What’s Going on With Lottie in Yellowjackets?

In episode 5, Jackie discovers Lottie in what seems like a trance, standing waist-deep in the lake wearing her pajamas. Later in the episode, the girls have a séance and attempt to jokingly talk to the cabin’s deceased owner. But after Javi asks the spirit if they’ll all die out in the woods, Lottie looks toward the window and screams, right before it blows open and the wind knocks out all their candles. Lottie starts crying and screaming, “It wants, it wants, it wants,” and then says, “Hungry, hungry.” She then giggles and turns to Shauna, who—unbeknownst to Lottie—is pregnant, and says, “It’s in you already.”

Lottie then starts speaking in French in a low voice, though the girls have trouble deciphering it; Jackie believes she’s saying, “It wants blood here.” Then, in English, Lottie says, “You must spill blood or else,” and smashes her head into the window. She snaps out of the trance with seemingly little recognition of what just happened.

In episode 6, audiences get more of Lottie’s backstory, starting with a scene of her as a young child, quietly sitting in the backseat of her parents’ car. At a red light, she suddenly starts breathing heavier and heavier and then screams, causing her parents to turn around; in doing so, her parents miss the light turning green and avoid a horrific car crash. Right after the accident, Lottie immediately calms down. Her parents seem to disagree about whether Lottie has some sort of supernatural powers or whether she is mentally ill.

Back in the woods, Lottie has her first vision since the crash: a deer with bloody antlers. Laura Lee later baptizes Lottie in the lake, and while she’s underwater, Lottie has a vision of herself traversing a series of hallways. There, she follows a deer to a staircase with candles set up like an altar, and she lights a candle at the top of the stairs. While still underwater, Lottie looks up at Laura Lee’s face and sees it turn black with flames bursting behind her, foreshadowing when Laura Lee dies in a plane fire later in the season. At the end of episode 6, Natalie and Travis bring back a deer with bloody antlers, identical to the one Lottie saw in her vision. Lottie says that she’s not crazy, and Laura Lee tells her she has a gift.

In episode 7, Lottie tells Van she had a dream and saw red smoke and a river of blood, foreshadowing later in the episode when Taissa lights a flare gun and some of the girls discover a red-tinged river. Lottie also gives Van a deer bone for protection, and Van gets hurt only after Taissa takes the bone away.

Then while the girls are all high on shrooms in episode 9, Lottie says, “Something’s coming. We won’t be hungry much longer.” In the next episode, a bear stumbles into camp, which Lottie kills with a knife. She ultimately offers up the bear’s heart as a sacrifice to the woods. At the very end of season 1, audiences watch adult Natalie get kidnapped by a cult connected to adult Lottie, letting us know that, even in the present day, she’s alive and influencing others.

What do we learn about Lottie in season 2?

At the start of season 2, stranded Lottie continues to be a spiritual leader of sorts for the group; she calms down Javi while he’s having a panic attack and assures him his brother is still alive, even though they haven’t seen him in quite some time. The show then flashes forward to when the girls are eventually rescued; viewers learn that when Lottie returns home, she becomes nearly catatonic, worrying her parents. As a result, she’s treated with electroshock therapy and committed to a mental institution.

In the present-day timeline, it’s confirmed that Lottie does run a cult, er, international community that, in her words, turns “suffering into strength.” And yes, said members did kidnap Natalie. Everyone at the commune wears lavender, save Lottie, and wears necklaces with the creepy symbol from the woods. At one point, Natalie sees some of the members performing a ceremony where they dress up as animals and fake-bury someone alive, something Lottie brushes off as a type of therapy.

Later, Lottie reveals to Natalie that she was with Travis before he died, and in fact, was the one to accidentally kill him; right after it happened, she saw a vision of a dead, decaying Laura Lee. At the end of episode 3, present-day Lottie has another vision: She approaches her apiary to find all the bees are suddenly dead and the beehives filled with blood. After the harrowing incident, Lottie meets with her psychiatrist to try to get an increased prescription for her medication, explaining that she started having visions again for “the first time in decades.” (Again, it’s unclear whether this is the result of something supernatural or, perhaps, because she’s triggered by Natalie’s presence.) Lottie returns to the commune, and we see her flipping through notes of gratitude from her members. Her joy quickly turns to horror as she then comes upon an errant Queen of Hearts—the playing card that used to signal which girl in the woods would be hunted and eaten. Taking to the wilderness, Lottie cuts her hand and sacrifices some of her blood, pleading, “Can’t this just be enough? Please.”

Back in the show’s ’90s timeline, we learn Javi is indeed alive, and some of the girls become convinced Lottie’s so-called powers are attracting the little food they’ve found. Annoyed at the suggestion, Natalie offers that the two of them should have a competition to see who can bring back the most game. During the hunt, Lottie descends into the bowels of the plane and has a vision she’s in a mall; she sees all her teammates eating Chinese food together, including Laura Lee, who tells Lottie she needs to get somewhere warm or she’ll die. Lottie then passes out in the snow.

Come episode 5, cult leader Lottie leads Natalie through some hypnosis to try and figure out why Travis left Natalie a note before he died that said: “Tell Nat she was right.” Through the therapy, Natalie reveals to Lottie: “The whole time there was something, some darkness out there, with us or in us. It still is. That’s what I was right about.” Lottie then sees a shadow of antlers on the floor.

Through a series of events, the present-day Yellowjackets—Misty, Shauna, Taissa, and Van—all end up at the commune, and Lottie tells her psychiatrist she believes a power from the woods pushed them back together. “This is what it wants,” Lottie says. Their conversation becomes increasingly intense, until Lottie has a vision of her psychiatrist turning into the Antler Queen and saying, in a distorted voice, “Does a hunt that has no violence feed anyone?” It’s then revealed the psychiatrist was never there—it was all, in fact, a vision.

At the end of episode 7, in one of the most shocking moments of season 2, teenage Lottie allows Shauna to violently beat her, so Shauna can release her anger after losing her baby. As Lottie struggles to recover, she tells Misty that if she dies, the group shouldn’t waste her body. When Misty shares this directive with the girls, it prompts them to complete their first hunt—killing and eating Javi in the process. Lottie is visibly upset when Misty tells her what happened, and Lottie announces: “You chose me [as your leader], I think, because I was the only one who knew how to listen. But I can’t hear it anymore…Maybe what it wants for us now is a leader who can help us survive for the rest of the time we’re out here. And that isn’t me.” She then appoints Natalie as the new queen.

In episode 8, and back in the present day, Lottie tells the women she believes something greater guided them to each other and “now we have to give it what it wants.” She continues, “The only way to get ourselves out of this is to give ourselves fully to it,” and suggests they each choose a random drink, one of which has been poisoned, explaining that this sort of sacrifice is how they survived in the woods. The women, understanding that Lottie needs professional help, suggest that instead they go on a hunt, just like they used to. The goal is to bide time and contact a crisis team to come and retrieve Lottie, though Van and Taissa ultimately end up calling them off.

When Lottie arrives for the start of the hunt, she appears to be in a disturbed state. The group begins to pull cards until Shauna draws the infamous Queen of Hearts, signaling she will be hunted. As everyone pulls on masks and grabs knives, Shauna asks the group, “You know there’s no ‘it’ right? It was just us,” and Lottie replies, “Is there a difference?” When Van and Taissa reveal they’ve called off the crisis team, Van explains, “It’s not right. She’s like this because of us,” referring to Lottie. A skirmish then ensues during the hunt and Natalie is accidentally killed; as she’s dying, she envisions herself on a plane where young Javi, her younger self, and young Lottie come to her. Lottie tells Natalie, “It’s not evil. Just hungry, like us. Let it in.” In the real world, Natalie’s body ends up being taken away by a medical team—as does Lottie, who tells Taissa and Van, “We gave it what it wanted. It is pleased with us. You’ll see.”

What have the Yellowjackets cast and crew said about Lottie?

In a 2023 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Courtney Eaton, the actor who plays Lottie, said: “I’ve decided that she doesn’t have a mental illness, but that she’s never really trusted her own brain. In dealing with the trauma of the crash, she’s just trying to latch onto whatever she can, which is often an energy that draws people to her even if she doesn’t know how to process it.”

Eaton also spoke to Vulture in 2022 about Lottie and how she loved “the ambiguity around what is going on with Lottie’s mind.” She told the outlet, “It gave me a lot of freedom because I didn’t want to box it in and say that she’s doing certain things because of mental illness,” adding that she doesn’t lean toward one explanation or another, which “helps in keeping it like that for the audience.”

“As humans, we can manipulate things to fit our own situations, and I think she’s reaching for any answer she can get,” Eaton told Vulture. “It’s so hard breaking Lottie down because while I was acting, sometimes I would look at her visions like, maybe this isn’t just her. With the other girls and the river … maybe it’s a collective kind of PTSD thing.” She added that she looked at the séance scene as “more of an accumulation” and “a building up of fucked-up shit.” Eaton said: “Even though she’s spewing French, I played it as a mental break, because if I had gone into it like she was being taken over by something, it wouldn’t have grounded it for me.”

The Yellowjackets co-creators, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, have also spoken about Lottie’s storyline, with Nickerson telling the L.A. Times: “Through the course of season 1, we’re watching the early kind of emergence of something that could be supernatural, could be psychological—could be both and probably is. The person who is the closest to that, in terms of being able to feel in touch and that, is Lottie. And in season 2, we’re gonna see what happened to that person.”

Lyle, when asked about Lottie, told the outlet that throughout the first season, a “central theme” of Yellowjackets is about the question of belief. “What belief means to people, what faith means to people, and how that can completely change your worldview—and thus, not only how somebody acts, but how other people react to that person,” she said. “There’s a really great power to that, and it’s one that we intend to explore moving forward in the show.”

During season 2, Eaton touched on Lottie’s mental state more, telling Harper’s Bazaar, “With Lottie, if you think too hard about her motivations, she ends up leaning one way or the other, and one of the best things about her is that she walks this line. I think that’s the magic of her.” Similarly, Eaton told Hollywood Reporter: “She’s kind of the driving force of being the one who walks the line of the show: Is it something out there, or is it the trauma? Does she have a gift, or is it mental illness? So, it’s a lot to juggle! And I try to not lean one way or the other.”