The White Lotus Season 3's Most Disturbing Sex Scene Goes Full Game Of Thrones

Don't board that random yacht for a full-moon party in Thailand if you're not up to speed on "The White Lotus." Spoilers lie ahead for season 3, episode 6, "Denials."

When "The White Lotus" season 3, episode 6 catches up with the Ratliff brothers Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola), the siblings are deeply hungover after a night of partying with Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon). After boarding a yacht owned by Greg Hunt (Jon Gries, reprising his role from the show's first two seasons), who's currently going by "Gary" and cavorting around Thailand with Chloe, the two brothers proceed to ingest pills and get drunk with the two young women, and that's when things ... escalate, to put it ever-so-mildly.

Chloe sleeps with both Ratliff brothers in turn, but while she's getting hot and heavy with Lochlan, Saxon sticks around and starts pleasuring himself while his little brother and Chloe are in the next bed over. Not only that, but the two boys also make eye contact during the deed, which is, uh, weird. The next morning, Saxon is visibly disturbed by whatever went down last night as Lochlan tells him, "I don't remember last night at all." Saxon, trying to move past the entire thing, tells him, "We both blacked out."

Considering that the two kissed in the show's fifth episode "Full-Moon Party" at Chloe's urging, we already know a bunch of weird stuff happened during that debaucherous night. Partway through "Denials," however, Chloe reveals that it may have gone even further than either of the Ratliff siblings could ever imagine in the light of day. While Chelsea, Chloe, and Saxon are relaxing by the pool, Chloe casually says that she had a "threesome" with them, with Chelsea mentioning that the two boys made out. Saxon writes that off as a joke, which is when Chloe drops a real bomb: Lochlan and Saxon actively got intimate during the encounter, with Lochlan actively pleasuring his older brother. "I blacked out," Saxon insists. "Well, I didn't," Chloe says cheerfully. (Chelsea, sunning herself between them, nonchalantly says, "God, I don't think there's a drug in the world that would make me get with my brother. Hey, I don't judge.") Lochlan, during a meditation experience later, suddenly remembers everything that happened, leaving the brothers in a genuinely bizarre place as "Denials" draws to a close.

During season 2 of "The White Lotus," creator Mike White plants a false incest flag, so to speak, only to pull the rug out from under the viewers. Even though Quentin (Tom Hollander) and Jack (Leo Woodall) claim that they're uncle and nephew, that's very likely not true. So, when Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge) catches them in an extremely compromising position and spills the beans to her assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson), it's easy enough to write it off as another one of Quentin's lies. We never really get any confirmation one way or another, but as far as the Ratliffs are concerned, they're definitely related, and frankly, the season's been leaving a weird trail of unsettling breadcrumbs about these brothers right from the beginning.

Saxon isn't quiet about the fact that he frequently watches pornography and even does just that during his first night in Thailand despite sharing a room with his younger brother; it feels like Lochlan is fascinated by this act, and both brothers spend a frankly inordinate amount of time wondering about the status of their sister Piper's (Sarah Catherine Hook) virginity. Nothing completely out of pocket happens until they spend the night on the yacht with Chelsea and Chloe, but to say that White was alluding to impropriety between these brothers is an understatement. Still, this is an HBO original, so incest not only isn't out of the question, but it's almost expected at this point.

Anyone's who even lightly familiar with HBO's slate of original programming knows that incest is nothing new for the premium network. There was plenty of incest to be found on the network's series "Rome," which kicked off in 2005, but that's not exactly shocking since incest wasn't quite as taboo with the ancient Romans. Still, viewers might have been just a little bit surprised to see siblings Octavia (Kerry Condon) and her younger brother hook up. Elsewhere, "Six Feet Under" featured a rather unconventional relationship between siblings Brenda (Rachel Griffiths) and Billy Chenowith (Jeremy Sisto), while the "Gossip Girl" reboot that streamed exclusively on Max tried way too hard to conjure up shocking twists and turns, leading to a dud storyline in season 2 where the seemingly innocent and sweet Grace (Anna Van Patten) slept with her own brother Jake (Zander Pacella), cheating on her popular and wealthy boyfriend Obie (Eli Brown). 

(To that point, the original "Gossip Girl" kept forcing Penn Badgley's Dan Humphrey and Blake Lively's Serena van der Woodsen together, even though their parents were married. Step-sibling romances aren't quite as bad, but they're still not great.)

Of course, you can't have a conversation about "keeping it in the family" on HBO without talking about "Game of Thrones." In that show's very first episode, we famously saw twins Jaime (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) in flagrante, and at the end of the series, Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) and Jon Snow (Kit Harington) found out that they're actually aunt and nephew after they slept together. "House of the Dragon" has also carried on this tradition — multiple members of the Targaryen family marry siblings or relatives, including Emma D'Arcy's Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen, whose second husband is her uncle Prince Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith). It's gotten to the point where, after airing the fifth episode of season 3 of "The White Lotus" (where we saw that aforementioned kiss between Saxon and Lochlan), HBO even threw up a post on its official Instagram account pairing a picture of the boys with other incestuous characters, adding the caption, "Family first." At least it's leaning into things, I guess!

"The White Lotus" premieres new episodes on Sunday nights at 9 P.M. EST on HBO and Max.