It finally happened. After weeks of not-so-subtle foreshadowing, in the most recent episode of The White Lotus brothers Saxon (Patrick Schwarzenegger) and Lochlan Ratcliff (Sam Nivola) got intimate with one another.

In episode five, we witnessed the siblings share a drunken kiss while playing ‘spin the bottle’ with Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) and Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) on the yacht owned by Gary AKA Greg (Jon Gries). So far, so gross. Then, in episode six, Saxon wakes up naked next to his little brother with a terrible case of hangxiety. He’s plagued by hazy flashbacks to the night before: first having sex with Chloe, then watching (and wanking) while Lochlan loses his virginity to her in the bed next to him. He’s repulsed – but as the day goes on, even more disturbing details emerge. While sitting with Chloe and Chelsea on the hotel’s sunloungers, the pair bluntly remind him that Lochlan “jerked [him] off”. Saxon wasn’t just masturbating at the sight of his brother mid-intercourse; turns out his brother actually gave him a handjob.

The storyline, unsurprisingly, has disturbed a fair few fans, with many taking to social media to voice their disgust. “The White Lotus lost me this season with the incest plotline,” one user wrote on X. “That episode was disturbing,” another wrote on Reddit. “I’m not even sure I want to watch the next one.” But the brother-on-brother action wasn’t shoehorned into the script for the sake of shock value. With every season of The White Lotus, creator Mike White’s MO has been brutally skewering the elite, and this season is no different. The incest storyline really says very little about sex at all – instead, it’s a shrewd comment on the incestuous nature of the ultra-rich.

Since stepping foot in the resort, Victoria Ratliff (Parker Posey) – mother to Saxon, Lochlan, and Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook) – has been wittering on about the importance of only fraternising with “good” and “decent” people. “Try to get along,” she implores her children as they bicker over breakfast. “Because you need your family. You do. Most people don’t have good values. They’re scammers.” In a later episode, Saxon gushes about securing an invite to Greg’s yacht, and again Victoria is immediately suspicious. “Who did you meet with a boat? Are they decent people?” she asks.

Victoria is terrified of losing an iota of the status that her family has managed to accumulate (does she have a nasty shock coming!); her biggest fear is the Ratliffs becoming sullied by their association with people with less class than them. Her attitude is true-to-life: research shows that people are generally inclined to choose partners from within their social class. And the higher up the social strata you are, the less likely you are to couple up with someone outside your tax bracket; nearly half of all upper-class participants in one 2017 survey said they would not even consider entering into a long-term relationship with someone from a different social class, compared to just 18 per cent of middle-class participants. Case in point: throughout time and across the world, royal dynasties have resorted to inbreeding as a means of keeping wealth and status securely within the family.

The problem, though, is that this leaves the Ratliffs – and the mega-rich more generally – with vanishingly few people in their circles. Take the instance where Kate (Leslie Bibb) runs into Victoria at breakfast. Victoria thinks of herself as a cut above Kate and consequently closes ranks, rudely rebuffing her attempts at conversation. “I’m on vacation with my family. I don’t know her,” Victoria says after Kate leaves, mortified. While Kate and Victoria appear as rough social equals, having met at a mutual friend’s baby shower several years prior and given that they’re both staying at the same luxury hotel, Victoria considers Kate to be beneath her. It’s a revealing insight into just how few people Victoria will socialise with; her circle is essentially limited to her family alone.

White has injected The White Lotus with some outrageous storylines over the years, but it’s fair to say that he’s not one to shock audiences just for the sake of it. “There’s always a very shocking, crazy, intense moment in every season [but] it’s never just for the sake of being shocking, it always serves the story,” Nivola said in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

The purpose of the incest storyline, then, is to underscore the grotesque extent of the mega-rich’s wealth-hoarding; it exposes the damaging, ugly consequences of the one per cent choosing to exist within isolated bubbles (private schools, private clubs, private hotels like The White Lotus itself), totally divorced from normal society. And their self-isolation has real, knock-on consequences for the rest of us, with the rich continually choosing to marry within their social spheres, exacerbating inequality. Today, in the US, the top 10 per cent hold over two-thirds of the nation’s wealth, with money trapped circulating around the same few, privileged families. This, White seems to argue, is scandalous and disgusting. Perhaps even as scandalous and disgusting as incest.