'The White Lotus' Creator Explains Why [SPOILER] Died in the Finale, Reveals How the Death Was Foreshadowed

Mike White, the creator of The White Lotus, is opening up about that shocking death at the end of season two.

A beloved character tragically died at the end of the episode along with some other minor characters. The anthology series has already been confirmed for a third season that is likely going to take place in Asia.

While speaking about the death scene, Mike even revealed that the death was foreshadowed in a previous episode. If you were paying attention closely, you might have predicted what was to come!

Click inside for the spoilers and to find out Mike White’s explanation…

Keep reading for the spoilers…

Jennifer Coolidge‘s character Tanya died at the end of season two. She was also featured in the first season!

Throughout the season, Tanya befriended a group of gay men who lived in Palermo and they brought her to their palazzo, where she was wined and dined for days. While traveling back to her hotel in Taormina, Tanya finally figured out (with help from her assistant Portia) that the men were likely scamming her. She came up with the theory that her husband Greg was working with the men to kill her so that he could collect her life insurance policy.

Tanya founded a gun on the yacht they were on and started blindly shooting at the men, killing almost all of them. While trying to deboard the yacht and get on a dinghy, Tanya fell into the water and drowned.

“In the end of last season, Tanya is sitting with Greg in the last episode and he’s talking about his health issues. And she says, ‘I’ve had every kind of treatment over the years, death is the last immersive experience I haven’t tried,’” Mike said in a post-episode segment on HBO.

He continued, “I was thinking, it’d be so fun to bring Tanya back because she’s such a great character, but maybe that’s the journey for her, a journey to death. Not that I really wanted to kill Tanya because I love her as a character and obviously love Jennifer, but I just felt like, we’re going to Italy, she’s such a diva — a larger than life female archetype — it felt like we could devise our own operatic conclusion to Tanya’s life and her story.”

“I just think her dying at the hands of someone else felt too tragic,” he added. “It felt like she needed to give her best fight back and that she, in a way, had some kind of victory over whoever was conspiring to get rid of her. It just made me laugh to think that she would take out this cabal of killers and that after she had successfully done that, she just dies this derpy death. And it felt like, that’s just so Tanya.”

Here’s everything we know so far about season three!