‘The White Lotus’ Season 2, Episode 4 Review: No Wasted Opportunities

For anyone who has read my review of the previous episodes of Mike White‘s dark comedy series, The White Lotus, then you may know that I have made no secret that the Sullivans (Meghann Fahy and Theo James) and the Spillers (Aubrey Plaza and Will Sharpe) are my favorite characters in this entire series. Any moment involving these characters, the lying/deceit that covers up their flaws and imperfections like masks, tension that sustains throughout their little moments of dialogue. It is all incredibly interesting to watch.

On the surface, everything has returned to where they were before: Ethan and Cameron are (or at the very least try to be) the best of friends, Harper continues to look down on the Sullivans, and Cameron and Daphne continue to act like the perfect upper-class couple. However, we as audience members know better than that. We know that the tension has only increased because it is not just dividing the two couples apart, but it’s dividing the couples themselves.

When Harper returns to her hotel room to spend some time with Ethan, she finds a condom wrapper underneath a pillow on the couch, but instead of confronting Ethan about this, she instead fumes about it and acts very passive aggressively against her husband. It makes sense though why she does this because in the previous episode Daphne revealed to Harper that when men earn a certain amount of money, they tend to cheat on their spouses.

Cameron himself admits this to Ethan when he proposes that they party with Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and Mia (Beatrice Grannò) that not cheating on their wives would be a “waste of an opportunity” and they need to take advantage of the women who throw themselves at them. However, despite Cameron’s silver tongue, Ethan remains faithful to Harper and does not engage in any debauchery, but at the same time, he also promises not to tell anyone about Cameron’s infidelity. Cameron swears Ethan to not break “the bro code,” but in making such a promise, conflict spurs between the once-happy Ethan and Harper.

Due to a lack of communication, Ethan and Harper remain at this incredibly awkward standstill with each other, and to see it tear them apart is incredibly satisfying and interesting to watch, and to compare that with the Sullivans who think they don’t know what the other knows adds to the deceit and fakeness that shrouds both of these couples.

This conflict surrounding the Sullivans and the Spillers is by far the most interesting aspect of this entire show, and I wish that this entire series was just about them because all of the other characters populating this show, are simply not as interesting as these couples. Granted, Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) and the love triangle surrounding Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), Albie (Adam DiMarco), and Jack (Leo Woodall) certainly had their moments and I was always at least somewhat invested in their conflicts.

However, overall, the show still remains fairly unbalanced with the level of interest the series is able to sustain with its entire cast. Some characters are more interesting than others, and until that changes in the last three episodes, it will continue to be a detriment for this season.