The White Lotus’s third season ended with one unexplained plot line that left many viewers scratching their heads.
In episode two of the latest season of Mike White’s luxurious drama series, Parker Posey’s Victoria Ratliff gives Leslie Bibb’s Kate Bohr the cold shoulder at dinner, suggesting that the two characters have a past.
*Warning – spoilers for The White Lotus season three are below*
Kate, a wealthy Texan, approaches Victoria and her family at the hotel’s restaurant, saying that she recognised Victoria from spending the weekend together at a mutual friend’s baby shower years prior. Victoria gave a stand-offish response and acted like Kate was a stranger. For the remaining episodes of the season, viewers were left without any resolution to that dynamic.
That mystery surrounding that frosty encounter had perplexed School of Rock actor Sarah Silverman, who explained in a recent episode of Live with Kelly and Mark that she went directly to the series creator to find out the answer.
“I loathe doing that because I feel like everyone must be asking him, but I did,” Silverman told hosts Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan about her interaction with White, who is her friend.
“I did text him out of this one. I emailed him and I said, ‘What’s up with Leslie Bibb – how come we didn’t find out why Parker Posey iced Leslie Bibb?’”
Silverman continued: “‘Why did she pretend not to know her? Is it something you didn’t get to that got cut out, or like, what’s the answer?’ And he goes, ‘No, I was just showing that she’s a b****. ''”
White has previously addressed the intrigue surrounding that scene, saying that he wrote it to show Victoria’s superiority complex.
“The idea of Victoria as the mother, when Leslie Bibb comes up to her and she’s trying to talk to her, she’s like ‘I don’t want to encourage her. I’m with my family, like, get out.’ She's always telling the kids, ‘you gotta be careful, you’re beautiful, attractive,’” White said on The White Lotus Official Podcast.
“She has a superiority complex and it has extended to her kids and it’s turned it into a little bit of a cult where they’re all kind of incestuous, that nobody’s good enough and so they’re all kind of looking inward.”
In the series finale that aired in April, Aimee Lou Wood’s character Chelsea catches a stray bullet during a shootout and dies in the arms of her partner, Rick, played by Walton Goggins. He then carries her across a bridge before he is shot in the back and falls leaving the pair submerged in water, side by side.
In a three-star review of the finale, The Independent’s Adam White argued that the show’s third season “was The White Lotus at its most un-fun.”
