The White Lotus Fans Had the Best Reactions to the Explosive Season 2 Finale

December 12, 2022 wpbackupsckb 340 Views 0 Comments

Spoilers below.

The White Lotus season 2 ended with a bang. Well, a few bangs—that’s what happens when Tanya McQuoid gets her hands on a gun.

Episode 7, “Arrivederci,” turned out to be a swan song for Jennifer Coolidge’s fan-favorite character, who put together the troubling pieces of why her husband Greg left her on their vacation to Sicily, and why a group of glamorous British expats have eagerly welcomed her into their circle. They’re connected, Tanya realizes while on the phone with her assistant Portia: Greg insisted they go to Sicily, organized for Quentin and his friends to kill her so he could get the insurance payment (which was much more than he’d get if they had just divorced, given their prenup), and planned to pay Quentin a cut. Portia backed it up with her own revelation—that Jack mentioned Quentin had no money and was about to make a windfall.

And in the volcanic finale—literally, Mt. Etna erupts in the distance between scenes—after Quentin invites dealer Niccoló onto the yacht, Tanya steals his bag, finds a gun inside, and kills everyone on the boat but one guest and the captain. The only thing she doesn’t do is make it out alive. In her attempted escape to shore, instead of going down the stairs and swimming to the adjacent dingy, she tries to jump from the deck of the yacht onto the smaller boat, banging her head on the way down and dying. The next morning, it’s revealed that the body Daphne finds on the beach is Tanya’s.

In a post-episode interview on HBO’s Unpacking The White Lotus, show creator Mike White explains his decision to kill off Tanya, and points back to a line she says at the end of season 1: “I’ve had every kind of treatment over the years. Death is the last immersive experience I haven’t tried.”

White said, “I was thinking it would be so fun to bring Tanya back, because she’s such a great character, but maybe that’s the journey for her, is a journey to death. And not that I really wanted to kill Tanya because I love her as a character and obviously love Jennifer, but I just felt like, you know, we’re going to Italy, she’s such a diva, larger-than-life female archetype, it just felt like we could deviser our own operatic conclusion to Tanya’s life and her story.”

But of course, having Tanya get killed by another character didn’t feel right. She had to go out in her own “derpy” blaze of glory.

“I just think her dying at the hands of someone else felt too tragic,” White said. “It felt like she needed to give her best fight back and that she, in a way, had some kind of victory over whoever was conspiring to get rid of her. So it just made me laugh to think that she would take out all of these cabal of killers and that after she successfully does that, then she just dies this derpy death. It just felt like so Tanya.”

Her whole final sequence was one that got people talking. Viewers tweeted their way through the grief of her death, shock of her body count, and pure adoration of Coolidge’s performance.