Warning: This post contains spoilers for The White Lotus Season 3, Episode 6.
The Ratliff siblings have always seemed a little off. They speculate about one another’s sex lives. They masturbate in rooms without even a door between them. They watch each other sleeping. Many White Lotus fans got an increasingly queasy feeling watching the siblings flirt with the boundaries of what is appropriate throughout the first half of Season 3. And now, Lochlan and Saxon have crossed a line.
In Episode 5, we saw Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola) kiss while high and drunk, at the encouragement of Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon). But as the two brothers nurse their hangovers in Episode 6, more memories flood back. Saxon is initially horrified to remember that he was masturbating in bed next to his brother while Lochlan had sex with Chloe. But as the day wears on, Saxon’s disgust deepens as he realizes that it was not his own hand, but his brother’s, that was touching him.
Chloe and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) all but confirm the series of events to Saxon at the pool. When Saxon claims that Chloe and Chelsea “forced” the brothers to make out, Chloe nonchalantly replies, “I didn’t force him to jerk you off.” Saxon claims he doesn’t remember that part of the night because he blacked out. “Well, I didn’t, so…” Chloe says, smirking. Viewers may consider the possibility that Chloe is messing with Saxon’s hazy memory and Lochlan did not, in fact, touch Saxon. But, later in the episode, Lochlan separately recalls the encounter with his brother while he is meditating with Piper at the Buddhist retreat, all but confirming the act of incest.
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The act dramatically complicates the relationship between the two brothers. Throughout the series, Saxon has been bullying Lochlan, mocking him for allegedly being a virgin, encouraging him to take advantage of women who “just want to be used,” all but force-feeding him protein shakes to bulk up his boyish frame. The parents echo this perception of Lochlan’s “meekness,” forcing him to go to posture training where he’s told that he protects himself with his “feminine” side. Saxon is not only trying to make Lochlan an alpha male in his own image (in contrast to the more enlightened, less aggressive man that their sister, Piper, would like Lochlan to be) but also to prove his own testosterone-fueled dominance in the family. Earlier on the yacht, before Saxon and Lochlan kiss, Lochlan tells his older brother, “One day, I’m going to take you down.” Saxon is later coerced into taking drugs, after insisting he won’t. He tells Chloe and Chelsea “not to take advantage of him.” But it is Lochlan who initiates the kiss with his brother and intensifies it, and it is Lochlan who presumably initiates touching his brother. As Lochlan presaged earlier in the evening, he has used sex to flip the siblings’ power dynamic on its head and wrest control from his brother, turning the elder Ratliff into a victim.
White Lotus creator Mike White has said in interviews that he wants to touch on taboos. In a recent New Yorker profile, White spoke about how after his father, a famous pastor, came out as gay, he tried hard to be a model citizen. “My dad suffered a lot from wanting to appear good…It was so important for him to say, ‘Gays are just like you, we’re good little boys,'” he told the reporter. “I don’t want to be making that argument for my career or my life. I’m not a good little boy.”
Each season of The White Lotus, White has delighted in writing transgressive queer characters. In Season 1, the gay manager of the hotel sexually harasses an employee and defecates in an (admittedly pompous) guest’s suitcase. Famously, in Season 2, a group of gay men conspire to kill White Lotus fan-favorite character Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) culminating in the iconic line, “These gays, they’re trying to murder me!” White then promised the New Yorker that a gay plotline in Season 3 of The White Lotus would be “truly Satanic.” No doubt, he was referring to the transgression between Saxon and Lochlan.
After the episode, we were left wondering about the prevalence of sibling incest in real life, what family dynamics may have played into this transgression, and how therapists treat real cases of incest. TIME emailed with Tanya Rawal and Sona Kaur, two consultants at the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN) who often work with outside organizations on issues of sexual abuse, and even occasionally consult on Hollywood productions portraying such abuse onscreen. They weighed in on the incest storyline on White Lotus and how incest manifests in real-life families.