Jessai Flores

San Domenico Palace, a five-star luxury hotel in Taormina, Italy, served as the backdrop for Season 2 of HBO’s 15-time Emmy-winning “The White Lotus.” The hotel — a reimagined 14th-century Sicilian convent perched on a rocky promontory overlooking the Ionian Sea — boasts an infinity pool, Italian gardens and Michelin-starred dining. But once creator Mike White got his hands on it, writing a drama of epic proportions fit for the stage of the Teatro Antico di Taormina, the hotel’s view became secondary to the volatile undercurrents brewing among its guests.

The soul of the second season of “The White Lotus” — both White’s and the show’s name carrying a quiet irony — is most sharply observed through two vacationing couples: Harper and Ethan and Daphne and Cameron. Their relationships are mirrored and refracted through one another, as if held up to a prism. Together, they offer a study in modern intimacy: desire coated in competition, sincerity tinged with performance and love curdled into something like acquisition.

Harper and Ethan are thoughtful, skeptical. They seem self-aware, perhaps to a fault — preoccupied with appearing above the excess, but still very much tangled in it. Daphne and Cameron, by contrast, radiate unbothered contentment. They flirt, giggle and drink. If Harper and Ethan live in the shadow of their own over-analysis, Daphne and Cameron seem blissfully, maybe dangerously, unaware.

But the real story lies between the men. Ethan and Cameron were college roommates at Yale, and that history turns out to be the key that unlocks their entire dynamic. Cameron’s approach to Ethan is one of deliberate encroachment: borrowing swim trunks, making sexual advances toward Harper, flaunting his wealth with performative nonchalance. He wants Ethan’s life — not out of envy, exactly, but out of a compulsive need to prove that he could have it, too. His jealousy is sublimated, almost artful. There’s no tantrum, no confession. Just a series of subtle territorial maneuvers, each one disguised as charm.

It’s the kind of rivalry that begins young. Two boys sharing a dorm room, both brilliant, both aware of their futures, learning to measure themselves against one another. And in the years since, that measuring hasn’t stopped. For Cameron, taking what’s Ethan’s — his wife, his peace of mind — is a way to collapse the distance between them. A way to remind Ethan, and himself, that he still wins.

If Season 2 is about the desire to possess, Season 3 is about the desire to matter.

Set in Koh Samui, Thailand, the Four Seasons Resort is the physical and emotional terrain for that unfolding. Surrounded by tropical greenery and framed by the calm, turquoise Gulf of Siam, the resort exudes quiet perfection. There’s a hilltop spa, an infinity pool where cocktails are served against sunset views, and suites with private decks that make the rest of the world feel optional. It’s a paradise designed for forgetting. And yet, by the time Mike White is finished, it becomes a stage for memory, regret and meaning.

The central triangle this time is not romantic but platonic — though just barely. Kate, Laurie and Jaclyn — referred to with both affection and annoyance as “the blond blob” — are lifelong friends whose bond holds the kind of intensity that only decades of closeness can produce. Their friendship echoes the sparring of Ethan and Cameron, but it plays out through misdirection and soft betrayals. It’s not testosterone-fueled — it’s psychological.

Jaclyn, in a moment of seemingly generous encouragement, nudges Laurie to hook up with a hotel staffer named Valentin. And then, quietly, unapologetically, sleeps with him herself. Her support was never support — it was cover. A façade of permission masking the thrill of taking something her friend wanted. In both seasons — Ethan and Cameron, Laurie and Jaclyn — friendship is not a refuge from rivalry. It is the arena in which rivalry finds its most insidious form.

But then something unexpected happens.

In the finale, the trio reconvenes. They share obligatory vacation highlights, all smiles, until Laurie begins to speak. “A Way Out,” the haunting instrumental track from Season 1, begins to play. And her monologue, quiet but searing, reframes everything. She speaks not of drama, not of resentment, but of despair. Her job has failed her. Love has failed her. The things she believed might sustain her have not. But her friendship with Kate and Jaclyn — flawed, fraught, often painful — has been the only constant she has been able to cling to. They are her timeline. Her history. Her proof of having lived.

In that moment, the show brushes against something deeper than plot. To me, Laurie’s reflection is reminiscent of the 2023 film “Barbie,” when Ruth Handler tells Barbie, “We mothers stand still so our daughters can look back to see how far they’ve come.” But here, the insight is inverted. Friends don’t stand still. They move with us. Not so we can see how far we’ve come — but so we can mark how much time has passed. Laurie doesn’t measure her life in achievements. She measures it in companionship:

I have no belief system. And I… Well, I mean I’ve had a lot of them, but… I mean, work was my religion for forever, but I definitely lost my belief there. And then — And then I tried love, and that was just a painful religion, just made everything worse.

It’s a revelation that echoes Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?”— a song written for “Barbie” that has become an anthem for the spiritually adrift. “Think I forgot how to be happy / Something I’m not, but something I can be / Something I wait for”— these lyrics strike a chord in a culture where religion is on the decline, meaning is outsourced to productivity and deaths of despair — suicide, addiction, loneliness — are on the rise. Laurie’s pain is not unique. It’s the despair “The White Lotus” has come to epitomize — spiritually adrift, sun-drenched misery among people who have everything and still feel nothing. That’s the point. Her sadness is ambient.

What “The White Lotus” reveals, perhaps more than any other show of the past decade, is that friendship is no safe harbor from the struggles of being human. But it may still be the most reliable metric we have of our time here and how far we’ve come. Cameron and Ethan, Jaclyn and Laurie. These aren’t perfect bonds. They’re competitive, needy and often cruel. But they endure. And in a moment when nothing else seems to, that might be just enough — to keep us watching, and maybe even to keep us going.

In college, these relationships begin. Later, they may become how we track our lives. How we know we’ve existed. If we’re lucky, they’ll be what remain when everything else has moved on. They may not save us. But in a place like this — in a time like this — they might be how we make it through.