‘The White Lotus’ Season 2 Episode 6 Recap: Way Down in the Hole

It’s a conspiracy! I think? The penultimate episode of The White Lotus Season 2 puts virtually every character through their paces, before a climax that calls into question much of what we’ve seen before. Does it work? On a technical level, maybe. On the level of being a television show that’s earned its space in your emotional bandwidth, maybe not.

We’ll go storyline by storyline. Bert, Dom, and Albie take a disastrous trip to Bert’s ancestral village, with Lucía brought along as a translator (much to Dom’s chagrin). Before they reach their final destination Lucí is forcibly reunited with her quote-unquote pimp Alessio, who engages them in a low-speed car chase. I maintain that there’s very little reason to believe that Alessio is in fact a pimp and not just some guy who’s in on Lucía’s hustle — her contention that she makes him a lot of money, despite the fact that her first sex-work gig was like three nights ago, closes the case as far as I’m concerned. Nevertheless it gives Albie plenty to worry about, and Lucí plenty to work with while forging ever tighter bonds with her nice-guy quarry. Remember how he’s attracted to “wounded little birds”? Yeah.

As for Bert’s family, they wound up getting run off their distant relatives’ property by a crazy old lady wielding a knife in one hand and asparagus in another. The whole affair is enough to legitimately devastate the seemingly unflappably cheerful Bert, who glibly dismissed his own wife’s dismay about his serial infidelity but is reduced to tears by getting rejected by total strangers. And there you have it, I suppose: As Mel Brooks once put it, tragedy is when I get a papercut, comedy is when you fall into a manhole and die.

Then there’s the unhappy-couple quartet of Harper, Ethan, Daphne, and Cameron. Ethan spends the entire day getting madder and madder — and thanks to Will Sharpe’s curious performance, less and less expressive — about Harper’s obvious belief that he cheated on her, even though he didn’t. He goes so far as to ask Cam to break the bro code and testify to Harper that Ethan did nothing untoward; this gives way to a day-long paranoia nightmare, likely justified, in which Harper and Cameron clandestinely fuck. Ethan warns Cam to stay away from Harper, but by that point whatever damage could be done has been done at any rate.

The episode’s sexiest storyline, from my perspective anyway, involves Valentina, the hotel-manager martinet who has an obvious crush on her employee Isabella. When she learns that Isabella is engaged to her fellow concierge Rocco, Valentina calls off the dinner date she’d asked her on and retreats to the hotel lounge to get sloshed. There she encounters Mia, the genuinely talented musician and part-time uncommitted hooker, who detects Valentina’s distress, finds out that Valentina has never been with a woman despite being gay, and seduces the everloving shit out of her. Good for them both, I say! It’s nice to see anyone on this show get what they want, or in Mia’s case give what they want, without some horrible strings attached. (At the moment, anyway.)

Finally there’s the saga of Tanya and Portia and their new British BFFs Quentin and Jack. The morning after finding Quentin and his “naughty nephew” in flagrante delicto, Tanya warns Portia of the two men’s potentially problematic relationship. Heedless, Portia heads off into Palermo to spend the day with Jack anyway, only to watch him grow drunker and drunker and more and more reticent about heading back to the palazzo for Quentin’s big party, until he all but gives the game away — swearing up and down about how Quentin rescued him from “a very fuckin’ deep hole” — at the hotel to which they retreat.

Tanya, meanwhile, is…well, whatever the cocaine equivalent of “wined and dined” is, that’s how she’s treated by Niccolo, a mobbed-up coke-dealer acquaintance of Quentin’s specifically procured for his heterosexuality and the size of his penis. He and Tanya make love, though not before she discovers a picture of Quentin and…her husband Greg? Whaaaaa?

Yet I find it hard to muster up a whole lot of emotional investment in what the hell is going on here, because The White Lotus is a show designed to frustrate emotional investment. At bottom, the hour-long dramedy is just not a genre for me. I dislike the way it uses sitcom shortcuts en route to dramatic payoffs, which even when they work weigh down the jokes in turn. I dislike the way it can bait and switch the audience by bouncing back and forth between tones and modes at random. It would be over the top of me to say the whole thing feels like a cheat — who is being cheated, and at what? — but the inconsistency, the self-defeating nature of it all, makes it tough for me to enjoy.

So that’s where I’m left with this episode. Are there dramatic moments that moved me, or comedic moments that made me laugh? Very much so! Bert’s open distress as he connects his failed family reunion with the fact that he’ll never be romantically or maternally loved again. Quentin telling Tanya that doing coke after a prolonged period of abstinence is like “riding a bike.” Jack semi-drunkenly asserting that we live at the best point in history despite all the signs to the contrary, which have been brought up by Portia primarily to burst his bubble rather than to make any kind of real point. Harper and Ethan’s grueling conversation about whether or not their marriage is dead, the tightest and hardest-hitting discussion of relatable human misery in the show’s history, I think. Ethan’s increasingly insufferable stone-faced fury at it all. The revelation that Isabella and Rocco are engaged. The genuine sexual chemistry between Valentina and Mia.

It just seems to me that the whole is worth less than the sum of its parts, however entertaining any individual one of those parts may be. With only one episode to go, though, who knows? Maybe every part will fit together.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.