The White Lotus season 2 goes out guns blazing in a riveting finale

This review contains spoilers for the season 2 finale of The White Lotus.

Death looms over both seasons of The White Lotus. One airport coffin, multiple beach bodies: Creator Mike White starts these stories with the promise of a bang. Bit of a con, maybe, an easy way to add tension to leisure weeks of hot, rich, ambient dramedy. Season 1's finale fatality was a sudden shock: accidental stabbing, apologetic stabber, the hysterical proximity of the killing to the pooping. White goes a different direction in Sunday's exuberantly deranged season 2 finale, building the episode around ticking-clock anxiety and a genuine action set piece. It's full of thrills and lingering ambiguities — plus sex, fighting, and lava.

When the Sicily season premiered back in October, I was half in and half out. Glorious photography, great actors, bright clothes, musical numbers, Conversations About Contemporary Themes: What's not to like? But I sensed a drop in eccentricity from the debut season and worried some characters were one-dimensional. In rereading that initial review, I have concluded that I am a dumb idiot, and I underrated just what hotblooded soap-on-fire entertainment White was cooking up. Case in point: I thought Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) was brought back as a kind of trumped-up franchise mascot, resetting herself for another luxury journey from shallow sadness to shallow happiness. Surely Coolidge had that Emmy-winning force field around her, and nothing bad could happen to a character so pitiful and hilarious.

Fabio Lovino/HBO Jennifer Coolidge in 'The White Lotus'

Wrong! Here's Tanya shooting her way through a yacht, leaving a trail of well-dressed bodies in her wake. A phone call from Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) nudges her toward paranoia. Has her absent husband Greg (Jon Gries) called upon his long-ago lover Quentin (Tom Hollander) for an elaborate prenup-avoiding murder? The conspiracy sounds crazy when you line it all up, and part of the finale's genuine freakiness is that nothing ever gets confirmed. Tanya kills three men, and throws mad words toward the dying Quentin. "Is Greg having an affair?" she asks him — a hilarious line given all the bullets that were just flying. Tanya then tries to climb off the yacht onto the dinghy. White plays with our expectations, since this should be the moment when the messed-up character Gets It All Together. "You got this!" Tanya mutters. And then she stumbles off, bashes her head, and drowns.

It's disturbing and grand: Pure farce, pure noir. For Coolidge it's a chance to push Tanya's trainwreck sweetness into a new operatic direction. Offhand, I can't think of any character in recent television who seems less equipped for a gunfight, and the way the camera stays on her the whole time is both a legitimately cool camera trick and a way to lay bare all her confounding sides in close-up. There's the caged-animal secret strength of someone who's lived her whole life sad, and some palpable booziness in her shaky aim. You imagine she is someone who has spent her whole life thinking that the people who love her don't really love her. Consider that fear confirmed: From her perspective, a husband and a lover and a bunch of new friends (even Didier and What's-His-Face!) want her dead.

To be honest, the first time I saw that scene, I thought it was still possible Tanya was overreacting wildly — that the ultimate twist this season would be that Quentin wasn't actually gaslighting her. Not sure what the rope and the duct tape were for, and it seems more likely (and much sadder) that she really did save herself from drowning before just drowning herself. And it took me a while to realize that Tanya's death includes another deflating twist. Portia spends the episode genuinely worried about her boss. Jack (Leo Woodall) drops her off far from Taormina, strongly suggesting that she not return to the hotel. Well, she'll definitely go back to the hotel, I thought to myself. Wrong again! Portia hears about the drowning secondhand from Albie (Adam DiMarco) at the airport. She does not race to call the police. Instead, she asks for the dope's number — a nice moment, except she's mentally (and actually) fleeing her boss' probable murder.

There's an angle where this finale is too joyous. Mutual adulteries heal all rifts between spouses. Harper (Aubrey Plaza) admits that she kissed Cameron (Theo James), which leads Daphne (Meghann Fahy) to guide Ethan (Will Sharpe) into an island canoodle. Presto presto: All the renewed marital mystery gives Harper and Ethan their mojo back. More mojo is reclaimed by Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore), abuzz with post-coital pep after a night with Mia (Beatrice Grannò). I kept waiting for their relationship to backfire tragically, and the opposite kept happening. Mia gets the singing gig full-time. Valentina reunites darling Isabella (Eleonora Romandini) with devoted Rocco (Federico Ferrante). Mia promises to take Valentina out clubbing to find "hot girls who are gay."

Meanwhile, in the Subplot About American Masculinity, Bert (F. Murray Abraham) leaves Sicily without dying or getting arrested for dirty-old-man impropriety. Dominic (Michael Imperioli) finally talks to his wife on the phone. And dear Albie gets rolled for 50 thousand euros, but he sort of expects that, and he gets Portia's digits.

The Di Grassos mattered less this season than I expected; I wonder if White just cared more about Tanya's gay getaway and the luscious nastiness between the couples. But it's worth noting how transactional a lot of these happy endings are. Dominic knows Lucia (Simona Tabasco) is feeding his son a line about needing so much money: "How are you gonna make it in life if you're this big a mark?" When Albie offers to talk up Dominic's redemption to his mom, though, they come to an agreement. A normal version of this story might see father and son opening up to each other in an honest way. Here, it's just two men cooking up a contract: Lie to your mom about my thing, and I'll give you money so you can lie to yourself about your thing. The only guy telling any truth is randy old Bert, who can't deny that a sweet daughterly hug from Mia gets him hard.

Fabio Lovino/HBO Theo James and Meghann Fahy in 'The White Lotus'

Then there's Daphne. Fahy was the breakout performer this year, embedding an inferno of repressed hurt and battle-scarred humor behind her dizzy-housewife façade. She was the very personification of the White Lotus dissolve from radiant sunswept slow-motion waves to explosive volcanic midnight awe. In the finale, she gives Ethan a variation of the advice she offered Harper: "Do whatever you have to do not to feel like a victim of life." Is that great advice for living or terrible license to sin? Consider the outcomes: She nudges Harper and Ethan toward infidelity. There's more here, I think, and I strongly suspect Daphne will pick up the baton dropped by Tanya to reappear next season. Girls' trip to the Maldives, maybe? Or could we finally meet her trainer?

White balances his moods so deftly — emotional brutality, goofy one-liners, simmering terror, soul-baring confession — in an episode full of expensive cheap thrills. When Ethan attacks Cameron in the waves, White shoots it like a Street Fighter duel, and finds a marvelous button when Cameron actually giggles after the fight. Whereas a long conversation between Ethan and Harper lingers in quiet moments of pent-up anger. First she lies, and then she throws her own infidelity back in his face: "You don't want to have sex with me!"

In the last few episodes, I felt like season 2 of White Lotus was veering away from satire into something both louder and trickier, taking the bygone model of the primetime soap opera and ratcheting up both the decadence and the perversion. Think "he was kinda f---in' his uncle!" but in a villa. Past a certain point all the walls looked like paintings and all the dresses looked like the walls that looked like paintings. The finale features a critical absence that would be Lynchian if it weren't more directly Hitchcockian: the complete vanishing of Greg, a person who was maybe having an affair and was probably planning to kill his wife. His place in the story recalls Tom Helmore's stern husband in Vertigo, mostly absent from a film that depends on his elaborate machinations. I think there's serious replay value in the show Greg and Quentin were putting on for Tanya: the Vespa ride and the opera visit, the possibility that all of Quentin's "die for beauty" monologues were his sincere confession to his victim.

"It's a good feeling when you realize that someone has money," Tanya tells Portia midway through the season. "'Cause then you don't have to worry about them wanting yours." That line hits like a depth charge when you realize Tanya was surrounded by people who wanted her money bad enough to kill her. My second theory about season 3 is that we'll see Greg — rich, unhappy, dying once again — and that the McQuoid fortune will become White Lotus' serialized saga, passed along like a parasite from one host body to the next.

Then again, maybe we're forgetting the show's real heroes. Lucia receded these last couple episodes, stuck in a con that was obviously a con. (Confirmed: Her angry murderous pimp was, in fact, not an angry murderous pimp.) I think I wanted one more level with her. As it is, she was kind of everyone else's unstable molecule, breaking marriages asunder and making father-son conversations very awkward. But I liked her last look back at Albie; the thought balloon seemed to say What a nice guy! and What a chump! We're left with Mia and Lucia cheerfully strolling down the road. Could a few more weeks like this give Lucia enough cash for a White Lotus trip of her own?

There's a lot to imagine as we await season 3. There's a part of me that badly wants a White Lotus without the murder or the melodrama — a more holistic and dreamy character piece, like White's sacred and short-lived masterpiece Enlightened. But I admire how often White Lotus lets the joke and the horror go hand in hand, embracing gaudy spectacle even as it revels in its characters' boiling self-destruction. "The best things in life are free" promises the singer over the closing scene. It's a compelling lie. Those things aren't free, but they really are the best.

Finale Grade: A-

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