Image Source: Paramount Pictures
The opening scene of Netflix’s “Yellowjackets” begins with one in all the most haunting TV sequences in current reminiscence. A dark-haired woman in a nightgown runs by way of a frozen forest, wanting scared for her life — and for good motive. As she runs, a pit opens up beneath her ft, and he or she falls in. The subsequent frames present her limbs nailed to the floor with sticks, after which she’s getting hung up by her ft and flayed whereas a bunch of individuals clad in animal skins look on. Eventually, after the woman’s stays are positioned in entrance of an antler-clad determine, the group devours her.
The specter of that scene haunts all of “Yellowjackets,” which tells the story of a women’ soccer workforce who crash-land in a forest and are compelled to outlive there for 19 months. Interspersing that story with scenes set 25 years later — when the surviving women are struggling adults — the sequence is generally about trauma and its lingering results. By season two, the wilderness has begun to wreak havoc on the workforce’s minds, making their descent into ritualistic homicide increasingly more understandable.
Since the starting of the present, one in all viewers’ most urgent questions has involved the identification of the antler-clad chief from the first scene, whom followers have branded the Antler Queen. While at first the determine’s identification appeared apparent, the Antler Queen could also be a bit extra sophisticated than she — or it — first seemed to be. Ahead, this is what we all know.
Is Lottie the Antler Queen?
Lottie (performed by Courtney Eaton as a teen and Simone Kessell as an grownup), who offers with psychological sickness and begins having visions of the forest as quickly as she runs out of her meds, has at all times been the fundamental contender for the Antler Queen. In one episode in season one, she’s proven in entrance of some antlers hanging on the wall, which body her face as if she’s carrying them as a headdress. She additionally sees a deer in the imaginative and prescient she has when Laura Lee (Jane Widdop) baptizes her, and presents Van (Liv Hewson as a teen and Lauren Ambrose as an grownup) a deer’s bone as a talisman to maintain her secure.
Image Source: Paramount Pictures
Then, in the ill-fated, psychedelic-distorted celebration in season one’s “Doomcoming,” Lottie truly places on some antlers and a scarf that resembles the Antler Queen’s. By season two, younger Lottie has already begun main the stranded Yellowjackets and firm in morning rituals and superstitious rites. She additionally appears to have some type of skill to speak with what she sees as the spirit of the forest. For all these causes, it is easy to imagine she’s the driver of the violent acts that the workforce commits.
In season two, although, we uncover that Lottie turns into a cult chief (performed by Simone Kessell) as an grownup, and oddly, the mysterious image that the workforce sees throughout the woods seems to play a essential function in her group. Adult Lottie additionally often reference an impartial pressure that existed in the wilderness whereas the women had been stranded, and that — mixed with a few of Kessell’s feedback — throws the Antler Queen’s identification into query.
Is the Antler Queen a Spirit or Force?
As it seems, Kessell had the similar questions all of us do about the Antler Queen’s identification. In an April interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she offered some perception that manages to make issues even much less clear.
“I remembering 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 mentioned. “It can be kind of anything that we deem it to be,” she continued. “There was so much about Lottie being the Antler Queen. But really now, we’ve distilled it into the fact that the Antler Queen is a part of all of us, and she really was something that kind of kept these women going to survive in the wilderness. That was my interpretation of it. I had so many questions, but I was trying to play it cool.”
There’s a good quantity of proof to again this concept up. Throughout the second season, grownup Lottie and Natalie (Juliette Lewis) often reference a pressure or entity they name “it,” which they each appear to imagine got here again house with them from the wilderness. This signifies that the Antler Queen in the present’s very first scene may very well be a hallucination, or probably an actual entity that exhibits itself to the workforce in the type of the shroud-clad being.
Judging by all this, it is secure to say that the Antler Queen will not be solely an individual. It’s additionally clearly some type of pressure, power, or spirit. This raises one other central query, although: Is the Antler Queen an actual entity that exists independently from the workforce’s minds, or is it one thing that exists in the aircraft conflict survivors’ minds, conjured up by hunger and worry? That query will most likely by no means be answered definitively, but it surely’s one thing to ponder all the similar.
Are There Any Other Contenders For the Antler Queen?
In phrases of the antler-clad determine in the first scene, if it is not a hallucination, precise spirit, or Lottie, it is doable that “Yellowjackets” may throw in a twist. Shauna (Sophie Nelisse as a teen and Melanie Lynskey as an grownup), who has at all times displayed consolation with blood and violence, has grown more and more erratic, and it is possible that she may develop into possessed with sufficient rage to develop into the Antler Queen. However, she takes main challenge with Lottie’s ceremonial actions in the second season, so it is most likely not her. The similar goes for Taissa (Jasmine Savoy Brown as a teen and Tawny Cypress as an grownup), who admittedly does bear hours-long fugue states — although the Antler Queen’s ritual appears to have taken a number of planning, that means Taissa most likely could not have completed it whereas sleepwalking, regardless that she appears increasingly more satisfied that Lottie has some type of particular energy.
We additionally know that Misty (Samantha Hanratty as a teen and Christina Ricci as an grownup) is risky and attention-hungry sufficient to do one thing like lead blood rites, however we all know she’s positively not the Antler Queen; she’s truly the one individual in the authentic scene who takes her masks off, revealing she’s the face behind that creepy bear costume.
Nat (Sophie Thatcher as a teen and Juliette Lewis as an grownup) has additionally continued to withstand Lottie’s spirituality in her youth, although her searching associate Travis (Kevin Alves as a teen and Andres Soto as an grownup) has proven indicators of infatuation with Lottie, so it is not inconceivable that Lottie may have manipulated him or one other one in all the teammates into main the sacrifice. Still, given Lottie’s cult chief tendencies in maturity and her obvious connection to supernatural realms, Lottie nonetheless appears to be the probably face below the Antler Queen’s shroud — although, after all, she may very well be being possessed by one thing a lot larger.
Knowing “Yellowjackets,” something may occur, and given the present’s slow-burning first and second seasons, we’d have to attend some time to know something for sure. But no matter who the Antler Queen is, one factor is evident: what occurred in that forest will not cease tormenting those that survived it.
Episode seven of “Yellowjackets” season two premieres on Showtime on May 14.
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