Spoiler Alert: Spoilers follow for the first two seasons of YellowjacketsAfter another long hiatus, no thanks to 2023’s dual writers and actors strike, Yellowjackets is finally returning next year. What started as a gender-swapped take on Lord of the Flies has gradually become a much stranger beast altogether. It’s a show that somehow fuses the supernatural mysteries of Lost with Heathers’ darkly humorous takedown of teen hierarchies, all while potently exploring the ways past trauma manifests itself in the present. There’s no other show on the air quite like it.
Much like Lost, this was a series that knew how to hook and intrigue viewers quickly with an enticing mystery. The Yellowjackets pilot mostly functioned as a setup for the 1996 storyline following a group of teenagers surviving in the forest after a plane crash and for the 2021 plotline following these same characters as adults. But it also contained an enticing tease, with a scene that prominently featured a cannibalistic cult (seemingly the crash survivors) led by a shrouded woman with an antler crown. While the show has somewhat cleared things up since then, many fans still have lingering questions about this “Antler Queen.”
Release Date November 14, 2021
Seasons 3
Who Was the Antler Queen in Yellowjackets?
Trying to explain the Antler Queen is a tricky task, as Yellowjackets portrays her in ways seemingly both literal and symbolic. Starting with the former option, we have to go back to the 1996 storyline and analyze the overall dramatic arc. In particular, the first season largely revolves around the titular Yellowjackets gradually slipping into animalistic behavior the longer they’re removed from civilization.
One of the first season’s most fascinating characters was Charlotte “Lottie” Matthews, a girl with schizophrenia. Shortly after the crash, she runs out of medication and promptly begins having disturbing hallucinations, which she gradually starts to embrace and even sees as spiritual visions. Slowly but surely, her fellow survivors adopt her visions as teachings, to the point where she comes to resemble a cult leader, as evidenced by a scene in the first season finale where she and the other girls offer a bear’s heart as a gift to the wilderness.
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This led to an almost unanimous agreement among fans that Lottie would turn out to be the Antler Queen, and these beliefs were seemingly vindicated by several occurrences in the show’s second season. Lottie began regularly clashing over the leadership role with Natalie, the most skilled hunter of the group, while the 2021 story introduced the adult version of Lottie, now the mysterious leader of a spiritual commune and seeing her visions return.
However, Yellowjackets ultimately subverted these expectations, as the latter half of the season saw Natalie engaging in increasingly cold behavior, namely letting Javi drown after he fell in a frozen lake, just so he can take her spot as the group’s determined sacrifice. In the season finale, Lottie insists she’s passed on everything she can about communicating to the wilderness, declaring Natalie the group’s leader (and maybe the show’s best character) and the first unofficial Antler Queen. This presumably helps explain a lot of Natalie’s behavior in the 2021 storyline, which sees her struggling with drug addiction to assuage her guilt and a past suicide attempt. Her self-sacrifice in the finale can be seen as a way to try and redeem herself for the inhumanity she had to embrace in being the Antler Queen.
Is The Antler Queen a Supernatural Figure in Yellowjackets?
But for all the build-up that Lottie was given, it seems too neat an explanation for Natalie to be the real Antler Queen. In the aftermath of the Season 2 finale, adult Lottie’s actress, Simone Kessell, explained, “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 us all, and she really was something that kind of kept these women going to survive in the wilderness.” So, it seems likely that the role of the Antler Queen is more symbolic than literal, functioning as a way to explore the loss of humanity the girls would undergo as they turn to nature as a force to protect them in the wild.
However, this still doesn’t fully explain the Antler Queen’s unmistakably supernatural characteristics or how the girls’ time in the wilderness is defined by strange occurrences that can’t be explained rationally. Consider how nature plays a key role in important plot points — a late-night snowfall prevents the group from burning Jackie’s body (instead cooking it and leading the group to cannibalism), or how Shauna goes into labor immediately after a storm. Midway through the second season, supporting character Javi, believed dead, returns to camp after weeks of being trapped in the forest. He refers to a mysterious entity as “my friend,” who is hinted to be the Antler Queen, who helped him survive.
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The second season regularly raised questions about whether the Queen was even real or just a hallucination. An early episode in the season depicts adult Lottie putting Natalie under hypnosis, during which she refers to a darkness they brought back with them. In her hypnotic state, Natalie has a vision of an alternate version of the crash, in which she didn’t survive, and she sees the Antler Queen exploring the plane wreckage.
Even if this individual scene was meant to function on a more symbolic level than anything else, it’s still clear that there’s something mysterious at work in the show. A common fan theory is that the Antler Queen was actually a literal supernatural entity preying on the girls as they were removed from civilization, or even more interestingly, a physical manifestation of the wilderness itself. There’s a lot of basis for the latter explanation, as evidenced by how Lottie seems to worship the forces of nature around them and eagerly seeks to pass that knowledge on to her fellow survivors.
We Still Know Surprisingly Little About Yellowjackets’ Antler Queen
As previously mentioned, explaining the Antler Queen requires both a literal and symbolic explanation. While the show has mostly been explained in the former category, there’s a surprising amount that’s still up in the air, as the show has yet to fully delve into its ambiguities about what’s real and what’s a hallucination.
While there’s still a fair amount of time before Yellowjackets returns to the air, we definitely hope that the third season gives us more to chew on. Yellowjackets Seasons 1-2 are streaming on Paramount+, while Season 1 is streaming on Netflix.
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