While I am certainly glad to see The White Lotus back for season 3, it feels like the show has moved on from many comedic aspects to turn into…something else entirely. It was of course always a blend of comedy, drama and the occasional crime, but season 3? Less of that first item in the premiere, and now adding instead, “deeply unsettling creepiness.”
No, you are not alone if you picked up on the weirdest vibes the series has ever seen, courtesy of Patrick Schwarzenegger’s Saxon Ratliff, there with his rich family and two siblings, Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola). Saxon has graduated, his sister is in college, his brother is a senior in high school. From here, a content warning for some ickiness follows.
We have seen dysfunctional families in the series before, but there was an overwhelmingly unsettling layer of, I don’t know how else to say it, potential incest in many of the interactions here. This is almost entirely on Saxon’s end:
- He comments that his sister and brother can’t share a room because of their “genitals” now that they’re both older.
- He comments that his sister is “hot” and speculates that she hasn’t had sex yet.
- He talks to his brother at the pool about how horny the trip is making him.
- He’s in bed nude talking to his brother about getting laid, asking him what his favorite porn is as he pulls it up on his iPad.
- He wonders aloud where he can masturbate in the room, and walks naked into the bathroom with his porn.
- This is met with…a look by his younger brother at his body that is unsettling in its own right.
None of this is played for laughs in any way, a joke we saw repeatedly in say, Arrested Development between George Michael and his cousin Maeby (it eventually turned out they were not actually related).
I don’t think I’m misreading this and I really do think the show is implying what we think it’s implying. I know that The White Lotus goes to some dark places but this? Are they really doing this? Or are they going to pull back in future episodes and maybe take this some other direction as Saxon pursues the “cougars” or the young, ignored girlfriend from the pool. But for now, ick. Just ick, ick, ick.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
