Editor's note: The below contains spoilers for Season 2 of The White Lotus.
Sunday night’s finale of The White Lotus Season 2 was an action-packed, if underwhelming, conclusion to a season of lies, manipulation, and the facade of extravagant wealth. With an uncharacteristically long run time of an hour and 17 minutes, writer/director Mike White had to wrap up the storylines of a whole cast of characters, leaving it unclear which, if any, of them will appear in the following season. Tanya’s assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), in particular, had the most harrowing journey, making it to the final scene at the Catania Airport by the skin of her teeth.
What Happened in the Season 2 Finale of 'The White Lotus?'
“Arrivederci”picks up where the previous episode left off, with Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) waking up in Quentin’s (Tom Hollander) villa in Palermo after a cocaine-fueled party, and Portia waking up in Cefalù with Jack (Leo Woodall) after dealing with his belligerent drunkenness the night before. Tanya and Portia initially traveled to Quentin’s villa together, but Jack whisks Portia away to explore Cefalù during the day, purposely keeping her from going to the party by getting so intoxicated he is unable to drive them back. The two are forced to get a hotel room, and before Jack passes out, he drunkenly reveals that Quentin and his friends aren’t as wealthy as they seem and that Quentin “rescued him” from his old life. Confused and suspicious, the next morning Portia wakes up to her phone missing from her nightstand, which Jack is quick to brush off, insisting they spend the day together before going back to Taormina. When she later tries to prod Jack into admitting he took her phone, he reveals that Tanya, Quentin, and the rest of the party are already on the boat on their way back to Taormina, leaving Portia no other choice but to drive back with him. At this point, fear is already starting to settle in, and when Jack leaves his phone behind to use the bathroom, Portia makes a frantic call to Tanya, her only lifeline in Italy.
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Portia's Real-Life Horror Movie
After her phone call with Tanya, where they start putting the pieces together to the larger conspiracy to kill her and Tanya reveals that she caught Jack having sex with his “uncle” Quentin, Portia enters a full state of panic. She tells Tanya, “I just have this really weird feeling that something bad is going to happen.” This phone call is a turning point in the episode for both Tanya and Portia. The unraveling of the murder plot against her, along with the fact that she is the only returning character from Season 1, make it relatively clear that Tanya is going to be one of the bodies Daphne discovers in the ocean. With this in mind, the audience has known since the first episode that multiple bodies are found, leaving the viewer to wonder if Portia will be one of the others.
From this point forward, Portia is completely in the dark. Her phone is still missing, and she's unsure of Tanya's whereabouts and of Jack's true intentions. She is living a woman's worst nightmare: trapped with a man she hardly knows in a country whose language she doesn't speak, with no cell phone to contact anyone for help. When Jack's true character starts coming to light, he grows increasingly frustrated with her, wanting her to stop questioning him and "let him do his job." For the remainder of the episode, we watch as Portia's life devolves into the plot of a horror film, complete with the poor decision-making you would expect to see from a woman who's about to get killed in a slasher movie. She has several chances to get away from Jack—when he is passed out drunk at the hotel, when he leaves his phone behind at the café, when he gets out of the car to smoke a cigarette — but she never does. She also makes the mind-boggling decision to wait to confront Jack about his lies, and even outright asks him if she's being kidnapped — but not until she's inside a locked car with him.
In Defense of Portia
These are the kind of decisions that make viewers scratch their heads or yell at their screens for Portia to trust her gut and get the hell out of there, but is this behavior purposeful or simply poor characterization? She and Jack have been involved in a brief fling, and he suddenly starts exhibiting abusive behaviors when Portia starts to show signs of resistance. He steals her phone, and when he discovers her using his phone to call Tanya, he snatches it out of her hand. When she confronts him in the car he suddenly shouts to get her to shut up. When she insists that she wants to return to Taormina he turns it around on her, trying to make her feel guilty for not wanting to spend their last day together, and refusing to drive her back.
Perhaps her questionable decisions weren't made out of sheer stupidity but out of self-preservation. Up until this point, she may have been under the impression that the two of them had some sort of connection, and that he cared about her at least a little bit, as a fellow human being if nothing else. Maybe she was cognizant of all the chances she had to escape but felt guilty leaving Jack with no phone or way to get back. Portia doesn't reveal much about her past romantic relationships, but it isn't completely inconceivable that she may have dealt with this kind of manipulative behavior before. Considering Season 2's commentary on masculinity and gender dynamics, it's unfair to place so much blame on Portia in such a terrifying situation, considering the power imbalance at play in their relationship coupled with her knowledge of the larger plot against Tanya.
Portia's confusing reaction towards this distressing situation could be intentional, to show her naïveté and highlight her similarities to Tanya, or could merely be the product of shoddy writing. Every episode is written and directed by a man, and it could simply be that Mike White didn't fully consider how a woman would realistically act in such a dangerous situation. When Jack eventually drops Portia off on the side of the road near the airport, he reminds her that she's smart, much smarter than him. But not smart enough to ditch a man she hardly knows at the first sign of danger? It's unclear if Portia will return in Season 3, but if she does, hopefully more light will be shed on her decision-making in this situation, or if her character simply suffered from poor characterization in the final episode, in which so many other storylines had to be wrapped up as well.
