There are two things we know for sure heading into the season two finale of The White Lotus…
The first thing is that multiple guests end up dead. We know this because of the scene way back at the beginning of the first episode where a body is discovered in the ocean and everyone freaks out (understandable) and in the aftermath we hear that “other bodies have been found” and those “other” guests have been “killed.” We don’t have a specific number yet but we do know it is, at minimum, “a few.”
The second thing is that the following people are safe: Daphne (discovered the body on a swim, screamed a little); Valentina the Manager (received the news about the bodies and cussed about it); Rocco (delivered the news to Valentina and made a number of delightful little faces while doing it); and Salvatore (never on camera but told Rocco about the multiple bodies, presumably with that remarkably Italian little voice of his).
Everyone else is on the table. Or… in the water, I guess. Potentially. Some characters are more likely than others to die. No one is doing especially great at this scenic Sicilian resort, if we’re being honest. There’s one episode left in the season and a reasonable case could be made for any of them ending up lifeless in the sea. So… that’s what we’re going to do here. We’re going to break it down into groups, represented by skulls, from One Skull (least likely to die) to Four Skulls (most likely to die).
A few final notes before we start:
- These will probably be wrong
- If I end up being correct, no one will ever hear the end of it
- It would be really funny if, like, Portia goes full John Wick and kills everyone on this list
Here we go.
Albie
Albie is a sweet boy and I cannot believe the show would spend six episodes creating this innocent little forest creature and then bash his head on the rocks strewn about the choppy Sicilian seas they keep cutting to between scenes. It would be kind of funny, though, in a sick way. I picture him walking along the cliffs, deep in thought about how to offset the damage generations of men before him have done, and then just, like, slipping on a banana peel and falling to his death. A long shot, yes, but something to consider.
Portia
Portia’s trip has been a rollercoaster, from no fun at all to lots of fun with exciting English boys with sensitive nipples to no fun at all again when the aforementioned English boy drank too much and got very honest about the situation he and his “uncle” have created for themselves. It’s not great. I do not think Portia will die, in part because there are many more likely candidates and in part because it will make me very sad. Portia needs to come home and evaluate some things.
Tanya
ON ONE HAND: I refuse to believe this or any show will kill off a perfectly good Jennifer Coolidge character, especially considering she’s the one who has tied the first two seasons together so far. I want to see her back again for season three, maybe in a ski lodge.
ON THE OTHER HAND: She sure was doing a lot of cocaine in Palermo. Worth monitoring.
Isabella
Isabella probably lives for two main reasons: One, the discussion about the bodies in the first episode refers to them as guests, not employees; two, Rocco was the one reporting on this bloodbath and I think he would have heaved his body in front of a car if his beloved Isabella perished.
I could be wrong here but I suspect I am not.
Mia
Quite a ride for Mia, from semi-reluctant escort to kind of poisoning a piano player during a tryst in a church to stealing his job to hooking up with the manager who hated her as recently as a few episodes ago. The smart money here is more on her getting discovered by a talent agent on vacation than her dying in the ocean, but we can’t rule out that Giuseppe takes her out with a revenge poisoning when he realizes she has replaced him behind the piano in the lounge.
Jack the Rowdy English Boy
More on him later.
Dominic
Tricky one here. Earlier in the season, back when he was miserable and hooking up with teenage prostitutes and getting hung up on by his wife, I would have had him way higher on a list like this. Now… I don’t know. It’s not so much that he’s improved his odds of survival as it is that other characters have tanked their own through relentlessly poor decisions. Lesson to be learned here. Sometimes you can win by letting everyone else lose.
Harper
I suspect Harper survives the season for a handful of reasons that are hard to quantify but I believe with all of my heart. That said, we simply cannot rule out a scenario where she and Ethan take a cruise with a number of other guests and a massively depressed Ethan grabs the wheel and crashes it straight into the side of a cliff. He’s not doing great. More on this later, too.
Lucia
Three notes here:
- Lucia also does not count as “a guest” of the hotel, so take everything below with a grain of salt
- She said the thing at the beginning about sex workers always getting punished in the end, which, if you believe in foreshadowing more than you believe in characters growing and changing throughout a season, could be a thing
- She does have an angry and possibly violent pimp with a number of aggressive piercings on his face chasing her around a bunch
So there’s that.
Giuseppe the Piano Man
Also not a guest, I suppose, but you can’t run around taking handfuls of mysterious pills given to you by sex workers and expect to live forever, you know?
Greg
I had forgotten about Greg in the last few weeks but it would be good to remember a few things before the finale:
- Greg went home to continue an affair because he is a sleaze and a doof
- He is allegedly coming back
- It would be really funny if Tanya just, like, accidentally knocks him off of a boat, or even straight-up murders him for being a sleaze and a doof
Let Tanya do a murder.
Alessio the Pimp
ON ONE HAND: Not a guest.
ON THE OTHER HAND: I could see Albie just kind of snapping and doing a vehicular homicide by running Alessio and his henchman off of the road and into the sea. Anyone as nice as Albie has a dark side. I want to see it.
Quentin and His Collection of Suspicious Hangers-On
My prediction for the finale:
- Quentin uses Tanya’s cocaine-fueled night with a studly gigolo to blackmail her into giving him a huge chunk of money in exchange for not showing evidence to her husband that would cost her millions and millions in a divorce that is presumably no longer restricted by a prenuptial agreement due to the aforementioned cocaine romps with gigolos
- OR he is working WITH Greg and plans to give him the evidence in exchange for a healthy chunk of the money Greg gets in the divorce
- Quentin and his crew celebrate by going out on the yacht for a sea-based party
- Someone — Tanya, probably not; Portia, no, but it would be funny; Jack, my favorite suspect, in a fit of revenge and morality — causes the yacht to crash or sink, killing everyone on board, including the adorable little captain we met a few episodes ago, which will make me really sad
Write this one down.
Ethan
Ethan is doing bad. He is doing so bad. I wondered a little bit if he was going to die at the end of the penultimate episode when he was doing his little depression breaststroke out into the horizon. He’s seeing visions of his wife cheating on him with his friends. He’s confronting both of them about it. He’s really just kind of sighing a lot and sitting around with his head in his hands and it is nowhere near outlandish to envision a scenario where he throws himself onto the rocks in the middle of his morning run.
Also, let’s consider…
Cameron
I do not necessarily think Cameron is the dead body teased at the very beginning, only because Daphne was the one who discovered it and her reaction would have been… bigger, I guess, if it had been her husband.
BUT
The body could have been Ethan’s…
AND
… Cameron could be one of the other bodies in the water…
BECAUSE
… maybe Ethan suggested they go out on those jet skis again and then rammed his into Cameron’s in a blind jealous rage, killing them both in a way that pays off the jet ski montage from earlier in the season…
AND
… allows me to shout “CHEKHOV’S JET SKI” at my television…
WHICH
I really want to do it now.
Bert
Bert is very old and concussed and just had his entire trip to discover his roots dashed by an old woman wielding an artichoke and a knife. There are literally dozens of scenarios where he ends up dead in the ocean. He had a good run.
