Warning: This post contains spoilers for season two, episode one of Yellowjackets.
An antler queen. A psychic. A cult leader. A mentally troubled teenage girl. Just who the hell is Lottie Matthews?
The season two premiere of Yellowjackets — now streaming on Paramount+ — gave little insight into the mystic Queen Bee whose seemingly-supernatural connection to the wilderness has been both a blessing and a curse for her teammates as they struggle to survive the aftermath of a freak plane crash. But episode one’s “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” did clue fans in on exactly what happened to Lottie [Courtney Eaton] once the team was rescued. Honestly, she might have been better off staying lost in the woods.
Who Is Lottie Matthews?
The first season of Yellowjackets established Lottie as a key player in the show’s ’90s-era timeline. Her wealthy parents paid for the girls to fly private to their championship game and, shortly after the crash, we saw Lottie’s mental health begin to decline. Her meds — which were prescribed because her father suspected she had a form of schizophrenia — ran dry and Lottie started having visions both similar to the ones she had as a child and also more disturbing. She predicted Shauna’s pregnancy and Laura Lee’s death, fell into dreamlike trances where she only spoke in French, and warned the girls that blood sacrifices needed to be made to appease some type of “hungry” spirit, and she somehow knew a dead man was waiting in the attic of the remote cabin the team now calls home.
But Lottie also persuaded a wild bear to sacrifice itself so the girls could have something to eat during the long, hard winter, so her occult rituals and unsettling premonitions began to be viewed in a different light, even by the non-believers in the group.
What Happened To Lottie Matthews In Season 2 Of Yellowjackets?
In season two’s first episode, a stuck-in-the-past Lottie is still leaning on her messiah-like status to lead the team as they struggle to find food and get along once winter sets in and food becomes scarce. She’s brewing bloody herbal teas and calming panic attacks and insisting that Javi, the young boy who went missing in season one, is somehow still alive despite the freezing temperatures and feet of snow trapping them inside the haunted cabin. We assume she’ll continue to channel the supernatural to keep the girls alive until their rescued but the show’s first episode back gave us a surprise glimpse at what happens to Lottie once help does arrive.
We see clips of the girls, freshly delivered from their Lord of the Flies nightmare, boarding a plan headed back home. Lottie screams at the dozens of reporters and photographers jockeying for a soundbite from the traumatized teens. Next, Lottie’s sitting in a doctor’s office with her parents, dead-eyed and silent, as they describe her comatose-like state at home. She won’t eat. She won’t speak. She stays up all hours of the night. We’re not sure how long she’s been like this, but it’s been long enough that both her family and a team of medical professionals think a stint in a Swedish institution complete with multiple rounds of shock therapy is the only cure. At the hospital, Lottie seems to be thriving, journaling and helping new patients calm their anxiety the same way she helped Travis earlier in the episode.
And when we see her again as an adult, she’s leading another group of lost souls, though not with supernatural visions and blood sacrifices. Instead, this mature Lottie has channeled her gifts into becoming a kind of self-help guru, with disciples garbed in purple who live on her commune and follow her therapeutic practices to reach enlightenment. She’s traded the harsh wilderness for a lakeside retreat and her psychic visions for New Age capitalism. Is she any happier? Is her mental health more stable than it once was? Is she still connected to the darkness in the woods? Those are questions we hope to have answered as the season goes on.