The White Lotus Season 3 Reveals Details About The Fate Of Jennifer Coolidge's Tanya

This post contains spoilers for "The White Lotus" Season 3, Episode 3, "The Meaning of Dreams."

In the rich-and-terrible universe of Mike White's "The White Lotus," it's been at least a year since Jennifer Coolidge's Tanya McQuoid declared "These gays are trying to kill me!" before shooting said gays, making a break for it, and unceremoniously falling off a boat and dying. The character's absurd death was made darkly funny thanks to the audible thud noise when her head hit the escape dinghy, serving as the abrupt and purposely anticlimactic end to a season-long mystery.

Now in its third season, "The White Lotus" is still going strong despite the loss of Tanya, and in this week's episode, it's keeping her memory alive — albeit via rumors and suspicions alone. In the third episode of the Thailand-set installment, "The Meaning of Dreams," viewers get to hear a little more from Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon), one of this season's new characters and the young companion to Jon Gries' slimy old man Gary. We already know that Gary is actually Greg, the man who married Tanya in Season 1, telling her he had a terminal illness. By the start of Season 2, though, he was sick of her, and also seemed to be pulling some strings behind her back. Tanya's death ultimately appeared to be the byproduct of a plan from Greg and his old friend Quentin (Tom Hollander) to have her killed and inherit her fortunes. Unless, that is, you believe the story Chloe tells her new pal Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood, a cast standout) while the pair are sunbathing by the pool.

"Gary barely ever talks to me. He's so secretive," Chloe tells Chelsea after the two quickly bond. "He has an ex-wife, but he never talks about her." Chloe then shares the version of events she heard from Greg, calling his ex "a real mental patient" who "was so depressed she couldn't take it anymore." One day, she says, the woman "just walked out into the ocean and kept going and never came back." It's an image that parallels the dream Parker Posey's always-sedated housewife Victoria had at the beginning of the episode, in which she steps into the gray sea while wrapped in a large white blanket. Of course, it's not what actually happened to Tanya.

This isn't the only detail from Chloe's story that doesn't add up. "All they found was, like, a part of her leg," Chloe confesses to Chelsea. In case you forgot (it has been more than two years since Season 2 aired, after all), Meghann Fahy's Daphne definitely found all of Tanya when she went for a dip the day after the poor woman fell overboard and bonked her head. The night of her drowning, Tanya was shown sinking deep into the ocean, unmoving, and we even got a close-up of her face without a single air bubble in sight. In the body recovery scene the next day, viewers were again shown Tanya's face, body, and both of her legs when Daphne nearly bumped into her corpse in the shallows. During the operatic final montage, a body bag was carried to an awaiting vehicle, and there's clearly a whole person in there. So, what the hell is going on?!

While it's nice to think this description gives us hope that a legless, resurrected Tanya might reappear at some point this season, that twist would require a whole lot of suspended disbelief since we saw Tanya's dead body multiple times in the Season 2 finale. It seems more likely that Chloe was either told a lie about Tanya or that she elaborated on the already-macabre story she heard to captivate Chelsea. If this was Greg's version of the story, the Italian police could have concluded that Tanya killed herself, but that doesn't explain the leg of it all. It's also possible Chloe is referring to a different ex-wife altogether. Recall that at one point, Greg told Tanya there were three wives before her. Is it possible he's out here vacation-killing every woman in his life for their money? 

If so, I trust Belinda (Natasha Rothwell) to get to the bottom of it. Chloe may have gossiped about Tanya (or another murdered woman) in "The Meaning of Dreams," but it's the White Lotus Hawaii spa manager who finally said her name aloud. She confronted Greg about his familiar face later in the day, and though he denied being the man she'd met before, Belinda went to bed suspicious about his reaction. Tanya may be gone, but her memory lives on in the form of one of the show's best characters ... one who doesn't exactly love Tanya after she screwed her over back in Season 1. Will Belinda uncover a serial killer? Or will that unidentified leg in the sea remain an ambiguous piece of the "White Lotus" puzzle? With this show, it really could go either way.

New episodes of "The White Lotus" drop on Max and HBO at 9pm ET each Sunday.