WHITE LOTUS 2nd Season Finale: WOW WOW WOW. What an episode.
There's so much to talk about, much of it about Tanya—wow, that story. But as a first run at the episode, I want to concentrate on Daphne.
If you look at the overall run of the series, Daphne seems like one of the least active characters. Up until the finale what actual choices has she made? Really just one stands out: she takes Harper to the villa and then sets them up to stay overnight without warning Cameron. That's it.
The fact is, she has been making other choices, but they're most the choice not to respond directly to Cameron's various misdeeds, not to react. Some would argue she's in denial of those misdeeds. At one point Harper asks her how many times she thinks Cameron has cheated on her, and her answer is one, maybe.
But I don't know, it never came across that way to me, perhaps because her whole m.o. is to refuse to be a victim. If he's going to be an an ass, let's do girls' night at a villa. He's going to sleep around? Okay, well she can get a side piece, too.
It's such a delicate balance, writing a character who we know is being lied to. A big writing rule, which I call The Skyler White: When a character doesn't know as much about their lives as we do, it can lead to us respecting them less. On BREAKING BAD, Skyler WHite should be the most sympathetic character, given what her husband is doing, but instead many disliked her, in no small part because her ignorance of what Walter was doing made her seem dumb and weak.
You could argue that Daphne is in denial, but her insistence that she will not be a victim seems to keep her situation from undermining her. Mike White and actress Meghann Fahy turns her character vulnerability into a strength.
It also suggests she knows exactly what is going on, too, that she's not as blind as she may play.
Approaching the finale, it'd be easy to think there's nothing to tie up with Daphne. She's had no real arc per se. But Ethan's revelation of Cameron's infidelity ends up being the test of her way of proceeding. What will she do in the face of the reality that her husband has been cheating on her—and with the one woman she's made friends with?
And Fahy delivers that incredible, silent moment of response. It begins with a startled look which is the only time in the entire series that Daphne's I Have It All Together mask falls away. Honestly she's been so implacably Zen about everything the whole time it's a surprise to discover there was so much more there—and that at the heart of it was deep suffering. It's a stunning, heart-rending moment (and another great example of how the suffering of a character wins us over).
But then, still without words, we watch Daphne take on that information and make a choice to be the person she has been saying all along that she is, the one who refuses to be an object of someone else's choices. And we get that beautiful monologue, which begins in a classic Daphne denial place--everyone is just a mystery anyway, blah blah blah—but then turns directly to the question of how we deal with suffering and betrayal. "I think you just do whatever you have to do not to feel like a victim of life, you know? You just use your imagination." It's the essence of who she is as a character, put into a few beautiful words.
When it's organic to the moment, there's nothing so satisfying as having a character deliver a statement that captures who they are, I think because it feels so revelatory. Their words are sort of like the pay off of an episode or season—unexpected and yet in retrospect inevitable. We find ourselves thinking Oh wow, right, of course that's who they are.
And then she seduces Ethan. Truly, the whole moment is *chefs kiss*.
