This article contains spoilers through the Season 3 finale of The White Lotus.
The guests at White Lotus resorts arrive and leave by boat, a fact I’ve come to believe has some kind of mythological significance. These guests are never simply going on vacation. Rather, they’re entering some kind of magical-realist hinterland where they’re tormented by different iterations of fate, pride, vanity, and greed, a ritualistic evisceration accompanied by pool drinks and a spectacular breakfast buffet. The high-Greekness of it all is offset by absurd humor. Is Tim really going to murder his entire family with piña coladas? I wondered, watching the Season 3 finale. Is this Duke University–loving, pill-popping, intrusive-thoughts-plagued man really capable of familicide?
Kind of! I’ve been hung up on Jason Isaacs’s Timothy Ratliff for several weeks now, because his particular storyline is the darkest the HBO show has ever explored, wallowing in the suicidal fantasies of a man on the brink of ruin week after week after week. The day Tim got to the White Lotus Thailand, he learned that his relationship with a business associate accused of financial crimes was being investigated by journalists; by the third episode, the FBI was raiding his office, panicked employees were lighting up his phone, and the prospect of being outed to his family as a failure led Tim to confiscate everyone’s devices while dipping into his wife’s lorazepam stash. Since then, he’s been a haunted wretch of a character: stoned, sullen, stuck with recurring visions of shooting his wife and himself.
The White Lotus is a satire; two of my colleagues, defending the finale on Slack, pointed out that Tim’s final speech to his family before giving them cocktails spiked with the toxic seeds of the pong-pong tree (thank you to Pam, a bizarrely forthcoming hotel employee, for the detailed lowdown on how best to do it) could have been ripped right out of Arrested Development. But I didn’t find the scene funny, and I’m still not convinced it was intended to be. For three seasons now, the show has parsed the varying flaws and faces of poisoned masculinity. In Hawaii, back in Season 1, Jake Lacy’s Shane exercised calamitous levels of entitlement while Steve Zahn’s Mark fretted over his diminished status within his marriage and the health of his testicles. In Season 2, Albie (Adam DiMarco) reproached his father and grandfather for their old-school sexism while Cameron (Theo James) boorishly cheated on his wife and stiffed sex workers at the Sicilian hotel. But none of these storylines was as high stakes or as bleak as Tim’s disintegration, through which the show examined all the ways in which a seemingly upstanding family man with no known history of violence might come to murder his wife and children.
Familicide, or family annihilation—the terms used to describe the act of murdering one’s children (and, often, one’s partner or ex-partner)—is disturbingly common in the U.S., occurring roughly every five days. A 2013 study divided people who commit familicide into four different groups: anomic, disappointed, self-righteous, and paranoid. Tim fits cleanly into the anomic group, people who see their family as an extension of their success and status and are unable to imagine them continuing to exist after something has taken that status away. People who kill their family are overwhelmingly men, and most fail to fit any preexisting criminal profile. “Family annihilators were overwhelmingly not known to criminal justice or mental health services,” the criminologist David Wilson told Wired in 2013. “For all intents and purposes these were loving husbands and good fathers, often holding down high profile jobs and seen publicly as being very, very successful. They were simply not on the radar.” In many cases, the precipitating circumstance is some kind of financial disgrace. The impulse to murder one’s family, Wilson has also argued, is tied to “masculinity in crisis,” whereby patriarchs feel unmanned by their failures and can’t fathom their wife and children functioning without them.
Tim—sinking into drug abuse and narcissistic despair, as mournful as a donkey in a spa robe—has hovered over The White Lotus like a heavy black cloud. Isaacs is a terrific actor, but I haven’t been able to figure out how we’re supposed to read Tim’s looming defeatism. When Tim watches his wife hug his daughter in the finale, the former hugely relieved that the latter is too spoiled to commit to a Buddhism retreat, are his slight eyebrow raise and confused expression, seemingly an acknowledgment that now he might have to murder them both, supposed to be comedic? When, ashen and lifeless, he tells his younger son, “It’s your last day. Don’t just sit in here,” is Isaacs delivering a wry wink? Tim’s speech to his family over poisoned drinks is stupidly simple: “I couldn’t ask for a more perfect family. We’ve had a perfect life, haven’t we? No privations, no suffering, no trauma. And my job is to keep all that from you. To keep you safe. I love you. I love you so much.” But it also reads as the thesis statement of someone who apparently would rather see his family dead than have their high opinions of him diminished.
This is, it has to be emphasized, very dark material for mainstream television. For the majority of the season, Mike White, the show’s creator, has teased Tim’s impulse to commit appalling acts, rendering his fantasies in bloody, realistic fashion. The character has sought out multiple ways to commit murder-suicide, first stealing a gun that he hides in a hotel room, and then asking Pam how best to avail oneself of something locals call “the suicide tree.” He goes so far as to harvest the poisonous seeds, grind them up in a blender, and mix cocktails for his wife and two of his children to drink, before changing his mind and dashing the drink out of his elder son’s hand. When his younger son, who collapses after making himself a protein smoothie using the still-toxic blender, opens his eyes in his father’s arms, is the moment supposed to be redemptive for Tim? Is he changed enough to be honest with his family about what he almost did to them? The show never lets us see.
The final scenes of Season 3, which duck away from the Ratliffs before they find out that their money is gone and their father is likely going to prison, left me feeling almost more unsettled than Tim’s violent reveries. For weeks, The White Lotus played with a truly macabre storyline like a cat with a ball of string, pulling it out, chasing it around, knotting it up. If Tim had actually killed one of his loved ones, whether intentionally or by accident, it would have signaled something new about the show: a willingness to take its pessimism about human nature and karmic balance to a grim and brutal extreme. Maybe an HBO executive intervened. Maybe family annihilation is too bleak for a satirical comedy after all. But there’s something abject about taking up such a fraught subject, wringing every ounce of suspense and dramatic potential out of it, and then backing away as though Tim’s arc is just another story of sad enlightenment.
