What Lottie Heard In Her Vision At The End Of Yellowjackets' Season 2 Episode 3

This post contains spoilers for "Yellowjackets" season 2 episode 3.

What you should understand about "Yellowjackets" by now is that whenever a Tori Amos song starts playing, nothing good is about to happen. In the final moments of the latest episode, "Digestif," adult Lottie (Simone Kessell) discovers with horror that her beloved colony of bees (another hive of yellowjackets to hold dominion over) have all died. When she pulls a sheath of honeycomb out of a carcass-covered crate, she finds viscous blood running where honey should be. The 1994 Tori Amos song "Bells For Her" intones mournfully over the whole affair, carrying elegantly over into the roll of credits with lyrics like, "Can't stop what's coming, can't stop what is on its way."

For the second time in three episodes, the Showtime drama about sisterhood and cannibalism in the Canadian Rockies dropped a Tori song in the final moments of an episode, the first being "Cornflake Girl," which closed out the premiere. Both of these songs appeared on Amos' second solo studio album, "Under the Pink." For the uninitiated, the debut album which made Amos an overnight star comprised of the kind of chocolate box assortment of confessional ballads and bangers you'd expect on a first album. "Under The Pink" was a radical departure, a baroque concept piece on the fractured nature of modern womanhood.

In a 1994 interview with The New Review of Records, Amos commented, "There is a triangle on this record: the songs 'Bells for Her,' 'Cornflake Girl,' and 'The Waitress' — a triad about women betraying women, that's a kind of theme here." Uh huh. Maybe a past transgression is catching up with Lottie, or maybe she's foretelling one that's coming. The biggest mystery of all: what is with that ominous French phrase that was whispered to her?

The blood vision turns out to be a trick of the imagination ... or something. Like a magic spell, the phrase which breaks her out of it is "Il veut du sang," spoken by one of Lottie's cult lackeys just out of frame. Lottie gets a look of mortal terror on her face. "What? What did you say?" Lottie asks. She clarifies: "Are you joining for lunch?" Lottie isn't the only one who experienced that shock of frightened recognition, though.

We've heard this creepy little French curse before. During the knife on a string seance in season 1, episode 5, a window shatters inward and Lottie begins screaming after Javi asks if they're all going to die out in the wilderness. The screaming turns to muttering, French muttering, that Jackie roughly translates as "it wants blood," which Lottie repeats over and over again. 

It wasn't the first indication that the woods they'd crashed into weren't all they seemed. Neither was it the first indication that Lottie wasn't all she seemed. But it was to that point the most incontrovertible proof that food and shelter weren't the only things they were going to have to worry about. So what is "it," and why has it finally caught up with Lottie in the present?

I found the conclusion of episode 3 to be quite shocking. Like a lot of others, I speculated that Lottie would become something like Mrs. Carmody of the teen timeline, were "Yellowjackets" taking place in "The Mist" cinematic universe. That is, a charismatic leader who derives her authority from the spiritual realm, and uses it to rule with an iron fist. The fact that Lottie was revealed to have made it out of the wilderness in season 2 didn't surprise me, and the fact that she'd already organized an entire community of sycophants around her only confirmed those season 1 speculations.

But seeing Lottie shaken to the core by literal voices from the past casts aspersions on the image of her as an all-seeing, all-powerful mystic. She's just as haunted as Nat in the wake of Travis' death, or Taissa, who continues to see the horrific man with no eyes. Are all these events and entities connected? Did something — the "it" from the incantation, maybe — follow the girls out of the woods? Just about every song on "Yellowjackets" means something, which makes the last lines of "Bells For Her" bone-chilling: "And I see it coming, And it's on its way."

If you're brave enough for a possible indication of just what might be on its way, look up the lyrics to the next song in Tori's "triad," "The Waitress." Don't tell us we didn't warn you.

New episodes of "Yellowjackets" stream on the Showtime and Paramount+ apps every Friday, and air on Showtime every Sunday.