We’re one episode away from the second season finale of “Yellowjackets,” and there are a lot of questions left to be answered. Will Walter’s email to the cops finally lead to Shauna and the gang’s ultimate undoing? What’s the deal with the seeming network of tunnels that run beneath the wilderness compound? Are we close to learning the true identity of that damn antler lady?
As /Film’s resident Lottie whisperer, my main question is this: exactly how much is Lottie in control of everything going on?
The teen mystic played by Courtney Eaton who became the adult cult wellness retreat leader portrayed by Simone Kessell has always been one of “Yellowjackets'” hardest-to-read characters. The core cast are all complex, but at the end of the day, you basically know how Misty, Taissa, Van, and Natalie are going to act in a given situation. Shauna and Lottie slip between subtle shades of passivity and agency, sadism and compassion with such liquid ease, it’s hard to ever predict what they’ll do next.
Lottie’s ethereal connection to the wilderness and growing sway over the girls has been depicted and debated all season, leading many to suspect that it’s she who becomes the antler queen, or at least the de facto leader of the girls’ turn toward barbarism. But last week, I pointed to the terrifying beating scene as a signal that the dark crown may be passing from Lottie to Shauna. Lottie is powerful and intimidating in her own way, sure, but can anyone who watches the show imagine her doing to Shauna what Shauna did to her?
As if an answer to that “prove me wrong,” in this week’s episode, Lottie showed us that she’s potentially capable of much worse.
Unconscious control
This week’s episode, threateningly titled “It Chooses,” contains two scenes in which teen Lottie and adult Lottie are implicated, to varying degrees of directness, in near-fatal atrocities.
In the teen timeline, we finally get the scene we feared ever since the pilot of “Yellowjackets.” The girls plan their first conscious sacrifice of a living victim. Misty takes that ratty old deck of cards around a circle and each Yellowjacket draws hers, hoping not to reveal the ominous Queen of Hearts. Natalie pulls the unlucky card, and who else picks up the knife to commit the grievous act but Shauna. Travis tackles Shauna and tells Natalie to run, giving her a headstart as the rest of the Yellowjackets chase her with axes, knives, and all manner of sinister implements.
It may seem like Shauna has again stepped into the role of brutal enforcer, foreshadowing her assumption to the dark throne of the Yellowjackets. But why did they feel compelled to cross the line from desperate scavenging to active hunting in the first place? That would be Lottie, who spends the duration of the episode writhing in pain in the attic above the room where the choosing ceremony takes place. The team has been hungry for a long time, even ravenously so. But weakened to the point of near-unconsciousness by the beating, the girls finally accept that, to keep Lottie alive, they need to feed.
It’s interesting, given the abject brutality of the episode’s final scene, that it never crossed anyone’s mind to let Lottie become dinner. She even tells Misty not to “waste” her if she dies. Hallucinogenic cross-cuts away from the card-choosing scene to images of Lottie writhing in a trance state beg the question: is she in control here?
The unseen hand
Meanwhile in the adult timeline, Lottie straight up asks the women to die. All season long adult Lottie has been having visions, hearing voices from other realms, and last episode she even saw the antler queen. Fan theories have been going bazinga about the fact that her compound is in the woods, that mysterious symbol is popping up everywhere, and now, that all the survivors (that we know about) have come together. It’s all pointing to a return to the primal scene. Not in the Freudian sense (although some parts of the Callie storyline …?), but in the sense that the woods may have well and truly come back for them.
Seeing some of what Lottie’s been witnessing through her own eyes kind of rationalizes her macabre gesture toward the end of the episode. She presents the women with six cups of tea, one of which has been dosed with a phenobarbital solution that the folks at the compound “use to euthanize animals who are suffering,” Lottie explains. “It’s also what the Heaven’s Gate people used,” Misty retorts.
It’s still not entirely clear what’s motivating Lottie. Is she a mere vessel being guided by the wilderness? A conscious agent of destruction in league with the wilderness or using it as justification? Or is she so afraid of what it could do if she doesn’t comply, that she rushes into action before it even makes demands? If I were a gambling man, I’d put my money on option three. But where Lottie and Shauna are concerned, you can never rule out the most frightening of explanations.
New episodes of “Yellowjackets” premiere on the Showtime app on Fridays, and on Showtime on Sundays.
