albie, both having been betrayed by the people they met and had sex with on vacation, give each other their phone numbers as a simultaneous admission of each of their sexual failures and hope for their future. But whether that makes literal sense when Portia is in the middle of realizing that her boss has been murdered and the guy she was running around Italy with was plotting it is questionable. 

I still think White Lotus is excellent. This is a small mark against its otherwise perfect record. I really admire how White Lotus manages to be accessible and have depth at the same time. HBO could have rolled it back with another class satire with a new set of characters in a new tropical resort location but they tried something different. The second season results in a completely different thematic arc than the first. It’s pro-sex and I think it’s pro-cheating on your wife, as long as you don’t get caught too badly. Morally I’m not going to condemn anything and I think it’s pro-cheating on your wife in the sense that it’s about choosing life, about choosing the things that make you feel passionate, rather than languishing in passivity. Some could criticize this as rich people's problems, but White Lotus has the first season to fall back on. I look forward to seeing what they do next.