Summary
Aubrey Plaza steals the show in “Abductions”, which shows glimmers of sensitivity in unlikely places, but also continues to lift the lid on some pretty deeply-held trauma and despair.
This recap of The White Lotus season 2, episode 6, “Abductions”, contains spoilers.
I haven’t quite taken to Harper and Ethan in this season of The White Lotus. They’ve been interesting enough, I suppose, but their dynamic – not to mention the one they have with Cameron and Daphne – felt a little too obvious. But “Abductions” completely upends all of that. In it, Mike White puts all the power into Harper’s hands, and he doesn’t just allow her to wield it, but determinedly keeps us in the dark about exactly how she has chosen to do so.
It started with Harper discovering an open condom wrapper in Episode 4, forcing Ethan to admit that he and Cameron had been doing molly and cavorting with hookers. Ethan, though, mostly abstained, which he tried to convince Harper of, to mixed results. This week he’s worried she still doesn’t believe him. She claims to be over it. He’s worried that she’s downplaying how she feels and is quietly pursuing revenge, which, honestly, she might be.
The White Lotus season 2, episode 6 recap
When Daphne goes off for a massage, Ethan and Harper go to “get drinks” and Ethan later finds Harper in their hotel room. She’s deliberately coy. Her mood has obviously lifted, but she claims it’s because Cameron corroborated Ethan’s story. He’s not so sure and imagines them hooking up at one point, filling in the blanks of a story that he’s writing himself, though Harper is admittedly providing the outline.
And that’s the clever bit. Because we’ve already seen Cameron make a move on Harper, we know there’s a possibility that they might have actually done what Ethan is imagining, but we also know that Ethan has a guilty conscience and that Harper is deliberately not saying one way or the other. I’d previously suspected Aubrey Plaza was wasted in this role, but she really comes into her own here.
The other subplots in “Abductions” are more obvious. The di Grasso family takes Lucia – thanks to Albie – as a translator as they attempt to find their Italian relatives, but they’re briefly pursued by Lucia’s pimp and then literally chased out of their potential cousin’s house at knifepoint. So, not quite what they expected. Lucia does seem to have some genuine affection for Albie, but I still think it’s inevitable she’s going to play/rip him off at some point since this very much seems like a season in which what you want the most gets you hurt the most.
Speaking of which – Tanya. I’m not sure what she really wants, to be honest, but being coked up with a well-hung Italian man certainly isn’t a bad consolation prize for her. Her drug binge has all of the episode’s best production design and physical comedy. Everything to do with Quentin also supplies the most obviously dark overtones, at least to me, but that’s thanks in part to what a drunk Jack inadvertently reveals to a very worried Portia on their little date.
So, towards the top of this episode, Tanya does Portia a solid for once and warns her that she doesn’t think Quentin is Jack’s real uncle, though she doesn’t clarify why. That rattles around in Portia’s head all evening as Jack gets progressively more wasted. At the very end of the evening she keeps asking him questions about his “uncle” and what we get seems to be an explanation for what Tanya stumbled on at the end of Episode 5. From Jack’s description it seems like Quentin got him out of a very bad personal place – “a hole”, in Jack’s words, probably owing money to the wrong people or something along those lines – and keeps Jack around as a kind of sex toy, banking on his gratitude. That’s a grim thought. But he also implies that Quentin is almost broke because of his lifestyle but is about to come into a lot of money. Is that why he has an armed Italian coke dealer floating around his palazzo? Well, it stands to reason.
