Hi! Happy New Year! Welcome back! Looking forward to digging into lots of great stories here in the year to come, starting with one more week on WHITE LOTUS, which I spent a couple weeks writing about before the holiday kicked in, along with the destruction of my internet connection—Thanks, Santa!
One of my favorite things about WHITE LOTUS 206 is the sudden moments of clarity we get: Harper asking Ethan about whether they should even be together; Tanya warning Portia about the state of her life.
In both cases, we're dealing with characters who have seemed the most self-deluded suddenly speaking real truth. To have them suddenly coming to these moments of clarity is all by itself enormously satisfying. You think of a first episode as setting up problems—Harper insists that everything must be her way (and also that she doesn't have to deal with anything real); Tanya, as different a character as she is, behaves much the same.
We want to see those problems paid off in some way. And because Mike White sets them both up as so hard on everyone else, he leads us in the direction of thinking that pay off is going to be of the "they get what they deserve" variety. Given how obnoxious they are, we want to see them knocked down.
And one could say that in both cases that has happened: Harper has been forced to confront the state of her marriage; and Tanya, her life. Part of the reason we're satisfied in those moments is the fact that even if they don't resolve the plot problems of those characters, they do show a change in the character that has been earned through suffering.
They're also so satisfying precisely because they don't play out as we've been guided to expect. When you're writing a story, the sweet spot for the ending is always something that is unexpected and yet in retrospect absolutely inevitable. An audience delights in that very specific kind of surprise of realizing Oh shit, OF COURSE this thing that just happened had to happen.
So in Harper's case rather than getting served, that means getting to place of personal vulnerability and risk. In Tanya's it's about thinking of someone other than herself, or just getting out of her head entirely. In both cases, having put their shit on everyone else for so long (in Tanya's case two seasons), the characters finally come clean.
There's one other thing that's fascinating about these moments: they don't occur in the finale of the season (or even at the end of the episode). Story structure generally demands that we get catharsis at the end. Putting it an episode early is unexpected. It could have been confusing, too.
But here's the thing: in WHITE LOTUS, because we've watched these characters go on a personal journey, one in which they've suffered and eventually learned important things—they are now precious to us. Tanya is horrible at the beginning of this season, and yet at the end of this episode as she's being manipulated into getting completely wasted tell me you're not absolutely terrified for her.
You (er, I) might think by giving us the resolution of those characters' emotional journeys early, Mike White has made 207 seem unnecessary, like THE RISE OF SKYWALKER after THE LAST JEDI. But instead, that resolution makes 207 that much more high stakes. Will these two be able to leave with what they've learned? Or will the new life that is now possible for them somehow slip through their fingers? And will it come as a result of their own choices (it really should) or another's?
(I'm so worried for Tanya.)
