Image Source: Paramount Pictures
The opening scene of Netflix’s “Yellowjackets” begins with one of the most haunting TV scenes in recent memory. A dark-haired girl in a nightgown walks through a frozen forest, looking scared for her life – and for good reason. As she runs, a pit opens beneath her feet, and she falls. The next frame shows her limbs being nailed to the ground with sticks, and then she is hanging by her feet and a group of people wearing animal skins. look carefully. Eventually, after placing the girl’s remains in front of an antler-clad figure, the group devours her.
The ghost of that scene haunts all of “Yellowjackets,” which tells the story of a girls’ soccer team that crashes in a forest and is forced to stay there for 19 months. Interspersing that story with scenes from 25 years later—when the surviving girls are struggling adults—the series is mostly about trauma and its effects. By season two, the jungle has begun to wreak havoc on the team’s mind, making their descent into ritualistic murder more and more perceptible.
Since the show’s debut, one of viewers’ most pressing questions has been the identity of the antler-clad leader from the first scene, whom fans have branded the Antler Queen. While the figure’s identity seems obvious at first, the Antler Queen may be a bit more complex than she – or it – first appears. Ahead, here’s what we know.
Lottie is the antler queen?
Lottie (played by Courtney Eaton as a teen and Simone Kessel as an adult), who deals with mental illness and begins having visions of the woods as soon as she comes off her meds, always The antler has been the main contender for the queen. In a season one episode, she is shown in front of some antlers hanging on the wall, which frame her face as if she wore them as a headdress. She also sees a deer when Laura Lee (Jane Widdop) baptises him, and gives Van (Liv Hewson as a teenager and Lauren Ambrose as an adult) as a talisman to keep him safe. I gift a deer bone.
Image Source: Paramount Pictures
Then, at the ill-fated, psychedelic-distorted party in season one’s “Doomcoming,” Lottie actually wears some antlers and a shawl that resembles the Antler Queen’s. By season two, young Lottie has already begun leading Yellowjacket and company steeped in morning rituals and superstitious rites. She also has the ability to communicate with what she sees as the spirit of the forest. For all these reasons, it is easy to assume that she is the driver of the violent acts committed by the team.
In season two, however, we learn that Lottie becomes a cult leader (played by Simone Kessel) as an adult, and strangely, the mysterious symbol the team sees throughout the forest plays a key role in her organization. Plays it Adult Lottie also frequently references an independent force that was present in the forest while the girls were trapped, and that – combined with some of Kessel’s comments – questions the identity of the Antler Queen.
Is the Antler Queen a spirit or a force?
As it turns out, Kessel had the same questions we all have about the identity of the Antler Queen. In an April interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she provided some insight that manages to make things even less transparent.
“I remember saying, ‘What is the Antler Queen? Is it a symbol, is it a metaphor, is it real?’ and i remember [the creators] going [no answer], ” she said. “It can be anything we consider it,” she continued. “There was a lot about Lottie being the Antler Queen. But really now, we’ve turned it into the fact that the Antler Queen is a part of all of us, and she was really something that kept these women alive in the wild. That was my explanation. I had a lot of questions, but I was trying to play it cool.”
There is a fair amount of evidence to back this theory. Throughout the second season, the adults Lottie and Natalie (Juliet Lewis) frequently reference a force or entity they refer to as “It”, which they both believe came back home with them from the woods. This indicates that the Antler Queen may be a hallucination in the very first scene of the show, or possibly a real entity that shows itself to the team as wearing the Shroud.
Given all of this, it’s safe to say that the Antler Queen isn’t just one person. It is also clearly some kind of force, energy or spirit. it arises one more The central question, though: is the Antler Queen a real entity that exists independently of the team’s mind, or is it something that exists in the minds of plane crash survivors beset by starvation and fear? That question will probably never be answered definitively, but it’s worth considering nonetheless.
Are there any other contenders for antler queen?
In reference to the antler-clad figure in the first scene, if it’s not a hallucination, a real spirit, or Lottie, it’s possible “Yellowjacket” could throw in a twist. Shauna (Sophie Nellis as a teen and Melanie Lynskey as an adult), who has always shown comfort with blood and violence, becomes increasingly erratic, and it is possible that she may rage enough to become the Antler Queen. may suffer from. However, she takes major issue with Lottie’s formal activities in the second season, so it’s probably not her. The same goes for Tit (Jasmine Savoy Brown as a teen and Tony Cypress as an adult), who admits to going through hours-long fugue states—though the Antler Queen’s ritual takes a lot of planning. , which means that Taissa probably couldn’t have done this while sleepwalking, even though she is more and more convinced that Lottie has some kind of special power.
We also know that Misty (Samantha Hanratty as a teen and Christina Ricci as an adult) is volatile and attention-hungry enough to do something like a lead blood ritual, but we know she definitely The antler is not queen by appearance; She is actually the person in the original scene who takes off her mask, revealing that she is the face behind that creepy bear costume.
Nate (Sophie Thatcher as a teenager and Juliet Lewis as an adult) also continues to resist Lottie’s spirituality in her youth, although her hunting partner Travis (Kevin Alves as a teenager and Kevin Alves as an adult) as Andres Soto) has shown signs of infatuation with Lottie. , so it is not impossible that Lottie may have manipulated him or another teammate into leading the sacrifice. Still, given Lottie’s cult leader tendencies in adulthood and her apparent connection to supernatural realms, Lottie still seems the most likely face under the shroud of the Antler Queen – though, of course, she could be a bit much. Is.
Knowing the “Yellowjackets” anything can happen, and considering the slow pace of the show’s first and second seasons, we may definitely have to wait a while to know anything for sure. But whoever the Antler Queen may be, one thing is clear: What happened in that forest will never cease to haunt those who survived it.
Episode seven of “Yellowjackets” season two premieres May 14 on Showtime.