‘The White Lotus’ Season 2 – Episode 6 & 7 Reviews: Mike White Delivers Big And Unexpected Payoffs In Stunning Finale

Mike White’s The White Lotus is a strange show, but a very good kind of strange. What started out as a relatively low-key story about people traveling to Italy to either get away from their demons or cope with their flaws has slowly twisted into something bizarre and unexpected. Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge), a ditzy yet incredibly wealthy wife comes to Sicily to live out her fantasy of having the perfect Italian vacation only to realize that she is being set up into a possible plot involving her death set up by her husband Greg (John Gries) and Quentin (Tom Hollander).

Albie (Adam DiMarco) and Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), are two hopeless young romantics thinking that they found the love of their lives, but later finding out that their possible soulmates turned out to be nothing either than cunning manipulators or complete sociopaths.

Even the characters that have much lower stakes and aren’t involved in crazy assassination plots or conniving partners experience some of the life-changing character growth that showcases just how much they’ve changed since the first episode.

Ethan (Will Sharpe) and Harper (Aubrey Plaza) finally become intimate and sexually attracted to each other after several episodes of mind games and uncertainty about whether one cheated on the other with one of the Sullivans (Theo James and Meghann Fay), something the show still very much leaves open to the interpretation.

Dominic (Michael Imperioli) finally has a chance to reconnect with his wife after agreeing to make his “karmic payment” by sending money to Lucia (Simona Tabasco) at his son’s request.

Even Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore), the manager of the White Lotus and by far the least interesting character in the entire series, manages to have her own little character arc as after spending a night with Mia (Beatrice Grannò), she no longer becomes this by-the-books prude workaholic. She has become, in a way, sexually liberated from this experience, and she soon realizes that she can be more than what she’s become.

The White Lotus is a show about setups and payoffs, and while the setups might not be the most interesting concepts in the world or take forever to become interesting, this show does an excellent job with its payoff. Every single character, from the biggest to the smallest, has some satisfying end to their journey, and what makes these resolutions even better is that they completely change how someone watches the show in a second viewing as everything that seemed pointless or strange at first is completely justified in retrospect.

Very few shows manage to reward you for multiple viewings, much less give you some motivation to watch the entire season again, but White manages to do just that. With the knowledge of what has happened in this season, it could make a rewatch possibly even more exciting as now that the audience knows that it was Tanya’s body that Daphne discovered in the beginning of the season, it will be interesting to see what new details audiences can pick up that they didn’t originally in the first watch.

In a future rewatch, it might be possible to know for sure whether Harper really was telling the truth about her and Cameron or whether they did have an affair as Ethan thought. It might be possible in a future rewatch just how planned and coordinated Lucia and Mia’s plans were to scam the hotel and its residents, or if it was just a spontaneous idea they thought up as time went on.

Perhaps in a future rewatch the audience could see if there was a way to prevent Tanya’s hilarious death. All of this is possible, and in premise the show rewards future rewatches, and yet, as Daphne states in the last episode, “A little mystery? It’s kinda sexy.”