‘The White Lotus’ Season 2 Episode 7 Recap: That Sinking Feeling

My kids, and therefore my wife and myself, were big fans of the Nickelodeon show Sam & Cat, a crossover between a character from iCarly played by Jennette McCurdy and a character from Victorious played by Ariana Grande. This show was very funny, because McCurdy and Grande are very talented. There was this one scene where Sam, who will eat literally anything, creates some kind of grotesque concoction she calls a sauce. Cat tries it, spits it out extravagantly, then in a polite kewpie-doll voice says “It’s not a sauce for me.”

The White Lotus is not a sauce for me.

But here I am and here you are and we are all together, so let’s review the events of the final episode. As predicted, Lucía successfully scams Albie (via Dom) out of an enormous sum of money to placate her fake pimp, who’s just some guy she’s friends with; she skips out on Albie during their final morning together, never to be seen by him again despite his invitation to move her to Los Angeles with him. 

Furious with Harper for her admission that she kissed Cameron and convinced something even more untoward happened, Ethan fucks Daphne. (I know, I know, you don’t see it, but folks, come on.) That night, Ethan rekindles his sexual relationship with Harper, fueled at least as much by Daphne’s words of wisdom about doing what you need to do independently to not feel like a victim as he is by actual ardor for Harper.

Mia has successfully fucked Valentina into being a half-decent boss, prompting her to reinstate Isabella’s fiancé Rocco to the front desk and promising to take her clubbing to meet real actual lesbians, though she promises to have another evening of carnal delights with her in the meantime.

And Tanya drowns after bashing her head against a boat in an attempt to flee after murdering several men on Quentin’s yacht, having successfully figured out, with her assistant Portia’s help, that these men meant to murder her so that her husband Greg could inherit her fortune and pass the savings along to them to help maintain their palatial estates across Europe.

Well, you’ve certainly got to give it up for Jennifer Coolidge, that’s for one thing. A lot of Coolidge fandom is that weird performative thing that all actor fandoms seem to do at this point where it’s more like you want this person to be your parent or best friend than a dude who happens to be really good at acting, but let’s put that aside, because she really is good at acting! It’s hard to convincingly play a stupid person without it devolving into a million old jokes, and Coolidge has consistently pulled that off as Tanya. This episode in particular is the ne plus ultra of the role, as Coolidge portrays Tanya’s final realization that she’s surrounded by men who intend to murder her for her money like a cocker spaniel figuring out calculus. 

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I’ll also hand it to Haley Lu Richardson as Portia, Tanya’s, what’s the word, estranged assistant. While Tanya is being shepherded to her appointment in Samarra, Portia spends the day being very obviously and flagrantly gaslit by Jack, Quentin’s “nephew,” i.e. some dude he hired to woo Portia while Quentin was busy setting Tanya up for the big sleep. I’m not sure what’s more frightening: the ease with which Jack cuts her off from contact with anyone else, or her willingness to go along with ideas she knows are bad for her, a habit no doubt inculcated during years of working for shitty bosses like Tanya for peanuts, not to mention the whole patriarchy thing.

And the third trophy goes to the season’s MVP, Meghann Fahy as Daphne. There’s a marvelous moment when Ethan comes to her about his suspicion that Harper and Cameron have hooked up where her perfectly poised face falls, just for a moment; after that, boom, it’s back to the usual platitudes about how life is what it is and people are what they are and ultimately all you can do is make hay while the sun shines or whatever. It’s in this moment where her relentless cheerfulness and optimism is revealed as its own form of Cameron-style sociopathy, where as long as she can feel she’s gotten one over on her husband, she truly does not care what happens to anyone else anywhere at any time. This is by far the most complex writing on this goofy show, and Fahy shoulders it effortlessly.

The problem of course is that none of this is treated like it’s real. It’s all ultimately played for laughs, and for the bitter irony of how lousy rich people mostly wind up okay in the end. So for the life of me, I don’t understand how any viewer on earth can actually get invested in, say, Tanya’s life-and-death struggle to escape that boat. Like, so what if she kills a bunch of comedic gays and a mafia guy who spent the previous evening rogering her, before bonking her own head in during an (on-point, character-wise) attempt to escape by jumping directly into the nearby dinghy instead of into the ocean first? These are not real people, they are the conveyor belts upon which jokes are delivered! It’s like getting really worked up about dead Dr. Evil henchmen in Austin Powers!

And who cares if the final image is one of triumph for working-class heroes Lucía and Mia? Of course they’re better off with, and honestly more deserving of, their money than Albie or Cam or Giuseppe or anyone else they scammed, but they triumphed over ciphers, not people, and their motives are no more or less noble than any of the marks they ripped off. You might as well root for the Whammies on Press Your Luck, or for the Noid to defeat Dominos Pizza. 

Much as I wish that I did, I don’t see what people see in The White Lotus. Check, please.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.