Jason Isaacs Really Stuck It To Duke After All That White Lotus Backlash

Spoiler alert! If you haven’t seen The White Lotus Season 3 finale, stream it with your Max subscription if you don’t want spoilers!

The White Lotus Season 3 has come to an end on the 2025 TV schedule, and we finally know which of the titular resort’s guests departed their Thai vacation in a bodybag. Surprisingly all of the Ratliffs made it out alive (though things got pretty scary for Lochlan for a bit), and nobody was likely more relieved by that fact than those at Duke. After getting backlash for sporting university merch this season, it seems Jason Isaacs got the last laugh.

Timothy Ratliff had a pretty tough vacation, as he hid from his family the fact that back home he’d been implicated in illegal business activity, and they were about to lose everything. Over the week, Jason Isaacs’ character was seen sporting a T-shirt with his alma mater’s name, and Duke did not like that, saying The White Lotus had gone “too far” in associating Timothy with the university. So I’d imagine they also didn’t appreciate Isaacs’ choice of wardrobe at a finale event Sunday:

Yes, Jason Isaacs proudly showed off a Duke Blue Devils T-shirt at HBO's The White Lotus Season 3 Finale Event in Westlake Village, California, on April 6. I’m sure nobody bought that he was simply supporting the men’s basketball team, who were eliminated from the NCAA Tournament just a day earlier, right?

It wasn’t Timothy Ratliff’s illegal business deals that seemed to rub Duke officials the wrong way, but rather the character’s response to learning his fortune was effectively gone. In a graphic scene — during which he is wearing the Duke shirt — Tim contemplates suicide, balking only when he thinks of his wife and daughter finding his body. This leads him to consider killing his family before taking his own life.

Frank Tramble, Duke University's vice president for communications, marketing and public affairs, released a statement saying the logo was used without permission and “in our view uses it on imagery that is troubling, does not reflect our values or who we are, and simply goes too far.”

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The Ratliff patriarch continued to sport the Duke shirt — apparently he didn’t pack much else in the way of sleepwear — including in the finale, when he nearly poisoned his family with fruit from the suicide tree. He wasn’t wearing the Blue Devils shirt during that scene, but Tim did allow his wife and two oldest children to take some sips of the poisoned pina coladas before changing his mind and knocking the drink out of Saxon’s hand.

If Duke’s administrators are upset about anything, they should be ashamed at how stupid one of their alumni was to not wash out the blender of suicide tree fruit. Because apparently the threat of rancid coconut milk is not enough to make a teenage boy wash a dish instead of just using whatever’s in there for a protein shake. Lochlan really does have questionable decision-making skills.

I’m sure the university is glad that this season of The White Lotus has come to an end, while we all recover from the loss of scene-stealing Aimee Lou Wood as Chelsea and her revenge-seeking boyfriend Rick (Walton Goggins). Of course we’re already thinking about the Season 4 setting and which White Lotus characters we’d love to see again, but until those big decisions are made, we can relive the first three seasons of Mike White’s series by streaming them on Max.