Versions of Timothy Ratliff’s death wish fantasy play out over several episodes of “The White Lotus,” but each involves a gun. Having received news that the feds may be waiting to arrest him at the end of this vacation, the stressed-out financier daydreams about putting a pistol to his head and pulling the trigger.
Since this third season of the resort fantasy opens with the sounds of shots fired and a body floating in one of the property’s many water gardens, these asides are designed to make us wonder whether Timothy, played by Jason Isaacs, is the shooter.
Mike White's reveals haven’t been that obvious in previous seasons, though. Besides, one gets the sense that if our suicidal patriarch were to follow through on his exit strategy, he would keep the body count within the family.
Timothy heads a family of entitled, maladjusted narcissists co-led by his Lorazepam-addled wife Victoria (Parker Posey). She raised her annoyingly named children Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger), Lochlan (Sam Nivola) and Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) to want for nothing. From the moment they arrive at the resort, she can’t stop yammering about the inane details of their lives in North Carolina.
But Piper is why they’ve come to Thailand, although she says she didn’t want the fuss. But since she’s writing her senior thesis on Buddhism, or so she says, the Ratliffs decide to make “a road trip” of it, as Timothy tells hotel staff that neither asked nor cares.
“Did we have to go halfway around the world?” Victoria complains the moment her prescription-induced holiday convalescence begins. “Why couldn’t she write her thesis on her own religion? She could have interviewed the archbishop of Canterbury. We could have stayed at Claridge's.”
The Kardashians they are not.
It would seem that the world is in an "eat the rich" mood, but recent polls tell a slightly different story. Many still approve of the world’s wealthiest man dismantling the government in the name of reducing wasteful spending.
That’s because Elon Musk and his DOGE bros tout their supposed and largely inflated wins while remaining quiet on the topic of business subsidies (aka “corporate welfare”) going untouched, a $181 billion expenditure in 2024 according to a Cato Institute official. And the thing about Musk, along with midlife crisis-edition Mark Zuckerberg and other tech bros, is that they’re styling themselves as entertainers instead of robber barons.
Some things about the wealthy class never change, as the Ratliffs exemplify. Like the rich families that vacation together in past seasons of “The White Lotus,” the North Carolina brood is a collection of insufferable personalities. In one unit, we get the parent who can’t keep their mind off work, the child who believes himself to be God’s gift, and the misfit who tries to balance their family’s out-of-control grossness by trying to be good, sometimes failing spectacularly.
As recent events attest, there may be no Earthly creature more dangerous than a white man with so much wealth that he can lose billions of dollars of his net worth, doom millions of people and not break his stride.
His rampage is bad for the planet, whereas a common millionaire on the verge of banishment from his community country club is primarily dangerous to those in his sight line. But the Ratliffs are a class unto themselves – isolationists on a micro-scale, casually racist and blisteringly ignorant. Victoria is so zonked out of her mind that she doesn’t even know where in the world she is. When Piper tells her parents she intends to spend a year at the monastery she initially purported to simply be visiting, an astounded Victoria blurts, “You want to move to Taiwan?”
To Victoria, Buddhism is a Chinese cult and other rich people are trashy.
She’s not entirely wrong in that second opinion; among the guests the Ratliffs fall in with are Jon Gries’ Greg, who now goes by Gary since the mysterious death of his wealthy wife Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) left him her fortune. He’s hiding out with his much younger girlfriend Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon), who might be a sex worker. Greg – er, Gary – is pretty trashy. Victoria’s no paragon of civility herself, though.
After brushing off Leslie Bibb’s Kate, a member of the girls’ trip trio who recognizes her, Victoria responds to the news that Kate’s friend Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan) is a famous actress by declaring all actresses to be “basically prostitutes.” “If they’re lucky. Am I right?”
That clears Saxon to make a few racist jokes, like lamenting that his massage didn’t have a happy ending. “What? Aren’t they all supposed to be a little speshy-speshy?” His mom roars with laughter.
You have to feel a little something for Timothy, a desperate man with a tacky wife, a horny scion with an inflated sense of self and a pair of junior children who will either escape, as Piper is trying to do, or be consumed by their family’s corruption, which may be Lochlan’s future.
At least he seems to know that he and his will get rolled over first when the peasants take up pitchforks, regardless of whether they deserve it, simply because they can be touched. The .01% live on compounds under armed protection. The Ratliffs are one donut-loving gated community security guard away from wreck and ruin. And their false sense of being above it all extends to their consideration of others, including each other.
When Saxon and Lochlan head off to party with their resort friends Chloe and Chelsea ( Aimee Lou Wood), they end up in a drug-fueled sex tangle on Greg’s/Gary’s yacht . . . and remember the next day that they were intimate with each other.
Simply alluding to what happens isn’t enough. As Saxon’s memory reassembles in the morning, White — who wrote and directed the episode — shows the brothers kissing and Lochlan handling Saxon’s privates while he’s with Chloe. Those scenes return to Saxon before the blackout clears for Lochlan. Unfortunately for him, that happens during a meditation session with the monk Piper wants to study with.
Timothy and Victoria aren’t aware that their sons have slipped into the type of libertine excess European aristocrats once indulged in. Yet. As things stand, these dumb parents are proud of their messy issue, which means the kids are probably safe from their father’s impending breakdown. But that understanding only goes so far. The recently aired sixth episode shows Timothy and Victoria visiting the local monastery, where Timothy has a comforting conversation with its head monk about, what else, death.
This actually makes him feel better about his daughter spending a year at such an orderly, simple place. But Victoria only sees dirty cots and unbathed children — privation. “I don’t want her thinking she'll be just fine if she's poor. She needs to fear poverty, Tim, like everyone else we know,” she says. “That way, she'll make good decisions.”
The joke is that Victoria has no clue that her long run on Easy Street is about to hit a dead end. She blithely tells her husband that if they were to lose all their wealth, she wouldn’t want to keep living. The real tragedy, if you can call it that, is that not many would see that development as a huge loss.
“I just don't think at this age, I'm meant to live an uncomfortable life,” Victoria says in a drawl pulled from the depths of North Carolina’s sunken place. “I don't have the will. No, I just don't have it in me.”
Then she pulls out a fancy perfume bottle and wafts it under her nose, inhaling a chemical approximation of the scented flora surrounding them.
“Grass,” Victoria sighs brainlessly, and she checks out from reality again, unaware that vapid admission has cast her in the grim two-hander playing in her frantic husband's head.
