DANIEL FIENBERG: The past month has left little doubt that Mike White has that special sauce when it comes to giving TV audiences a show capable of providing and sustaining discourse. But I find it fascinating to see what people talk about when they talk about The White Lotus.

As always, there’s been chatter about the identity of the season’s inevitable casualty and the circumstances behind their death, which has never been a level on which White Lotus interested me. (I reserve the right to change my mind, of course, if the killer turns out to be a monkey.)

Then there have been fixations on North Carolina accents — who knew there was a suburban Durham accent that was different from the urban Durham accent — and Aimee Lou Wood’s teeth, proving that the White Lotus audience isn’t made up of Sex Education fans, or Oscar completists who sought out Living, in which Wood gave superb support to Bill “Not the Science Guy” Nighy.

But for the past two weeks, the chatter has been dominated by one thing and it isn’t the beloved TV veteran looking to avenge his father’s death, the Academy Award winner who dropped by for an all-timer of a monologue in the fifth episode or the three cougars whose sins have included infidelity and voting for Trump.

No, we’re all abuzz about what did or didn’t happen between brothers Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan (Sam Nivola). At first it was just a kiss. Sorry, “just” a kiss. But then there was some under-the-sheets action. And now the Internet is in a tizzy about incest, discussing a serious societal taboo — and/or crime — in the most superficial and frivolous ways possible.

So, Angie! When you watched your screeners — we were sent the first six episodes ahead of the season premiere — were you agog about what transpired between Saxon and Lochlan? And have you been surprised by the audience reaction?

ANGIE HAN: If anything, I think I was less stunned by the Saxon-Lochlan stuff because I’d heard so much rumbling about it beforehand. By the time I finally got there, I was almost surprised they didn’t go further. (Not to mention those Ratliff kids were giving off deeply uncomfortable vibes even before Lochy watches a naked Saxon prepare to masturbate in the premiere.)

Besides, this isn’t coming totally out of the blue for The White Lotus. Season two gave us the shocking twist of an uncle sleeping with his nephew, and while that was ultimately a fake-out (the characters turned out not to be related), it doesn’t seem out of character for Mike White to try and up the shock value by including real incest.

Because incest does have a way of sucking up all the air in a room. Just look at last fall’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. For all the truly outrageous things that happen on that show (up to and including some very graphic murder!) the part that seemed to attract the most chatter was the unsettlingly close dynamic between the brothers, culminating in a literally steamy shower scene. 

As you said, incest is still a major taboo, in a TV landscape with fewer and fewer of those — and thus, an easy way to draw a viewer’s attention. What I’m thinking about is what else it can be. In the case of Monsters, I’m not sure it was much more. Depending on the episode, the Menendez brothers’ relationship was portrayed as either a titillating reflection of their moral depravity, or the harrowing consequence of years of molestation by their father. Trying to have it both ways just made the whole thing feel icky and cheap.

As for The White Lotus, I’m not sure yet. It’s no coincidence that Lochlan and Saxon’s hook-up comes in the same episode as Special Guest Star Sam Rockwell’s monologue about imagining himself as an Asian girl getting “railed” by a white guy like him. Both fit into the season’s larger themes of desire, identity and transference, and I’m intrigued to see where else White goes with them. 

But how many people do you see talking about that, and how many are just clutching their pearls at the brother-on-brother action?

FIENBERG: I don’t wanna talk about Menendez: Monsters — The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story for exactly the reason you say: Ryan Murphy desperately wanted to have it both ways — to be like, “Here’s why incest is so horrible and reprehensible that it’s a justification for homicide” but also “Here’s why incest is hot if two hunky actors who you know aren’t actually brothers in real life are in the shower.” There are things that it’s fine to have both ways, like “I like chocolate ice cream” and “I like vanilla ice cream” so “Let’s see if we can find some place that still makes Neapolitan ice cream!” Incest isn’t one of those things.

Speaking of having it both ways, Mike White wants vacations to seem sexy and exotic, but at the same time he views the resort experience as one that tears down the fundamental boundaries of society. The moral scaffolding that keeps us from giving in to our primal desires gets ripped away and, naturally, very rudimentary notions of decency fall apart. Freud, always one to fixate on incest, albeit primarily in Oedipal terms, positioned the prohibition of this instinct to be a major tenet of civilization. So when White takes his characters away from civilization, incest is a good litmus test for how they’ve strayed.

It’s been gradual, too. The first season gave us Sydney Sweeney’s Olivia, who insisted that her brother sleep in the kitchen because of her certainty that he’d masturbate to her bestie — one of several examples of their Hawaiian vacation putting the Mossbachers in a position of excessive proximity and therefore intimacy. Then the second season, as you note, had the uncle-nephew sex that wasn’t actually between an uncle and his nephew. And don’t forget that the second season also had a father and son both enjoying the services of the same sex worker.

This season started with the Ratliff kids debating sleeping arrangements and continued with Saxon’s unnatural interest in Piper’s (Sarah Catherine Hook) possible virginity, as well as ongoing intimations of voyeurism and partner-sharing. And then the hook-up in question.

That being said, how confident are you that what seems to have transpired between Saxon and Lochlan actually transpired? Party drugs were involved. Are we heading toward another fake-out? Does Mike White really want to be The Showrunner Who Cried Incest? (Semi-related: Does Hook, who just starred in Amazon’s awful remake of Cruel Intentions, want to be building a body of work playing young women engaged in unnatural relationships with her siblings, step-or-otherwise? It is, as the cement-mixing pelican in The Flintstones would say, a living.)

HAN: I mean, I’m pretty confident the incest actually happened? Not only do Saxon and Lochlan both recall the incident, separately, but Chloe explicitly brings it up in conversation with Saxon, unprompted. And we’ve been given no reason to assume Saxon and Lochlan aren’t really brothers. I suppose it’s possible we’re being set up for a rug-pull, but based on what we know right now, I’m less wondering whether the incest is real, and more curious about what it means.

To me, the dynamic between the Ratliff brothers seems to be teetering on that knife’s edge between wanting to fuck someone and wanting to be someone. Saxon, as we’ve seen throughout the season, is eager to mold Lochlan into a version of himself; Lochlan, as we’ve also seen, idolizes his big brother. Their connection that night — fueled by booze, pills and that strange vacation mindset where nothing feels quite as “real” as it might back home — seems less about them giving into some long-simmering attraction than about that blurring and transferring of identities alluded to in Rockwell’s speech. 

Not that any of that intellectualizing is likely to come as much comfort to two brothers confronting the fact that, holy shit, they hooked up with each other. But I think that’s part of what the season is playing with, too: the collision of the philosophical or metaphorical with concrete reality. It’s all well and good to imagine transcending the boundaries of your body or your family, or for that matter your history or your culture or your class. It’s another thing to grapple with the practical consequences that can come with trying.

But speaking of class, it’s also interesting to me that the Ratliffs and the Menendezes are definitionally wealthy and powerful, as are the Targaryens on House of the Dragon and, for that matter, the Merteuil-Belmonts on Cruel Intentions. (The latter are step-siblings not related by blood, but still — it’s clear the proximity to incest is meant to add a naughty charge.) Is the idea that these scandalous relationships reflect the depravity and decadence of the elites? That these characters are so protected by their wealth that they get away with things normal people can’t? Is there a reason we seem to be getting so many of these incest or incest-adjacent stories now, or is it just a coincidence?

FIENBERG: Of all of the available forms of “privilege,” “incest privilege” has to be the grossest. 

When TV shows about lower-income families feature incest, it’s almost exclusively couched as sexual assault, the nightmarish worst-case scenario. But when historical shows and fantasy epics deal with incest, it’s dynastic in the sense that intermarriage and inbreeding were common for centuries. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip? Cousins. Not so much a big deal on The Crown. The simplest explanation is that it was important for royals to marry people of equal status, and the available dating pool usually required either somebody within your dynastic line or somebody from a dynastic line in a different country. But even those bloodlines became intermingled in a hurry.

Throw in dragons and you get a familiar fantasy trope. Jaime and Cersei Lannister? We’re supposed to be disgusted, but the whole “discarding Bran out the window” thing is a far greater crime, because the way Game of Thrones presented it? Incest is just what Lannisters do. And it’s just what Targaryens do.

And that, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the Ratliffs, who are Southern royalty, but try to avoid consanguinity between Duke and UNC — so presumably siblings making out is off the table?

In any case, the incestuousness this season seems in many ways emblematic (or symptomatic) of these luxury resort getaways, which have become more and more exclusive with each season. The Hawaii White Lotus felt basically like a Hilton. You could easily imagine going on that vacation. The Italian White Lotus last season gave the impression of some degree of selectiveness, but there were still dozens of non-characters in the background at that resort. But this season? This is a ritzy gated community for TV stars and financial schemers (and however Rick got in). The more exclusive you get, the more insulated you get. And when you can’t look outward, what’s left but to look inward?

So why so much incest on TV of late? You might just as well ask why there are so many billionaires in Donald Trump’s cabinet and why there are people saying in earnest that Don Jr. might be a presidential candidate in 2028. We aren’t quite sure if America is becoming an oligarchy or a monarchy, but either way there are a lot of people with a lot of money who have somehow gotten a lot of power. It’s fair to ponder whether, if you’re going down a monarchal path, this might be a consequence.

That said, I’m still not convinced that Saxon and Lochlan actually committed incest. Mike White likes to shock, but I think there are limits to what HBO is willing to sign on for. Everybody that night was doing a lot of drugs and nobody’s memory is going to be precise. Maybe there’s consensus on a kiss. Maybe different people have different fragmented memories of something more taking place. But I’m not sure whom I’d trust to have a clear-headed and definitive version of what occurred. The person with the highest level of sobriety, Chelsea (Wood), is the person who opted for the least involvement. 

HAN: At the very least, we can agree that this series wants you to think incest might have occurred — that it’s very deliberately invoking that idea knowing full well it’s going to surprise and unsettle people. But is this just provocation for provocation’s sake? Or do we think there’s some purpose to this plot point beyond simple shock value?

Personally, I think White’s earned enough benefit of the doubt over the two previous seasons (not to mention his other works, like the superb Enlightened) that I’m willing to believe he’s got something more ambitious and interesting in mind than simply scandalizing the audience. What that something is, however — and whether this particular controversial plot beat will turn out to have been the best way of accomplishing that — we won’t know until the last two episodes of the season. 

To the extent that the goal here was to try and get a viewer’s attention, it certainly worked. If the not-incest last season offered a jolt, it was only a fleeting one, since the very next episode indicated the two people involved weren’t who they claimed to be. The Saxon-Lochlan connection ups the ante significantly, and is much harder to dismiss. As you noted earlier, it feels like it’s all anyone’s been talking about with this show over the past couple of weeks. 

But that also, then, leaves the question of where we go from here. If the show keeps meaning to outdo itself in sheer outrageousness each season, is there even anywhere more shocking it can go?

FIENBERG: Monkeys. With. Guns, Angie. Monkeys with guns. Gunkeys?

HAN: It’s true. Incest seems to be everywhere on TV these days, as we’ve just been discussing at length. But gunkeys? Now that would be a real innovation.