What do we really want from life? It's a question Portia ponders with her Essex Boy, Jack, over a beachside gelato (her) and a fifth bottle of beer (him), in the latest episode of The White Lotus. “Be satisfied, I guess,” she decides.
As we’ve seen in previous episodes, Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) feels that she has a nightmare job. A personal assistant to perhaps the world’s neediest boss, Tanya McQuoid, Portia is told to make herself invisible one moment and be at Tanya's beck and scream the next. Still, as viewers have regularly pointed out, she’s also on a luxury trip to Sicily, and is basically free to embark on a holiday romance with the cheeky chappy (Leo Woodall) she pined for. It's not so bad, is it?
But even the bond between these two fuck buddies becomes strained in episode six. As Portia (once again) discusses her Gen Z angst, an increasingly drunk Jack takes her to task. “It’s a pretty fucking good world I’d say,” he argues. “You’d rather live in the middle ages, would ya? When they were ripping each other to shreds, yeah?... What I’m saying is, we’re fucking lucky. We’re living in the best time in the history of the world, on the best fucking planet, if you can’t be satisfied living now, here, you’re never gonna be satisfied.”
He’s got a point, and it throws Portia slightly, him being the antithesis to her generalised anxiety for each day. It's certainly not what nice guy Albie would have responded with. But it also savagely highlights Portia’s privilege, which is a big part of the reason she’s blind to who Jack really is. While Portia moans about being forced to stay in a hotel room by her boss and order room service pasta, it’s nothing compared to Jack’s employer’s demands.
As the viewer, we’ve already cottoned on to the fact Jack is in fact not nephew to his rich “uncle” Quentin, and as discovered by Tanya’s nocturnal wanderings, is likely to be a sex worker employed by him. But it’s not until several beers later that Jack becomes more loose-lipped, and lets Portia know why his world view is so different from hers, hinting at a dark personal history.
“He’s very giving, you know?” He says of Quentin, also spilling that he’s not rich, but due to get a lot of money coming his way soon, hinting about the potential job to get Tanya’s money. “I’m just happy I get to help him now. Because he’s helped me. I was in a fucking hole.”
Jack, tearing up, tells Portia once and for all what many of us have been screaming at the screen about; he addresses something that all the main characters in both series of The White Lotus share. “You complain about your life but really you should just shut it,” Jack says. “Because you ain’t never been in a fuckin’ hole like that. And he comes along and…No one’s perfect. Sometimes you do things you don’t wanna do. ”
Jack, like the waiter Kai or the spa manager Belinda in the first series, lives on the side of life that the one-percenters know nothing about. And yes, while the Super Rich Kids also have their own set of issues while working their way through the world, they are chasms apart from other sections of society and their daily struggle. What he’s saying, to all Portia types, is: read the room.
With just one episode left of the second series, this may be the deepest we go with Jack on his troubled background, but Woodall – and creator Mike White – have managed to deftly flesh out this character in an unexpected manner, twisting and turning the storyline to examine it from another angle, also adding another counterpoint to the life of sex workers, as we’ve seen with Lucia and Mia.
However! Call it a hunch, but this emotional outburst doesn’t bode well for Jack. As he says in his earlier monologue: “Who knows if we’re even gonna be here tomorrow?”. The line is spoken in such a pointed way that we can’t help but feel it may end up being prophetic.
The White Lotus series two finale is on Sky Atlantic and NOW TV from Monday December 12.
