This moment of catharsis could easily have come off as grating-the predictable endnote of a hackneyed self-help parody or a contrived character arc. She tosses the ashes into the surf with the glee of a little girl making a mess of craft-store glitter. Sure, along the way she manipulated and then shattered the hopes of the resort’s gentle spa manager Belinda (an excellent Natasha Rothwell), who thought she’d found a benefactress to fund her vision for a women’s wellness center-but it was all part of Tanya’s path to self-actualization.
But here, on this final morning, wearing a billowy white cover-up that likely cost more than a hotel maid’s monthly pay, she is finally ready to let go. Tanya came to Hawaii to scatter her abusive mother’s ashes-the contents of the silver box-but could not bear to do so, even after chartering a boat for a disastrous impromptu ceremony. She is leaving the resort with a new boyfriend named Greg, a crinkle-eyed stringbean who may or may not have a terminal illness, but who refused to walk out of her suite even after she had a full-on bananas meltdown (open-mouth crying, calling herself a “dead end,” demanding that Greg save himself from the maw of her neediness). She arrived at the White Lotus an open wound in designer caftans, a chronic loner with a stiff neck, a dependence on stiff drinks, and corrosive mommy issues that her extravagant riches could not compensate for.
It is a cream-colored early morning on the island, the beginning of Tanya’s last day at the hotel, and she is ending her vacation a changed woman-at least in her own mind.
In one of the final scenes of “ The White Lotus,” Mike White’s HBO series about wealthy white travellers’ disastrous stay at a five-star Hawaiian resort built on ancestral indigenous land, the fragile, middle-aged lush Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) trots toward the ocean carrying a silver box.