The second season of HBO‘s The White Lotus came to an end on Sunday, with the reveal of the identity of the mystery corpse seen in the premiere.
The season opened with Daphne (Meghann Fahy) chatting with some new guests on her last day at The White Lotus in Sicily, before going out for a swim… where she discovered a corpse floating in the sea.
The Season 2 finale – appropriately entitled Arrivederci – the guests all get ready to leave the resort, but not before the mysterious death(s) are uncovered.
Reveal: The season opened with Daphne (Meghann Fahy) chatting with some new guests on her last day at The White Lotus in Sicily, before going out for a swim… where she discovered a corpse floating in the sea
Mystery: The Season 2 finale – appropriately entitled Arrivederci – the guests all get ready to leave the resort, but not before the mysterious death(s) are uncovered
The finale begins with Ethan (Will Sharpe) laying in bed, imagining his wife Harper (Aubrey Plaza) having sex with his friend Cameron (Theo James) before he gets out of bed.
Meanwhile, Daphne (Meghann Fahey) is on a video call with their kids, as she keeps trying to get him to speak with their kids but he keeps hesitating before finally going to talk to them.
Albie (Adam DiMarco) is in bed with Lucia (Simona Tabasco), telling her he wants to help her and take her to Los Angeles.
Dom is looking through old wedding photos, with a twinge of sadness while, back in the villa in Palermo, Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) wakes up and finds Quentin (Tom Hollander) and the other men talking in hushed tones.
Quentin offers her coffee and asks how Niccolo was, as she said the whole night was a dream.
She says she wishes she can take them all with her, and asks if anyone has seen her assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson).
Portia wakes up in her hotel with Jack (Leo Woodall) and she can’t find her phone, saying she needs to call Tanya but Jack pulls her back in bed and says it will all be fine.
Jack says maybe she left it at the bar but she says she definitely had it last night because she was trying to find him on Instagram but he says he doesn’t ‘do that s**t,’ which worries Portia.
Meanwhile, back at The White Lotus, Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore) wakes up in the empty hotel room when a maid tries to enter the room.
Mia (Beatrice Grannò) asks Valentina if she liked last night, and says she was good, but she doesn’t answer and rushes off.
Cameron and Daphne are at breakfast with Will and Harper as Cameron and Daphne make small talk about some friends back home.
Cameron says that people can’t even succeed anymore because they might harm someone, but Harper just calls him an ‘idiot,’ which he takes with a smile.
Albie meets his father Dom for breakfast, immediately asking his father for 50,000 Euros.
Dom realizes he wants it for ‘that girl’ but Dom won’t do it, adding, ‘Albie, get real. A lot of people need help.’
‘You’re just gonna go through life trying to rescue every desperate girl you come across?’ Dom asks. and says, ‘Well, good luck with that. Don’t expect me to subsidize.’
‘Think of it as a karmic payment,’ Albie says, adding, ‘For all the s**t you’ve done,’ as Dom offers 10K Euros.
Albie says he wants her to visit Los Angeles and an amused Dom says, ‘How are you going to make it in life if you’re this big a mark?’
‘I’ll help you with mom. Give me 50 and I’ll help you with mom. I’ll tell her how sorry you are and how this whole trip, all you could think about was her, and how it seems like you’ve really changed. Yadda, yadda,’ Albie says.
‘You would do that?’ Dom says, when Bert (F. Murray Abraham) arrives, asking what they’re talking about but they don’t say.
Meanwhile, Valentina arrives at the front desk, as Isabella comes up and asks if she’s thought about bringing Rocco back to the front desk.
Valentina appears lost at first, but then remembers and agrees to bring him back, which overjoys Isabella.
Valentina orders Salvatore to go back to the beach club and bring Rocco back, which clearly angers him, asking where he’ll be the next day and she says, ‘Washing dishes’ before he takes off.
Back in Palermo, Tanya is sitting with all her luggage as she walks through the villa again, trying to find anyone.
She goes back to the photo of Quentin and her husband Greg when they were younger, when Quentin finds her.
She asks who the other man in the photo was and she says he was Steve, who worked at a dude ranch, adding, ‘we used to go fly-fishing and drop acid together.’
Tanya says he looks just like her husband Greg and the resemblance is ‘uncanny.’
Mateo comes and wants to say goodbye to Tanya since he is staying behind in Palermo, as Tanya and Quentin leave.
Back at The White Lotus, Ethan and Harper go back to their room, as Ethan is clearly upset.
‘You f***ed him. You f***ed him to get back at me but I did nothing wrong,’ Ethan said.
Ethan insists that they were doing something and she says she doesn’t know why the door was latched.
She insists she didn’t do anything and she’s not lying, adding, ‘Haven’t I always been honest with you?’
‘Yeah, but you’re lying now,’ Ethan says, adding he can’t move on unless she tells him, ‘exactly the truth.’
Harper sighs and comes clean, saying, ‘OK, we did shots at the bar and yeah, I was really mad at you about the hookers and the condom and the whole situation and then he said, “Let’s go upstairs.”
‘The night before, at dinner, he kept touching my leg, or something. I dont know I was drunk, obviously. So we went upstairs, I let him in the room, he latched the door… and then he kissed me,’ Harper admits.
‘But that was it. That was all. You came up right away. He went through the connecting door. And he kissed me for like two seconds. It was nothing. And I was drunk. And I’m not even attracted to him anyway. He’s disgusting, okay? It was a drunk, stupid nothing. I regretted it immediately, okay? That was it,’ Harper says.
Ethan says, ‘So you didn’t come up here for the hat?’ and she admits that she didn’t.
She shoots back, ‘And the real issue is that you’re not attracted to me anyway. You don’t want have sex with me. You make up excuses. You’d rather watch porn. That is the problem. Not Cameron kissing me for two seconds.’
‘You’re still lying to me,’ Ethan says, adding ,’I came up, like, ten minutes after you and you’re telling me that all you did was kiss
‘All right. You didn’t f**k him, but what happened? Did you suck his dick? Did you blow him? Did he get his d**k out?’
She insists, ‘I told you what happened,’ as Cameron storms out, looking for Cameron, but Daphne says he went out for a swim.
Ethan finds him in the water and confronts him, asking if he invited him on vacation so he could f**k his wife.
Ethan hauls off and punches Cameron as the start fighting, as Ethan tries to down him underwater but Cameron turns the tables for a bit, starting to drown Ethan as they both get up and a random man gets between them.
Ethan gets one last punch in before walking off as Cameron lays back and floats in the sea… going under the water.
Back in Palermo, Jack and Portia are having breakfast as she keeps worrying about her phone.
‘I’m here for work, and Tanya’s my boss, and I have to call her,’ Portia says as Jack says, ‘Yeah, well, she can’t talk to you now anyway ’cause she’s on the boat. They’re heading back to Taormina.’
Jack says he’s drying her back to Taormina and he wanted to show her around the island before they go back.
Portia takes Jack’s phone and calls Tanya and she tells her that she saw Quentin and Jack and they were ‘naked and stuff like that.’
‘Well… he was kinda f***ing his uncle,’ Tanya says, adding she didn’t have the heart to tell her before.
‘I feel like something bad is happening. I don’t know, I just have this really weird feeling that something bad is going to happen,’ Portia says.
Portia says that, ‘Jack got really drunk last night and he was saying how like, um, Quentin has no money, and he almost lost his house, and he’s about to come into this giant windfall or something, and Jack is helping him.’
Tanya says that she remembers the photo on Quentin’s desk… when she pieces it together, adding Greg insisted on coming to Sicily.
‘If we divorce, he gets basically nothing… but if… I die…’ Tanya says, telling Portia to meet her in Taormina, adding, ‘We gotta get the f**k outta here,’ when Jack comes back.
She tells him, ‘I need to get back to Taormina, like– like right away,’ but he says, ‘Your flight’s not till tomorrow. It’s our last day together.’
She says she needs to get back right away and he tells her not to worry.
Ethan is walking on the beach when Daphne calls to him, saying he hasn’t seemed himself the past few days.
She asks if it’s work stuff and he says no, and he tells her, ‘I think… I don’t know… Cameron and Harper… maybe something happened.’
Daphne looks wistfully at the sea before turning back to Will and says, ‘I don’t think you have anything to worry about.’
‘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 know? You don’t have to know everything to love someone,’ Daphne says.
‘I think you just… do whatever you have to do, not to feel like a victim of a life, you know,’ Daphne says.
‘You just use your imagination,’ she says, asking if they’ve been over to Isola Bella, saying she wants to see it before they leave, asking Will to walk with her, which he does.
He follows her on the sandy path to Isola Bella as she looks back at him with a smile.
The new episode comes after the Season 2 premiere set an impressive viewership standard for the seven-episode season.
The premiere was viewed by 1.5 million viewers last Sunday night, a huge increase of 63% from the Season 1 premiere on HBO Max and linear broadcasts on HBO.
Season 1 went on to average 9.3M viewers per episode across platforms in the U.S.
Viewership: The new episode comes after the Season 2 premiere set an impressive viewership standard for the seven-episode season
The series saw a resurgence of viewing in the weeks leading up to the season 2 premiere, ranking among the top 5 series on HBO Max last week.
The first season, which premiered July 2021, received 20 Emmy(R) nominations across 13 categories and 10 wins, the most wins of any program this year, including Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series.
The series was created, written and directed by Mike White and executive produced by White, David Bernad and Mark Kamine.
Resurgence: The series saw a resurgence of viewing in the weeks leading up to the season 2 premiere, ranking among the top 5 series on HBO Max last week
The Season 2 cast includes F. Murray Abraham, Jennifer Coolidge, Adam DiMarco, Beatrice Grannò, Meghann Fahy, Jon Gries, Tom Hollander, Sabrina Impacciatore, Michael Imperioli, Theo James, Aubrey Plaza, Haley Lu Richardson, Will Sharpe, Simona Tabasco, and Leo Woodall.
Much like last season, Season 2 introduces a bit of a death mystery in the premiere, which will presumably be solved at the end of the season.
The premiere opened with Meghann Fahy’s Daphne heading out into the ocean on her last day at The White Lotus in Sicily, where she discovers a dead body floating in the water.
Cast: The Season 2 cast includes F. Murray Abraham, Jennifer Coolidge, Adam DiMarco, Beatrice Grannò, Meghann Fahy, Jon Gries, Tom Hollander, Sabrina Impacciatore, Michael Imperioli, Theo James, Aubrey Plaza, Haley Lu Richardson, Will Sharpe, Simona Tabasco, and Leo Woodall
