The White Lotus (2022): Season 2 Review

Scorch Score: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Why You Should Start With Season 2 of The White Lotus

When I tell you guys that I truly believe that most people should start with Season 2, I will gladly die on that hill! I was told forever to start watching this show, and in my Season 1 Review, I noted that it covers the heavy subject of wealth satire, disguised by some humor, which made it difficult to digest quickly for empaths such as myself. However, Season 2, in this writer’s opinion, is much more effective and engaging for audiences that might not “get” the show or felt bogged down by the first season’s excessive dry humor. So, I instructed my sister to watch Season 2 (yes, out of order) and she LOVES it! Now she is going back to watch Season 1 before diving into Season 3.

A Different Approach to Satire

This season was different than the first in terms of character development and narrative structure. In the first season, the writers and director took a direct and sometimes painfully dry approach to the satire (White Lotus was originally supposed to be a mini series, but was made into an anthology series after its success) that I believe was intentional, however, I was concerned that the path of storytelling would be lost in a second season that was never meant to happen in the first place. But let me tell you, I was pleasantly surprised.

In my opinion, the second season has better writing, jokes, scenarios, and complex meanings behind dialogue and guest interaction. The second season also diversifies the outcome of hotel guests and working class characters. In the first season, everyone who was ‘wealthy’ got off Scott-free, no matter the plot, while the working-class characters ended up in a worse condition than at the beginning of the show.

In Season 2, however, the outcomes are not divided strictly between wealthy guests and working class. Instead, we get characters with diverse motivations and goals that land them in different outcomes. For example, the only character to follow the show into Season 2 is Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), who meets a terrible end at the bow of a boat when she tries to escape from hired mobsters and ends up hitting her head on the dinghy strapped to the side of the yacht (also after she kind of impressively takes out all of the killers by herself!).

Tanya is one of the guests, one of the elite, and she meets a gruesome end and drowns in the ocean, with no one the wiser about what happened to her. I thought it would be satisfying to see one of the spoiled and privileged characters perish, but it only made me dumbfounded that I couldn’t guess where the writers were taking the plots! ( I do love when a show can surprise me!). In White Lotus fashion, the opening scene shows a body floating up to the beach, and the entire time I was certain it was going to be someone who didn’t deserve it. But then I thought to myself, did Tanya deserve it either? As clueless as she was, she was never intentionally harmful to others. So, I looked to the other plot lines to find more lessons on humanity…

Portia’s Journey

Tanya’s assistant, Portia (played by Haley Lu Richardson), exemplifies someone who wants to ‘get lost’ on foreign soil to just feel something, due to the fact that she never experienced much in her young, middle-class life, only to discover that ‘getting lost’ can be extremely dangerous and not what you expected. Portia runs off with Tanya and their assortment of new, wealthy friends, thinking they are harmless, when in reality, they trusted complete strangers in a foreign country simply because they were wealthy and seemed nice enough.

Turns out, those nice strangers were hired to murder Tanya for her prenup money, and it is all but confirmed that Tanya’s new husband Greg ordered the hit to get out of the marriage with the money. If this is true, then I can’t wait to see if they explain this further with Greg’s character from Season 1.

Portia, luckily for her, is not murdered, and is instead let go by the young boy that traveled with the strangers as a sex worker. The boy takes pity on Portia and lets her go. Portia’s response, I believe, mirrored the audience’s—the disbelief that she was safe and alive after doing something so reckless. When Portia returns to the hotel and encounters Albie (Adam DiMarco), the young son visiting The White Lotus with his father and grandfather on an Italian home-finding mission, all she can do is move forward, telling him little about her time with the mob and nothing of the untimely death of her boss.

The Di Grasso Family’s Generational Trauma

Albie, on the other hand, had his own insane plot line that speaks to the human condition of repeating generational trauma. Albie’s father, Dominic (Michael Imperioli), a sex-addict, employs the services of two escorts, Mia (Beatrice Granno) and Lucia (Simona Tobasco), to keep him company in the evenings. However, once Albie’s grandfather, Bert (F. Murray Abraham), discovers the indecency, he chides Dominic, and the girls no longer visit his room, but they stay around the hotel attempting to find new work. During their search, Lucia clings to Albie, and they quickly form a physical relationship.

Albie, in his naivete, doesn’t know Lucia is an escort, and upon discovering this, begs his father for thousands of dollars to buy Lucia her freedom. Dominic, however, tells Albie that he is being targeted by the escorts and should be less gullible. Upset, Albie reveals that he knows about his father’s infidelity and promises his father that he will “help him with mom” and put in a good word if he transfers the money to help Lucia.

At first, this conversation was great, and I was impressed that Albie, with his kind and shy nature, confronted his father so openly. But then Albie makes a drastic mistake by offering to smooth things over with his mother, to help his father get back in her good graces. This is where Albie loses credibility as a wholly good person. He is showing his father that he is willing to lie to his mother that his father has changed (even though Dominic was inviting escorts to his room the day they arrived at The White Lotus).

Albie shows that he is willing to hurt others to get what he needs. And not just any others, but his own mother, whom one can assume he loves. I had hopes that Albie would be the only character to come out of Season 2 with a renewed understanding of the world and an ethical answer to live harmoniously, like Quinn from Season 1. However, Albie is just as lost and terrible as the rest of the men in his family—it’s classic generational trauma.

Albie’s father ends up giving him the money for Lucia, and the three men go to find their ancestral home only to be brutally rebuffed. After this, the grandfather becomes upset, and Dominic tells him how he never learned to love correctly because he witnessed infidelity from his own parents too. It’s a pivotal scene when this confrontation occurs at the public dinner service, and Dominic realizes that his actions are a result of his childhood.

It’s almost a moment of clarity; however, that all disappears with the final scene of the three men in the airport. While waiting in line, they see a young woman in attractive clothing, and they all three turn simultaneously to gawk at her as she walks by, proving once again that patterns are exceptionally challenging to break, even with fleeting moments of clarity.

The Two Couples: Toxic Dynamics

Now, the most interesting group from Season 2, that likely spurred a lot of relationship conversations amongst couples, was between: Daphne (Meghann Fahy), Cameron (Theo James), Harper (Aubrey Plaza), and Ethan (Will Sharpe).

Daphne is married to Cameron (a wealthy stock broker), and Harper is married to Ethan (Harper is a lawyer and Ethan just sold his own company). Harper and Ethan are newly wealthy and therefore appear to have the “awareness” discussed in the Ponderfire Community. They communicate well, value honesty above all else, and point out flaws in Daphne and Cameron’s marriage, like their apparent dislike for one another that is veiled by sexual intensity.

At first, I was certain that Harper would rise above the influences of these unlikely “friends.” However, when the women leave the hotel for the day, Cameron convinces Ethan to go out and drink, where they meet Lucia and Mia. They take the girls back to the hotel room, and Cameron hooks up with them, while Ethan sits in the corner, looking scared out of his mind.

Ethan now has the chance to test his value of honesty when Harper and Daphne return from their overnight stay. But three times, he chooses to avoid the question instead of telling Harper the truth. This is where the cracks begin.

Instead of being honest, he lies, which makes Harper paranoid that Ethan did in fact cheat on her. When the truth gets out, Harper is fine with it, and both try to move forward, but there is now a pungent odor to their dynamic. Ethan goes for a swim and sees Cameron with Harper at the bar, just hanging out. When he comes back, they are gone, and he becomes paranoid that Harper is trying to get back at him for not telling the truth about the escorts in the first place by sleeping with Cameron.

Ethan dashes to his room and finds Harper has the door locked, another detail that fuels his paranoia—paranoia that he himself created when he agreed to go out with Cameron (who is arguably one of the least likable characters I have personally ever seen on screen, mostly because he is so realistic).

When Ethan confronts Harper about his concerns, she tells him that Cameron only kissed her briefly, but Ethan doesn’t believe her, and frankly, it becomes hard to tell if she is lying. We see flashes of Ethan’s assumed series of events, where Cameron is trying to be intimate with his wife. So he finally decided to confront Cameron.

I was so excited for this—to see someone immoral actually face consequences for their actions. And it was satisfying. But quickly, the confrontation didn’t even matter. Cameron gets a black eye, and the trip returns to normal. Worse actually, because Ethan, in his despair that his marriage is ruined after this trip (from the influence of Daphne and Cameron but also from his own inability to act honestly), asks Daphne for help. Bad idea, considering she is just as messed up. She earlier claimed to Harper, indirectly, that her children, or at least one, is the child of her trainer back home and not Cameron. In an intimate scene where Daphne FaceTimes the kids back home, the audience can clearly see Cameron’s disgust as he looks in the mirror before he slaps on a smile to video chat with them. So, yeah, lots of problems in their marriage that they are avoiding, which will likely lead to a terrible ending for them and those innocent children.

So, after Cameron gets his well-deserved black eye, Ethan asks Daphne for advice. She looks at him, looks at the sea, and then leads him to the abandoned house that tourists can visit. The scene fades away as both of them disappear into the foliage and trail leading up to the house. Audiences are likely being led to believe that Ethan and Daphne hook up to make everything even, but this is before there is any clarification that Harper and Cameron did in fact cheat. I believe they did, so now all four of them are guilty of betraying their own partners. Gross.

They meet for dinner on the last night, laugh about their next trip being in the Maldives, and both couples are seen being lovingly affectionate to one another as they wait for their plane in the airport. And their eyes are full of sorrow, complacency, anxiety, and love—or what they think is healthy love. So Harper and Ethan come full circle into depravity. At first, they are a healthy, well-balanced couple that needs to discuss their sex lives but that’s it, and by the end, they become the exact thing they hated about Daphne and Cameron.

They showed enough fight throughout the season to convince me that they would be alright, but the end scene simply solidifies a dark truth: anyone can be convinced of their own happiness.

More Than Just a Binge-Watch

In my opinion, The White Lotus is not a binge, but something to take in slowly, since the truths of its satire are baldly exposing human nature in vicious and uncomfortably honest ways. Humans are terrible to each other, rich or poor. And The White Lotus proves that class divisions only perpetuate that horrible nature.

It takes strong-willed individuals to see their impact on others and themselves. Everyone on The White Lotus Season 2 could’ve done with a healthy shot of reality. However, Lucia and Mia, despite their deception with Albie, seem to be the only ones that are aware of the “game of life” and decide to live independently from the game, sadly using kind people to get what they need. But what is to be expected from two girls that live in a world that doesn’t actively help them live better lives? Can you say you wouldn’t do the same?

Final Thoughts

The White Lotus Season 2 was excellent, and I actually thought the writing, plot lines, and characters were even more compelling than the first season, which is very impressive for a show that was meant to be only one season.

I like that the characters were brand new and had their own stories and arcs that were completely different from the first (although I couldn’t help but make some close comparisons). The working-class characters gained some things in the second season, which somehow felt more balanced, and Tanya had one of the craziest, funniest deaths of any character for a dark comedy! The one thing I am left curious to know, as I gear up to write a review for Season 3 (I have only watched one episode so far!), is how they intend to explain Greg.

In the first season, he seemed very sweet, so when Tanya dies due to his actions of hiring a hit on her (which went awry but caused her death anyway), it confused me. Why would he do this? The real question is: What the heck is up with Greg?!

Review for Season 3 will be posted April 27th at 10am CT.