Timothy Ratliff, played by Jason Isaacs and Victoria Ratliff, played by Parker Posey. (Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO)
Let’s talk about that finale. Spoilers ahead for the White Lotus season three.
The White Lotus wrapped up its third season on Sunday, April 6, with an hour-and-a-half finale. If you’ve seen it, you know that it’ll be hotly discussed for a while. And of course, the finale provided a conclusion to the plot involving a North Carolina family split along UNC/Duke lines.
The season has five main plots. The rich Ratliff family of Durham, North Carolina is transformed by their experience in Thailand. Rick and his girlfriend Chelsea travel to Thailand so Rick can pursue revenge. A girls’ trip shakes the foundations of three lifelong friends. Returning character Belinda makes a troubling discovery. And finally, a security guard deals with the difficult tasks required by his job. As with each season, viewers were left to speculate which of these plots would end in death, as foreshadowed by a shooting at the start of the first episode.
The big deaths of the season are Rick, played by Walton Goggins and Chelsea, played by Aimee Lou Wood. Rick Hatchett came to Thailand seeking the man who killed his father, who he blames his bad life. His girlfriend Chelsea tries her very best to pull him away from the path of self-destruction, but he refuses to change course. After failing to go through with killing the man, who happens to own the resort, he feels he’s been freed from his past. But when the man comes back to the resort and confronts Rick, he decides to go through with his revenge, stealing his gun and shooting him to death. And in typical cynical White Lotus fashion, it is revealed the man was actually his father all along. He then gets into a firefight with multiple bodyguards, and Chelsea is killed in the crossfire. Finally Gaitok, the guard who had been struggling with confrontation throughout the season, is forced to shoot Rick dead. It’s an explosive ending that draws multiple of the season’s plots together in a satisfying way.
That means that the Ratliff family was not involved in the shooting, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t also have an explosive end to their story. So, what was going on with the Ratliff family? A lot, if you can believe it.
In the episodes since I last wrote on the White Lotus, the Ratliffs changed immensely. Brothers Saxon and Lochlan had their relationship tested by a drug-fueled sexual interaction. Sister Piper realized that she can’t handle the off-the-grid lifestyle of the Buddhist temple where she planned to spend at least a year. And Timothy Ratliff, the patriarch of the family, spends the entire season agonizing over his shady business dealings being discovered by law enforcement back in America.
All of this agonizing leads to one of the darkest decisions made by any character in this series. Timothy, after speaking with each of his family members, decides that they won’t be able to handle losing their wealth and status upon returning to America. So, he decides to kill himself and take the rest of his family with him, besides Lochlan, who indicates that he’d be okay living a humbler life. He prepares to poison his family, but changes his mind at the last second. However, Lochlan ends up accidentally consuming the poison and nearly dies by the pool. Luckily Timothy rescues him, having nearly killed the one member of his family he decided was worth saving. The family heads back home, each one changed in their own way, besides mother Victoria who is able to stay relatively the same.
Piper Ratliff, played by Sarah Catherine Hook and Lochlan Ratliff, played by Sam Nivola. (Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO)
So what does all of this mean? At the start of the season the family was split, with Lochlan as the odd man out. Timothy and Saxon, both Duke graduates, push Lochlan to embrace masculinity and aim for success. Victoria and Piper, both UNC graduates, push Lochlan to follow their path to UNC. However, this division does not last long.
The Ratliff family, over the course of their stay, drifts closer and closer together, despite the tensions that exist between them. Saxon, through a traumatic experience with his brother, is forced to question his macho persona. He tells his dad how worried he is that his job, given to him by Timothy, is all that he is. His sexual encounter with his own brother shakes him to the core, and causes him to search for a deeper meaning, even if somewhat superficially. By the end of the season he is reading books on spirituality and seems to have a more down to earth and worldly perspective, if only a little. Even Piper seems to notice the shift.
Piper spends the season distancing herself from her family, as she is embarrassed by their privilege and lack of cultural awareness. She assumes that she is above those things, but once she spends one night at the temple she wants to become a resident of, she realizes that she is spoiled. She tearfully admits to her elated mother that she doesn’t think she can handle the lifestyle. In this way, her arc is the exact opposite of Saxon’s, each being drawn to a middle ground between their two extremes.
The answer of which school Lochlan will pick is never answered, and that’s okay, because it’s never what his plot was really about. It was just another example of the ways that he has been pressured to fit the mold of the older members of his family. He tells Saxon that he’s realized he’s a people pleaser in a family of narcissists, which is how he explains away that scene between the two of them. When Timothy asks if he could live without money, he says that he thinks he can, which is why Timothy decides he should be spared. When Lochlan poisons himself, he sees an image of four figures looking down at him, which he calls “God.” Maybe his God is his family. Saxon even tells Lochlan not to literally worship him, which drives this point home as well.
Victoria is an interesting case, because she is easily the least down-to-earth character in the season. She has far less cultural understanding than the rest of the family, and consistently demonstrates an unwillingness to budge from her ways. By the end of the season though, it becomes clear that she was the only member of the Ratliff family that had been true to themselves the entire time. She tells Piper that she is fully aware how privileged she is in comparison to billions of people across the world, and argues that it would be insulting to those who dream of a better life not to live their own pampered lives to the fullest. It’s a message that surprisingly resonates with Piper, who gives up on trying to absolve herself of her white guilt.
Finally there’s Timothy. Oh, Timothy. His assumption that his family is entirely consumed by their privilege leads him to nearly kill everyone but Lochlan. He can’t imagine what life will look like without the status his family has held onto for generations. While his kids are changing right beneath his nose, he can’t see it. His anxiety causes his normal concerns to fall away, and eventually he is even supportive of Piper moving to Thailand, although somewhat passively. He asks a monk what comes after death, and is comforted by the notion of breaking the karmic cycle. His thought process is actually in line with many real-life family annihilators, who kill their family and sometimes themselves as well to “spare” them, often from something like impending financial trouble. While it was pretty clear a crime of this scale wouldn’t come to pass, the fact that Timothy spends the back half of the season pondering it is disturbing enough. The final thing he says to his family this season is the truth, finally telling them that hard times are coming when they return home. It’s a short and simple admission, and one that was clearly much easier than he had been imagining. He realizes that even if things are bad, his family will carry on.
Saxon Ratliff, played by Patrick Schwarzenegger. (Photograph by Fabio Lovino/HBO)
I’d be remiss not to briefly mention the real life controversy surrounding the Ratliff’s inclusion in the show. Timothy’s downward mental spiral, much of which happened in a Duke t-shirt, led to some memes and a response from the school. Principally, the image of the character holding a gun to his head while wearing the shirt was immediately picked up by sports fans less than fond of the Blue Devils. Duke University put out a statement saying that the show had gone too far in its use of the Duke brand alongside shocking imagery. The same certainly cannot be said for UNC, which overall has much less direct references over the course of the season.
So at the end of the day, what was the point of the Ratliff family? They are an exploration of privilege, and more specifically what it means to have that privilege put at risk. Victoria embraces privilege and doesn’t want to live without it. Timothy literally comes to believe that his family won’t be able to live without it. Saxon, like his mom, embraces his privilege, until he realizes the box that it has placed him in. Piper rejects her privilege until she realizes how much comfort it ultimately brings her. Only Lochlan seems to live free of this pressure, instead living under the pressure of the “big personalities” in his family. The family heads home towards an uncertain future, but somehow the strange events of the week have brought them closer together to face it. Timothy will just have to hope they never figure out he tried to kill them all.
The Ratliffs are another example of the White Lotus’ exploration of what makes rich white people tick, only this time with a North Carolina flair. It’s a reminder that privilege doesn’t only play a role in the lives of those at luxury resorts overseas, but in our own backyard as well.
Featured images via Fabio Lovino/HBO.
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