Spoiler alert: Spoilers follow for the first two seasons of Yellowjackets. After another long hiatus, no thanks to the 2023 double writers’ and actors’ strike, Yellowjackets finally returns next year. What started as an inverted version of Lord of the Flies gradually became a much stranger beast. It’s a series that somehow merges the supernatural mysteries of Lost with Heathers’ darkly humorous dismantling of adolescent hierarchies, while powerfully exploring how past trauma manifests in the present. There is no other show on the air like it.
Much like Lost, it was a series that knew how to quickly hook and intrigue viewers with a tantalizing mystery. The Yellowjackets pilot primarily served as the setting for the 1996 storyline following a group of teenagers surviving in the forest after a plane crash and for the 2021 storyline following these same characters as adults. But it also contained a tantalizing tease, with a scene highlighting a cannibalistic cult (apparently survivors of the crash) led by a woman shrouded with a crown made of deer antler. Although the series has since clarified things somewhat, many fans still have lingering questions about this “Antler Queen.”
Release date November 14, 2021
Seasons 3
Who was the antler queen in the Yellowjackets?
Trying to explain Queen Antler is a tricky task, as the Yellowjackets represent her in a way that is seemingly both literal and symbolic. Starting from the first option, we need to return to the 1996 storyline and analyze the overall dramatic arc. In particular, the first season largely revolves around the titular Yellow Vests who gradually slide toward animalistic behavior the further they are removed from civilization.
One of the most fascinating characters in the first season was Charlotte “Lottie” Matthews, a girl with schizophrenia. Shortly after the accident, she runs out of medication and quickly begins to experience disturbing hallucinations, which she gradually begins to adopt and even view 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 in a scene in the first season finale where she and the other girls offer a heartfelt bear as a gift in the desert.
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This led to almost unanimous agreement among fans that Lottie would turn out to be the Queen of the Woods, and these beliefs were seemingly confirmed by several events during the show’s second season. Lottie began regularly competing for the role of leader with Natalie, the group’s most skilled hunter, while the 2021 story featured 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 second half of the season saw Natalie exhibit increasingly cold behavior, namely letting Javi drown after falling into a frozen lake, just so he could take its place as a determined sacrifice of the group. In the season finale, Lottie insists that she passed on everything she could to communicate with the wilderness, declaring Natalie the leader of the group (and perhaps the best character on the show) and the first unofficial queen of the woods. This likely 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 of trying to redeem herself from the inhumanity she had to accept as Queen of the Woods.
Is the Queen of the Woods a supernatural figure among the Yellow Vests?
But for all the preparation given to Lottie, this seems too neat an explanation for Natalie being the true queen of the woods. In the wake of the season 2 finale, adult Lottie actress Simone Kessell explained: “There was so much going on about Lottie being the Queen of the Woods. But actually, now we understand that Queen Antler is a part of all of us, and that she was really something that allowed these women to survive in the wild. It seems likely, then, that Queen Antler’s role is more symbolic than literal, functioning as a means of exploring the loss of humanity the girls would experience as they turned to nature as a force to protect them in the wild .
However, this still doesn’t fully explain Queen Antler’s undeniably supernatural characteristics or how the girls’ time in the wild is defined by strange events that cannot be rationally explained. Consider how nature plays a key role in important plot points: a late night snowfall prevents the group from burning Jackie’s body (instead of cooking it and leading the group to cannibalism), or how Shauna gives birth immediately after a storm. Midway through the second season, supporting character Javi, believed to be dead, returns to camp after weeks trapped in the forest. He refers to a mysterious entity as “my friend”, believed to be Queen Antler, who helped him survive.
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The second season regularly raised the question of whether the Queen was real or just a hallucination. An early episode of the season shows the adult Lottie putting Natalie under hypnosis, during which she references 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 did not survive, and she sees Antler Queen exploring the plane wreckage.
Even though this individual scene was meant to function on a more symbolic level than anything else, it’s clear that there is something mysterious at work in the series. A common fan theory is that Queen Antler was actually a literal supernatural entity preying on the girls while they were away from civilization, or, more interestingly, a physical manifestation of the wilderness itself. This latter explanation has a lot of basis, as evidenced by the way Lottie seems to worship the forces of nature around them and eagerly seeks to pass this knowledge on to her fellow survivors.
We still know surprisingly little about the Yellowjackets queen of the woods
As previously mentioned, explaining Queen Antler requires both a literal and symbolic explanation. Although the series has been mostly explained in the first category, there is a surprising amount still left hanging, as the series has yet to fully delve into its ambiguities about what is real and what is a hallucination.
While there’s still quite a while before Yellowjackets returns to the air, we’re really hoping that the third season will give us more to chew on. Seasons 1 and 2 of Yellowjackets are streaming on Paramount+, while season 1 is streaming on Netflix.
