The White Lotus Season 2 Episode 1: Summary and Ending The Coitus Interruptus Explained
The best scene in episode 1 of season 2 of The White Lotus series, Ciao, is much more than meets the eye. Do you remember the Lotus Eaters from Season 1? It seems that Mike White, the creator of the series, is not done settling accounts with them. Look, the scene where Tanya McQuoid-Hunt (Jennifer Coolidge) pushes Greg (Jon Gries) in the middle of their passionate lovemaking and he is ridiculously shot backwards has so many reads that we couldn’t pass it up. Yes, we could have been fine about the representation of sex in television fiction, about the role of sex and gender roles in episode 1 of season 2, we could even have started to write that foot fetishism begins to come out on HBO (after Olivia Cooke invented OnlyFans in Foot Landing), even starting to count the penises that appear in the series and relate them to the penises in Game of ThroneI dream of the penises of the HBO Max series (whose latest milestone, for now, is Minx), or I don’t know what other nonsense we could have written. But the fact that Jennifer Coolidge’s character gives us that coitus interruptus in The White Lotus season 2 Episode 1 deserves our full attention, and now yours.
The White Lotus Season 2 Episode 1: Ending Explained
Remember the Lotus Eaters that Armond’s (Murray Barlett) character was talking about in the Season 1 finale? Tanya is the queen of the Lotus Eaters. “Lotus Eaters. Abominable as the dark firmament that folds over the dark sea. Death is the end of life,” Armond recites in the season 1 finale. It is a quote from a Tennyson poem and is also a reference to Homer, who like all this universe created by Mike White has a lot of Greek tragedy and is not something chosen by chance. Lotus fruits and flowers are narcotic and lotus eaters live in peaceful apathy, an analogy that White uses to refer to a wealthy white social class that always gets its way and lives in its world. Season 2 in this gesture takes Lotus Eaters one step further. And no, Tanya is not crazy. If this scene shows us anything, it is that she is always in control: she may be wrong, but she decides with whom and how she is wrong. She is not a victim of chance, but of her bad decisions. She is a Lotus Eater because she wants to be a Lotus Eater.
Tanya is an elephant in a china shop: with a reasonable fortune of $500 million (thanks Portia for the info), with a cool head to sign prenuptial agreements so she doesn’t have to worry about losing her hard-earned money. father to win it, he takes what he wants, when he thinks he wants it and when he no longer wants it he moves on to something else… The series insists on showing us Greg’s character as the bad guy in the movie, but is he doing with him and with everyone, in the end, the same thing he does with the character of Nicole in season 1? Use them and then expel them from your life? As an excuse to justify coitus interruptus in the middle of the afternoon (another theme of the series is how sex before 10 at night is a kind of taboo that either nobody likes or it simply goes wrong; daylight hours, comes to say the series, they are only for masturbation) tells him that “he has dissociated”. Apart from a fabulous comic scene, there is more.
He comes to tell us that Jennifer’s character is, again, unhinged; something is wrong in her head. In the first season she went to Hawaii to get rid of her mother and now it seems that, albeit unconsciously, she has gone to Sicily to get rid of her husband. I imagine him dead, with shark eyes, with jellyfish hair… that’s not very normal, unless, of course, it’s a fetish. albeit unconsciously, she has gone to Sicily to get rid of her husband. I imagine him dead, with shark eyes, with jellyfish hair… that’s not very normal, unless, of course, it’s a fetish. albeit unconsciously, she has gone to Sicily to get rid of her husband. I imagine him dead, with shark eyes, with jellyfish hair… that’s not very normal, unless, of course, it’s a fetish.
It’s also clear that Jon Gries’ character doesn’t treat her particularly well. That passive-aggressive comment about macaroons is to give anyone a coitus interruptus, I know (Look, Greg, we drink whatever champagne we want whenever we want and eat whatever macaroons we want whenever we want), and It clearly shows that this marriage has nothing to do with the hot and possible romantic encounter of season 1. However, as Tanya manipulates her environment of particles, it is interesting that she gets rid of Greg in the first episode. In addition to lotófago, that is clear, that she does what she wants, it is important to see how she decides against where her life is going. She’s a character that has mental issues, but she’s also a strong female representation. That gesture means that Greg is history from minute 1 of the season, so we only must find out whom he will now attract into his black hole. And no, he doesn’t go second.
