Yellowjackets: The Symbol of Cannibalism
The supernatural mystery box soon opens
[Warning: The following essay contains spoilers from Yellowjackets Season 1.]
One of the most interesting elements of Yellowjackets is what the audience doesn't always see.
The story of the show appears simple enough. A team of high school girls soccer players bearing the team name the Yellowjackets are stranded in the woods for 19 months following a tragic plane crash. The girls, alongside their male soccer coach and the two sons of another coach who died in the crash, must survive while holding onto the dwindling hope that help will soon arrive. As the story of the Yellowjackets' time in the woods is told, so too is a tale in the present day, following four survivors—Shauna, Taissa, Natalie, and Misty—as they deal with the trauma of their past. And, it seems, with a resurgence of the mystery of their time in the woods following Travis' modern-day death.
Season 1 was almost entirely a primer for the show, building up its characters and hinting at what was coming next. There were also many twists and turns in the plot, such as Shauna's husband trying to blackmail the girls for money to stop thus-far-unseen loan sharks; Misty kidnapping private investigator and possibly real reporter Jessica Roberts; and Taissa experiencing an unknown personality disorder in both the past and the present. The series also indicates that, in future seasons, the past versions of the girls will begin resorting to cannibalism to survive. Trailers for Season 2 already indicate this will transpire, although it's unclear who on the team is destined to be eaten during the upcoming harsh winter.
But there is one figure among the Yellowjackets who stands out the most: Lottie Matthews. Flashbacks during the series have indicated that Lottie has some form of psychic ability, evident when she was able to predict a car crash as a child, thus saving her parents' lives. However, her parents believed that she was somehow mentally ill, putting her on medications that eventually stunted the odd symptoms she was experiencing. However, when stranded in the woods, she runs out of said medication, growing more in tune with her seemingly psychic abilities in the process. She predicts danger in the woods, hits her head against a window, murders a bear with ease, and, by the end of Season 1, is heavily implied to be the mysterious Antler Queen seen in a winter scene during the show's pilot.
What makes Lottie so unique, however, is that the series never outright states if she has supernatural abilities or not. It's possible that the bear she killed was sick, thus making it easier for her to take down. Her panicked predictions about the woods could be construed as general worry about the girls' horrific situation. But then there's her warning about a "river of blood" and seeing an explosion behind Laura Lee's head during her baptism. The river of blood ended up symbolizing the danger Taissa and her ragtag group faced when they decided to leave the cabin, resulting in Van's face being disfigured by a wolf. The explosion she saw behind Laura Lee's head during her baptism symbolized the faithful girl's failed attempt at flying a plane to find help for everyone. It's safe to say, then, that Lottie does, in fact, harbor supernatural abilities that allow her to see glimpses into the future she must then interpret.
These abilities are likely what gives her so much secretive power in the present day. The end of the Yellowjackets Season 1 finale reveals that Lottie is very much alive following the plane crash in the woods. However, it appears that general society isn't fully aware of her presence. Natalie receives a phone call from a bank-working acquaintance, Suzie, who was trying to find out who emptied Travis' bank account after his supposed suicide. Suzie's panicked voicemail reveals that she is being followed, and that the bank account was emptied by Lottie. However, Suzie doesn't appear to know who Lottie is, underscoring the idea that she has gone into hiding following the girls' rescue from the woods. However, that doesn't mean plans of her own aren't forming in the background.
Natalie is captured by a group of people working for Lottie, all of whom are wearing a strange symbol dangling from their necklaces. The symbol appears to be a silhouetted drawing of a woman being impaled, her legs also replaced by a hook. This same symbol has appeared before in the series, with its most prominent locale being in the woods the girls crash landed in 25 years ago. The symbol had already been carved on a tree near the crash site prior to their arrival, a clear sign that there has to be someone else out there in the woods with them. Or, perhaps, people who were in a similar situation as them in the same location. Whatever the case may be, the symbol and the cabin are clear evidence that someone had been out in their area of the woods prior to their arrival. People who don't seem to be around anymore.
But what does the symbol mean, and why is it tied to Lottie? Surprisingly, the symbol makes sense when thinking about all the context we have surrounding what the girls went through when stranded in the wilderness. Hear me out on this one: What if the symbol is a representation of them? If we interpret the symbol as showing a figure with a hook-leg being impaled and consider how it could be related to the Yellowjackets team, a few interpretations can be made. The figure's triangular "body" could symbolize a dress, and therefore a woman. The circle acts as its head. The arms are up, and there's a line impaling the figure. There's also another slightly longer line jutting from just below the right arm, perhaps an unseen impalement. The hook on the bottom almost resembles a meathook. The kind you would see in a slaughterhouse. What if this isn't just a symbol, but a drawing of a woman being impaled?
What if the symbol is hinting at cannibalism?
It's already a factor that appears to be generally presumed about the Yellowjackets survivors. Jessica even mentions it to Misty in the finale: "You ate each other." The description for the series, even in Season 1, with no cannibalism in sight, already promised that sooner or later the girls would start eating one another. But what if this isn't the first time something like this has happened in the woods? The symbol could easily be showcasing a girl being impaled, the hook where her legs should be an indicator of the slaughterhouse mindset that comes with the territory of eating another person. But if that were the case, then it would have to be from some kind of wilderness cannibalism that predates the girls crash-landing in the forest.
If this symbol truly is a depiction of cannibalism, it raises dozens of questions. The general ones stay: Who made the symbol, where are they now, why was somebody out here before. But if we're to assume that the symbol is inspired by similar events that happened in these very woods before the Yellowjackets crashed there, then it complicates everything about the story. Why would there be two instances of cannibalism among different groups of lost people in the same area of a miles-wide forest? How could two cults be formed, one that originated with the symbol, and one headed by Lottie's Antler Queen persona? If the symbol is connected to cannibalism, then who are the people in Lottie's present-day cult?
None of this can be explained, given how little we truly know about the symbol and about Lottie's motivations for presumably killing Travis and definitely emptying his bank account. But if the symbol does represent cannibalism, then it may provide us with some answers. Not just about why the girls decided to resort to cannibalism, but also how they ended up in such a situation. Yes, it could easily be explained by a harsh winter. However, Yellowjackets has slowly begun introducing supernatural elements into the story through Lottie's unexplainable, Oracle-like gifts. And, with the symbol now being tied to her at the end of Season 1, I believe there's enough room to speculate about the implications of the symbol and its status among her group despite representing cannibalism.
The girls are not alone in the forest.
There are seven known survivors of the Yellowjackets plane crash who managed to make it out of the forest and back to society: Shauna, Natalie, Taissa, Misty, Lottie, Van, and Travis. That's a good chunk of the main cast in the past, with just a few girls here and there who likely didn't make it out alive. If all of these girls resorted to cannibalism to survive, would Javi, Coach Ben, Mari, and Akilah really be enough food for the girls to eat over the next year out there? And let's not forget about Javi being Travis' brother, making it unlikely the group would eat him given how emotionally distraught Travis would be about it. Which leaves only three people who could feed the group. Sustain all seven—maybe eight, if Javi survives—for over a year. Personally, I don't buy it. I think the group would need more people for cannibalism to play such a central role in their time out in the woods.
Which is why I don't think they're alone. I believe that, as the series progresses, the mystery of the symbol in the forest will be tied together with the revelation that the girls were not alone out there. Going back to when Jessica tells Misty, "you ate each other," a look appears on Misty's face. It doesn't seem like denial or regret, but rather the look of someone who would rather end the conversation they're in the middle of. Of course, if you were forced to cannibalize your friends in the middle of the woods during the winter while being part of a cult run by a girl wearing elk horns on her head, you might not want to talk about that either. But I believe there's a deeper reason why Misty had that look on her face. Why she didn't confirm or deny the cannibalism, the statement that the girls ate one another.
I don't think the girls did eat one another. At least, I don't believe the majority of their food came from each other. Instead, I believe that at some point during the winter, the girls realized they were not alone in the forest. There was another group, one who struggled just as badly as they did, that they too began to resort to cults and cannibalism to survive. Their symbol underscored their purpose. But, unlike the girls, who are eventually rescued, this other group never was. They resided in the forest, continued to reside there, eating one another whenever they had to. And then, when the plane crashed, they suddenly discovered a new source of food that could sustain their dwindling numbers for much longer. I believe this group, the one that created the symbol, also practices cannibalism, and is very much still active when the girls' plane crashes.
Of course this could all be fanfiction nonsense. But with a five-season plan behind the series already, it sounds like there will be plenty of twists and turns in Yellowjackets' future. Yet this still leaves a few ideas that haven't been tied in yet. What about Lottie's supernatural abilities and their connection with the symbol? Personally, I think that there's more beyond the veil of the supernatural that we simply haven't seen yet. This includes the man with no eyes that Taissa saw in a vision when she was a child, and the mystery man Jackie sees inside the cabin when she dies at the end of Season 1. Taissa's split personality may also somehow tie into the supernatural, since her wife discovered their dog Biscuit's head and heart in a shrine-like area underneath their house.
With all of this in mind, the symbol may not be just one that represents cannibalism. It may also have a double meaning, one that Lottie is able to fully embrace thanks to her psychic abilities. There's no clear answers as to how the symbol and Lottie's precognition are connected, but her use of it in the present day to signify the group under her command shows that she somehow ends up connected to it in the past. If that's the case, and all of the other "out there" predictions I've made in this essay transpire, then it may not be a situation of the girls having to face the other people in the forest as a threat. Instead, Lottie could find common ground with them, something that ignites the spark she needs to become the Antler Queen.
As for what Lottie wants in the present day, that much is entirely unpredictable. It somehow has something to do with what the girls went through when lost, but given how little information we have about their time as cannibals in the series, it's impossible to know for sure. If I had to guess, it may have something to do with Lottie's powers growing stronger, predicting some kind of negative event that will transpire if she hadn't killed Travis. While it appears Lottie will end up being a key antagonist in Yellowjackets Season 2, allegiances within the show have already proven fickle, since we know Misty aligns herself with Lottie in the past, yet helps the main group in the present. With so many unknowns, there's no way to know for sure how the series will progress in its upcoming second season.
What is for sure, however, is how easy it is to speculate about the series thanks to the massive puzzle box involved. The mystery of the symbol will likely continue to elude us fans of the show for some time to come, but the context clues within the series so far lend to many ideas about what the symbol might be. Including hints that it belongs to a group of stranded cannibals the girls will end up having to face down in the show's future. Perhaps, even, in Season 2. While nothing can be known for sure, it's clear there is importance to the show's mysterious symbol, and that there may be a more supernatural twist to its present-day purpose than meets the eye. The future of Yellowjackets could go anywhere, but wherever it goes, it will undeniably be tied to Lottie's powers, her cult, and the mystery of their symbol.
Season 2 really will be when the fun begins.
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