That White Lotus season two finale
That White Lotus season two finale
Daphne emerges a winner but her coping mechanisms—a fitness trainer, massages, and walks on rocky beaches—should come with a warning.
This post contains spoilers.
The second season of The White Lotus aired its final episode over the weekend. It is a series that hops around fictional White Lotus luxury hotels and destinations, showing the dynamics between its rich clientele and the hotel staff and locals who cater to their whims and quirks.
The first season was set in Hawaii and the theme centered on class and privilege, with the guests and their white messiah complex wreaking havoc on the islands. The newest season is set in Sicily and explores desire, specifically the transactional nature of sex and relationships. Compared to the previous season, the ending this time hinted at the power available to everyone: even if you belong to the minority group of being poor and female, this does not excuse you from making a major play.
Each season kicks off with the death of a lead character whose identity isn’t revealed until the last episode. It’s a whodunnit although I find that the guessing game is moot: as you meet each character and learn their neuroses, everyone becomes a suspect, and if everyone is a suspect, then no one is. What’s more interesting to me is the tension in relationships, specifically between husband and wife Ethan and Harper, two of the guests who check in at the hotel.
Earlier in the season, Harper accuses Ethan of infidelity after she finds a used condom on the couch of their hotel room. Ethan had lied about a wild party he had in the room with college friend Cameron and a couple of sex workers the night before while Harper and Cam’s wife, Daphne, were on an overnight side trip out of town.
As viewers, we could vouch for Ethan’s innocence (it was Cam’s rubber): we saw everything that went down, albeit he could have been forthcoming about it with Harper instead of issuing denials that Harper knew to be false.
Driven by her continued suspicion about what truly happened, Harper tries to make Ethan jealous by leaning into Cam’s sexual advances. We know that Ethan has sexually neglected his wife, preferring porn over her. We also know that Cam has a pathological tendency to pursue women Ethan likes since their university days, which Ethan explained as mimetic desire: "If someone with higher status than you wants something, it means it's more likely you'll want it too,” Ethan directly addressed Cam. “I was smarter than you. Maybe you thought fucking the women I had a connection with would make you smarter.”
All that history, along with Harper’s mind games, drive Ethan to jealousy. As soon as he realized Harper and Cameron had disappeared from the beach where they were all hanging out just minutes ago, Ethan raced to his and Harper’s hotel room. He got to open the door with his key card, but the latch was on. Harper took time to unlock it. Once inside, Ethan found that the door to Cam and his wife’s adjoining room was slightly ajar.
This time, the viewer is just as removed from the situation as Ethan was, with only shreds of circumstantial evidence as clues. Harper says it was all harmless: she went up to get her hat and Cam, his book. The latch was a reflex and the door was… who knows? She professed innocence.
All along, Harper has been brutally honest—in her words, her nonverbal cues, her unbothered coolness. But as much as we want to give her the benefit of the doubt, Ethan’s obsession to know the “truth” plays to our own curiosity and shifts the burden of proof to the accused. By minimizing her assurances that nothing happened and insisting, instead, on hearing the answer we want to hear, have we not become predatory ourselves? An earlier scene that referenced L’Avventura takes new meaning.
It’s a tension we all must contend with in our relationships: up to which extent do we trust or become suspicious of our partners? It requires a complicated and constant calibration of our biases, intuition, context, and history—on what we feel we know about our partner.
If I were Ethan, I would have let it go. But his rabid suspicion eventually fleshed out the truth from Harper herself: she and Cam kissed; it was he who latched the door; Ethan was right to doubt her.
It would be wrong to read this as a verdict on Harper, an Eve of Eden, the “quintessential female sinner” (a view which I do not endorse). Ethan’s neglect, his denial of a wild night, and his consequent gaslighting led her to this path. If anything, it shows how it can get the best of us, even a lawyer who wore her intellectual snobbery like a badge of honor.
Eventually, Daphne offers a pragmatic—or a pessimistic—solution to the debate, one she herself applies in her relationship with the philandering Cam.
“We never really know what goes on in people’s minds or what they do, right?” she told Ethan after he reported that something might have happened between their respective partners. “You spend every second with somebody and there’s still this part that’s a mystery… I think you just do whatever you have to do not to feel like a victim of life.”
With a bite on the lip and come-hither looks, she leads Ethan to a deserted section of the beach. Again, as viewers, we don’t see what exactly happens, but whatever it was, it results in the eventual reconciliation between Ethan and Harper, a suggestion that one-upping your partner’s infidelity restores balance.
Perhaps, it would. But it would also require you to look the other way, even from your own pain. While many reviews have named Daphne as one of this season’s “winners,” I would be circumspect in thinking that her relationship is sustainable. While she and Cam may have not left the resort in body bags, their dynamic sounds more like death by a thousand cuts.
