I ended up enjoying season 2 of White Lotus. The finale was a letdown. Not bad, just not very satisfying. I'm definitely down for a third season though.
White Lotus is the sort of show that's a lot more fun if you just look at it as a guilty pleasure, like a soap opera for literate people. It has some interesting characters placed in interesting situations. A very large percentage of those situations are full-on cringe, which I really enjoy. Every little thing doesn't have to make sense, and every little plot line doesn't need to be resolved in the most logical manner. Every character gets their own arc, and obvious plot holes are kept to a bare minimum. That makes it better than most shows on television. It's a solid B+ in a world where there's just no excuse to waste your time on anything below a B.
I maintain that this is in large point the point of the show.
You may very well be right about that. But it doesn't make for the best viewing.
For example . . . [SPOILERS FOLLOW]
[SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS]
I would like to have seen more of a payoff to the grandson's story. I'm sure all of us saw that he was being scammed over the second half of the season, and that could have gone in a bunch of different directions. On the tragic side, maybe it's devastating for him to learn that the hooker isn't actually that into him. He's kind of innocent that way. Or maybe the other men in his life intervene in a helpful direction for once. Or
maybe this experience drives him toward the same misogyny that he's grown up around. And so on. Instead, the finale reveals that he pretty much knows that he's being taken for a ride, and his dad knows it too, but they end up being like "Eh, just give her the 50 large" and
then nobody does any more than shrug their shoulders when she runs off.
If the point is to show that
$50K is NBD to these people, okay I guess that's fine.
But that's a pretty anticlimactic payoff. We knew they were rich already because they travelled to the Sicily White Lotus and it was the other characters who were selling their bodies for money. This plot point was resolved in the first 10 minutes of the first episode.
I could make a similar argument about those two couples. I get that the "did they or didn't they?" style of storytelling is being done to make a point about the nature of uncertainty in a relationship and how we choose to manage it. But that's not very exciting. They gave us a crazy story involving sex-starved wives, a husband with an internet porn problem,
a DudeBro who's raising his wife's trainer's kids, and
a three way with DudeBro and the two hookers. That kind of story needs a real payoff, not a beard-stroking meditation on jealousy culled from black-and-white French cinema.
[ending spoilers here]
In other words, I feel like this show switched genres a bit in E7 and only in E7. The first six episodes were Melrose Place For HBO Viewers and then the last episode decided to be try to be subtle/profound. It's a little disconsonant IMO. (Edit: To reiterate, I'm not saying that the finale was bad. It just could have been better.)
