Warning: the below article contains spoilers for episode six, season three of The White Lotus.
Talk about a hangover from hell. In the latest episode of The White Lotus, Saxon Ratliff woke up dazed and dishevelled from the previous night’s Full Moon party. It had been a long, messy day-and-night of booze, edibles, “lasers and shitty music”. Oh, and being pleasured by his own brother.
The blender-obsessed nepo baby, played by Patrick Schwarzenegger, regained consciousness on a superyacht, next to his naked younger brother Lochlan (Sam Nivola). Despite both Ratliffs insisting they’d blacked out, flashbacks kept floating to the surface.
First the siblings snogged for a drunken dare during a Spin the Bottle-style game. Ex-model Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) breezily admitted she’d “hooked up with both brothers”. Toxic jock Saxon had a hazy memory of Chloe and Lochlan having intercourse while he masturbated next to them. Hang on. Was that definitely his hand beneath the bedsheet?
Eventually, a queasy image came into focus. The women matter-of-factly reminded Saxon that Lochlan “jerked you off”. Saxon was disbelieving at first, before blaming the drugs. “I don’t think there’s a drug in the world that’d make me get with my brother,” deadpanned Chelsea. At which point Saxon stumbled off to throw up again. The power balance between the brothers seems to have tipped. Is little Lockie now the alpha bro?
HBO’s super-rich spa satire had been dangling this taboo-busting prospect for the previous five episodes. There was a distinct whiff of dysfunction between the Ratliff siblings since they touched down in Thailand. When first escorted to their villa, the family of five were informed there were only three bedrooms. “You can sleep with me,” sister Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) told Lochlan. “I don’t mind.” Saxon promptly made it even weirder: “Brothers and sisters don’t sleep together after they have full-grown, you know, genitals.”
The priapic protein shake enthusiast has a habit of making suspiciously over-sexualised remarks. “Dude, long plane rides make me so fucking horny,” he said poolside, ostentatiously adjusting his trunks. Piper, a gap year Buddhist, was understandably upset by her brothers grilling her about whether she’s still a virgin. In their adjacent beds that night, Saxon called his sister “pretty hot”, insisting that Lochlan must have noticed too.
He proceeded to browse porn on his iPad, before heading butt-naked to the bathroom. Lochlan ogled him before Saxon caught his eye and closed the door. Social media blew up with speculation about an incoming incest plotline. And now writer Mike White has finally gone there. Schwarzenegger has acknowledged the “very odd and weird” dynamic between the brothers, adding that certain scenes were “uncomfortable to watch with my family”.
White has deployed sexual shock tactics in all three seasons so far, with eye-popping male nudity and graphic gay romps. In the Sicily-set second series, Leo Woodall’s Jack was caught mid-coitus with his “uncle” Quentin (Tom Hollander). This familial cliffhanger was resolved with the revelation that they weren’t actually related. This time, though, The White Lotus did it for real.
Sibling incest has long been a TV taboo. Nearly 50 years ago, the BBC’s Roman epic I, Claudius – sort of Succession in togas – showed John Hurt’s Emperor Caligula fathering a child with his sister Drusilla. Playwright Stephen Poliakoff’s 1991 film Close My Eyes portrayed the obsessive love between Clive Owen’s town planner and his elder sister, played by Saskia Reeves. A few years later, scouse soap Brookside caused a stir by depicting a sexual relationship between siblings Nat and Georgia Simpson. “We’re adults and we love one another,” Nat told their parents after they were found in bed together. There was tabloid uproar. MPs waded in. Producer Phil Redmond admitted it had gone too far and the Simpson family were written out.
But HBO dramas have continued the troubling trend. The Seven Kingdoms of Westeros are a veritable hotbed of icky inbreeding. Game of Thrones began with 10-year-old Bran Stark sneaking a peek at Queen Cersei having sex with her twin brother, Jaime Lannister. “We shared a womb, we came into this world together, we belong together,” said the defiant Cersei when confronted. In prequel House of the Dragon, most of the Targaryens end up inter-marrying to keep their bloodline pure and their peroxide mullets intact.
During the first and best series of True Detective, viewers glimpsed multiple murderer Errol Childress, AKA The Yellow King, in flagrante with his half-sister. Last year’s Prime Video reboot of Cruel Intentions ramped up the incestuous vibe between step-siblings Lucien and Caroline. And the 2021 Gossip Girl remake saw twins Grace and Jake hook up in a New York hotel room. “Even I didn’t see ‘twincest’ coming,” quipped their trans frenemy Luna.
Screenwriter Andrew Davies insisted that the incestuous affair between siblings Hélène and Anatole Kuragina (Tuppence Middleton and Callum Turner) was “crucial” to his 2016 BBC adaptation of Tolstoy’s War & Peace. And in Tom Hardy’s aptly titled 2017 BBC show Taboo, the mud-spattered protagonist’s feelings for his half-sister Zilpha (Oona Chaplin) progressed from love letters to groping in church pews and ultimately the bedchamber. Chaplin told Vanity Fair: “There’s a sexual libertarianism right now. Girls are walking around with their asses hanging out. Guys are just as much. Sex has become a very public-display type of thing, so very few things have remained taboo. Where does the taboo lie now? I think it’s in incest.”
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Last year, there was a backlash against an incestuous scene between the Menendez brothers in Netflix’s true-crime dramatisation Monsters: The Lyle & Erik Menendez Story. Critics claimed the “sick” showrunner Ryan Murphy had “made up” the storyline. Murphy pushed back, arguing that it was important to “present points of view from many people involved in the case”. He pointed out that journalist Dominick Dunne, played by Nathan Lane, “wrote several articles about that theory”.
With their roots in classical literature and the Bible, incest stories are certainly nothing new. In the prestige TV era, however, they’re definitely becoming more frequent. For audiences hardened online, it’s a way of upping the ante in terms of sexual transgression, a shortcut to shocking a seemingly unshockable generation. Drugs and violence are so last century.
When it comes to TV incest, it’s usually villainous characters who are the culprits. Saxon certainly falls into that category in The White Lotus. By invoking the ultimate taboo, White isn’t just breaking boundaries and baiting controversy, then. He is pointing out the deep-rooted corruption of the moneyed elite.
The show’s executive producer, David Bernad, told the New York Post last week that the scenes weren’t just for shock value and will pay off in the climactic two episodes: “There’s a specific reason in terms of the narrative storytelling and the larger thematic idea. As the season wraps up, you’ll see their purpose. The brother story culminates in a very satisfying way.”
