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- December 12, 2022
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Spoilers for the season finale of The White Lotus to follow.
After seven weeks of speculation, theme song dance parties, and close examination of one suspiciously placed photograph of cowboys, The White Lotus has revealed who dies at the end of what was supposed to be a relaxing week’s vacation.
The body count began on Quentin’s yacht, where Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) sussed out what viewers had suspected: those gays, as she told the boat captain, were trying to kill her. Niccolo‘s black bag turned out to be exactly as suspicious as Tanya believed it to be, and she pulled out the gun to tearfully shoot Quentin (Tom Hollander) and his friends (and still made time to demand, unsuccessfully, that Quentin tell her if Greg was having an affair).
But it turned out to be Tanya who was the body floating in the water all along. Attempting to make her escape overboard on the dinghy parked next to the yacht, she instead hit her head on the railing, drowning and presumably allowing her absent husband Greg (Jon Giries) to get away with taking her money after all. But at least she stopped some would-be murderers in the process.
In the “Unpacking Episode 7” segment following the episode, series creator Mike White admits he didn’t want to kill Tanya but “she’s such a diva, larger-than-life female archetype, it just felt like we could devise our own operatic conclusion to Tanya’s life and her story.” And he suggested that Greg’s part of the story might not be done— “it feels like there’s got to be somebody who’s going to track it down to Greg. But maybe you’ll have to wait to find out what happens.”
The season ends, just as the first one did, with all the major players in the airport and on their way home. The rich and privileged are, once again, escaping with all their privileges intact, and the spirit of Tanya lives on in Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), who escaped whatever role was intended for her in the murder plot and wears a very Tanya-worthy head scarf for her flight home. Reuniting with Albie at the airport, embarking on what might not be the best relationship for either of them, feels like its own tribute to Tanya, too.
White has been frank that the dead body conspicuously placed at the beginning of each White Lotus season is a tool for luring in audiences. “When that first season became such a water cooler show [that] people were talking about, I was like, had I only known if I’d put a dead body at the beginning of Enlightened, maybe people would’ve watched Enlightened,” he told NPR. “You realize these kinds of hooks do actually get viewers.”
But the magic of The White Lotus is that the wild theories about bloody endings (Cameron and Ethan jet ski accident? Harper murder rampage?) don’t get in the way of the character drama that’s actually at the heart of the show. In a season devoted to examining the interplay of sex and power, virtually every character has been putting themselves in dangerous situations in the name of love, lust, jealousy, or some combination of all of the above. But even though The White Lotus isn’t about death, it was about Jennifer Coolidge—and with a third season officially coming, it’s time to start reimagining exactly what that might look like.
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