The following story contains spoilers for The White Lotus season 3, episode 6, “Denials.”
FOLKS, THE WHITE Lotus has finally landed where we all suspected it might be going. From the very first episode of season 3—when Patrick Schwarzenegger’s Saxon asked about porn before stripping down to his birthday suit to masturbate while his younger brother, Lochlan, played by Sam Nivola, quietly stared—it seemed like the boys of the Ratliff family may be headed on an, uh, deviant collision course. And by the time we’re into the thick of “Denials,” the sixth episode of the season, it’s happened, albeit in a blacked-out haze. After a night filled with drinking and an unknown sampling of drugs, Lochlan and Saxon did some things together that brothers should not be doing.
The episode teases something unsavory throughout, continually revealing that Saxon has some memories that don’t seem good—and that he wants to push down and away. But it’s only once Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) invites Saxon over to hang out with her and “Gary”/Greg (Jon Gries), that we get the full idea. Chloe and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) suspect that maybe “Gary” wants to have a threesome, to which Saxon responds that he would not be interested in doing that with another guy involved. Chloe then asks what about what they did last night, both adding that Saxon and Lochlan “made out.”
“That was a joke,” Saxon says, before continuing. “You guys forced us to.”
But then Chloe drops the ultimate hammer: “I didn’t force him to jerk you off.”
There’s more dialogue after that, and in typical Mike White/The White Lotus fashion, it’s very quick, very funny, and very smart. But all Saxon needed to hear was Chloe saying that to confirm that what he was seeing and remembering in his head all day wasn’t just a weird dream—that happened. And it’s already changing everything for him.
This is part of what makes The White Lotus, throughout all three seasons, such a buzzy, provocative, and well-crafted show; every season of the show has these wild, salacious moments. But they aren’t just for shock value. In fact, quite the contrary; if Saxon and Lochlan hadn’t already established the types of characters and people they are through the season’s first several hours, the aftermath of what happened with Chloe and Chelsea on that boat wouldn’t have anywhere near the same impact.
It’s the same thing as season 1’s famous rimming scene involving Armond (Murray Bartlett) and Dillon (Lukas Gage)—if we didn’t know how hard Armond was trying to stay clean and on the straight and narrow, his fall from grace and into Dillon’s butt would not have meant so much on both a character and thematic level.
It’s the same thing with Sam Rockwell’s appearance as Frank; his much-discussed monologue was a fairly absurdist and outlandish piece of writing in and of itself, but seeing it as yet another ripple in Rick’s (Walton Goggins) already bizarre and emotionally-fraught journey gives it even more thematic weight in this story we’re watching unfold.
It’s been a common refrain among some critics of The White Lotus that season 3 is moving at a slower pace; what those people need to remember is that this season is eight episodes long (the longest of the show to date), and that it’s always about the simmer boil that eventually overflows. Everything in The White Lotus is about building up to something wild, but with purpose.
The Saxon and Lochlan Incest Scene Has Everyone Talking
Sam Nivola, who plays Lochlan, is adamant that the Saxon/Lochlan moment has a greater purpose than simply being shocking.
“It’s silly, but this is the defining pivot point for me and Saxon’s characters in the show,” he said in an interview with Vanity Fair. “It really shakes up the dynamic of our whole family. Because it’s such an important piece of our characters’ arcs in the season, I was fully ready to go do it.”
Nivola also suspects that Lochlan is only just at the end of the episode coming to grips with what he’s done when he clears his thoughts and begins to meditate at the monastery.
“I think what’s top of his mind even more than, like, “Oh my God, I’ve just done something terrible,” is “Oh my God, Saxon’s going to be so mad at me. He’s not going to want to talk to me again.”” he says. “It’s sad.”
People online, predictably, also had thoughts on the wild happening.
Nivola’s father, Alessandro Nivola, is also an acclaimed actor in his own right (he appeared last year in The Brutalist, The Room Next Door, and Kraven The Hunter). And he reacted to his son’s, uh, third base scene.
Look: we can only hope that if Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs) ever finds out about what happened between Saxon and Lochlan, that he takes it anywhere nearly as well.
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
