There is a lot going on with Lottie, and it makes many of the other characters uneasy.
With many fans now getting to watch Yellowjackets for the first time on Netflix, audiences are expressing a renewed interest in what exactly happened to Lottie.
Charlotte “Lottie” Matthews, played by Courtney Eaton in the Yellowjackets cast, is a member of the WHS Yellowjackets soccer team who gets stranded in the wilderness after a terrible plane crash.
As revealed in Season 2, she is also one of the few who survive the entire ordeal. Simone Kessell plays her older self.
Lottie’s Yellowjackets Journey
Asking what happened to Lottie in Yellowjackets in the show is a loaded question.
Her story begins when she was a little girl and first started to experience visions. Many thought that they were signs of a psychological condition, such as schizophrenia.
At one point, while out with her parents in the car, she started screaming wildly. Moments later, a terrible crash occurred in front of them––right where they would have been.
Her mom thought she was seeing precognitions, but Lottie’s father was unconvinced. Instead, he made sure to have his daughter seen by doctors and put her on medication.
After the fateful crash with the WHS Yellowjackets, Lottie runs out of the medication that she has been on for so long. This leads to those strange feelings and visions coming back.
All of these instances remain vague and unexplained, but they sure do leave a feeling that something supernatural is occurring with her and this strange wilderness.
At one point, Lottie becomes seemingly possessed, speaking fluent French––a language she does not know.
She also has precognitions about certain situations that play out: Natalie and Travis finding a deer with bloody horns, the bad luck of their cabin home, and Laura Lee’s death.
Lottie’s visions lead to lots of tension within the group, as she’ll have strange outbursts or say wild things that throw people off. She also claims to be close to the wilderness itself, being able to hear it when no one else can.
This leads to a fracture in the group, with some supporting Lottie as sort of a clairvoyant and all-knowing leader. Her strange ways and visions assert a strange control over everyone.
Others, such as Shauna and Natalie, are unconvinced of Lottie and her ways.
Lottie’s struggle with Natalie culminates in a big competition about who can find food for the group so that they can survive.
While Lottie almost dies in the process, she does not succeed in finding food. Natalie nearly does, but she loses her game to the frozen lake.
Shauna and Lottie also have a notable conflict. Lottie becomes obsessed with her unborn baby, whom she’s convinced will “change everything.”
Sadly, Shauna’s baby is stillborn. This, of course, doesn’t settle any tensions.
To protect Misty from Shauna’s anger at one point, Lottie takes an extreme beating from Shauna. This leaves her in a bloody pulp, eventually relegated to slowly recovering in the attic of the cabin.
Eventually, Lottie admits to the group that she never wanted to be the leader. She also can no longer hear the wilderness–according to Lottie, it doesn’t need her anymore.
Instead, she surmises that the wilderness wants the group to have a leader who can help them survive. She thinks Natalie is the perfect pick, thanks to her surviving the group’s recent sacrifice attempt (to get meat to survive).
While Lottie’s story in the wilderness is far from over, that’s about all that the first two seasons reveal.
Season 3 will surely bring even more insane development for the character (read more about Yellowjackets Season 3 here).
What Is Wrong With Future Lottie?
In many ways, the older Lottie is positioned as potentially a big bad figure for Season 2 of Yellowjackets––but it is more complicated than that.
It turns out Lottie (sometimes referred to as Charlotte) has been running a cult at Camp Green Pine––or, as she’d rather it be called, an intentional community.
Lottie had sent her men to find Natalie in Season 1 because she worried Natalie would do something stupid after discovering Travis’ death. She was right, too, which led to them preventing Natalie’s suicide and bringing her to Lottie.
After being rescued from the wilderness alongside her fellow survivors, Lottie was sent to a mental health institution in Switzerland, where she spent over a decade.
Once she left, she founded Camp Green Pine using her family fortune.
It’s quickly revealed that, for the first time in decades, Lottie is once again having those visions. She’s been seeing a therapist to try to keep everything in check, which has seemingly been working up until this point.
As things get worse for Lottie, she admits to her psychiatrist that she worries that she has never been ill. Instead, perhaps there was something dark and supernatural happening.
Much to Lottie’s surprise, eventually, all of her and Natalie’s former Yellowjackets team members—Misty, Shauna, Taissa, and Van—arrived at her facility.
Lottie is convinced that a dark force, coined “it,” is sending her friends to her. This is the same entity that was with them in the wilderness.
She tells this to her new psychiatrist, who was originally revealed to be a substitute for her original psychiatrist at the start of Season 2, but it is revealed that this person has potentially never existed in the first place.
Becoming increasingly convinced that a dark force is at play once again, Lottie tries to convince the group that they need to make a sacrifice to satisfy.
While Shauna attempts to go along as a ruse, eventually, things get out of hand, leading to Natalie dying––potentially handing herself over to the dark presence. In the aftermath of everything, Lottie is placed on a stretcher and taken to a mental institution.
While Lottie may be getting locked up, she feels confident that the dark entity got what it wanted and is pleased for now.
