Lottie’s Premonitions and Powers Explained
Spoilers below.
Heading into season 2 of Yellowjackets—the mysterious and addicting Showtime series about girls from a high school soccer team that get stranded in the wilderness and maybe turn into cannibals—there’s one question that’s top of mind: Who the fuck is Lottie Matthews? At least, that’s how season 1 ends, as viewers find out Lottie made it out of the woods alive and in the present day seems to be leading a cult. While it’s quite a revelation, it’s also not entirely surprising. Throughout the first 10 episodes of Yellowjackets, Lottie—the player whose wealthy father paid for the team’s plane that ultimately crashed—turns into a leader of sorts. She constantly has visions about what the future holds, and for a group of women just trying to survive, Lottie’s words are particularly enticing, even if they’re not always rooted in reality. But what exactly is going on with Lottie? Are her visions the result of supernatural powers or something more mundane? Below, everything we’ve learned so far about who Lottie Matthews really is.
What do we learn about Lottie in season 1?
Audiences are quickly clued into Lottie’s mental health journey during the pilot episode when she takes the medication “Loxipene” during breakfast one morning. While this medication doesn’t actually exist in real life, it’s most likely a reference to “Loxapine,” a medication used to treat symptoms of schizophrenia. Once the team’s plane crashes, Lottie realizes she only brought enough medication to last her a few days.
In episode 3, Lottie vocalizes for the first time that she has a bad feeling about “this place,” meaning the cabin where the girls have found refuge. Shortly after she says this, Taissa hears creaking coming from the top floor of the cabin. When Taissa ventures upstairs, she finds the dead body of the person who they assume lived there before. In the next episode, Lottie tells Natalie that “bad things happened here,” referring to the cabin.
In episode 5, Jackie finds 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 then 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 have the Yellowjackets cast and crew said about Lottie?
In an 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 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.”
Madison is a senior writer/editor at ELLE.com, covering news, politics, and culture. When she’s not on the internet, you can most likely find her taking a nap or eating banana bread.
