The White Lotus Season 3 Episode 6 “Denials” on HBO finds the Ratliff family at their lowest point yet. While Victoria (Parker Posey) gripes about daughter Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) spending the night in a Buddhist meditation center, Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola) are dealing (separately) with the realization of what they did on Full-Moon night. However, no Ratliff is in a worst spot than patriarch Timothy Ratliff (Jason Isaacs).
**Spoilers for The White Lotus Season 3 Episode 6 “Denials,” now streaming on MAX**
With the reality of his whole life collapsing getting closer and closer, Tim spends most of The White Lotus Season 3 Episode 6 embracing suicidal ideation. The episode opens, seemingly, with the aftermath of his death by suicide. Victoria and Piper hysterically discover his body, only for it to then be revealed as a dream sequence. Tim holds off.
“He’s trying to live in denial of what’s really coming,” Jason Isaacs told DECIDER when he visited our studio in New York City last month. “This wave that’s coming for them. It’s not a coincidence, Mike [White], such a brilliant writer, that Lochlan talks about the tsunami because this tsunami is coming for the Ratliff family.”
“None of their futures are real. Nothing that they think is going to happen, their life will ever be able to happen, if this financial devastation is coming.”
However, later in the episode, after Victoria admits to him that she would rather be dead than poor, he begins playing out a violent murder-suicide scenario in his mind.
“He cannot imagine life continuing. So he has to end it. He thinks about ending Victoria’s life because she’s very clear — and I think she’s probably right — she couldn’t live as a poor person,” Isaacs said during The White Lotus press junket. “She’s not going to get off the boat and find she got no house, no phone, no car, no living and no status.”
Compounding Tim’s resolve to die is a fateful conversation he has mid-episode with the monk (Suthichai Yoon) who leads the meditation center Piper wants to join. When Tim asks this Buddhist monk what death is, he makes it sound incredibly appealing to the desperate man.
“He’s told death feels like this very comforting thing, where we return to the sea,” Isaacs said at the junket. “For a man who has been separated from the world so much by feeling like he’s better than or ought to be better than or is above everything else, to be told you return to this warm ocean of humanity feels very reassuring.”
“That it’s not something necessarily to be feared,” he said. “It makes it much more welcoming.”
All of which is to say that at the end of The White Lotus Season 3 Episode 6 “Denials,” Timothy Ratliff is thinking that death sounds pretty darn sweet.
What he doesn’t know, yet, is that resort security guard Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) has snuck into the Ratliff villa and stolen his pistol back.
What will Timothy do now that death by shooting is no longer an easy option? We’ll have to tune into the next episode of The White Lotus to find out…
If you or someone you know are experiencing suicidal thoughts, call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline 24 hours a day, 7 days a week at 988.