What Is Up With Lottie's Ritual Roulette In Yellowjackets?

This post contains spoilers for the latest episode of "Yellowjackets."

I don't know about you, but I think I might have to unsubscribe from Lottie's cult's email list. The plane crash survivor turned new-age commune leader has straddled the line between impressive (we've seen a lot of her unorthodox treatments work) and questionable (she's getting her advice from a therapist who's actually the Antler Queen) all season, but in the latest episode, she finally went where I can't follow. I'm not the only one, either; when Lottie (Simone Kessell) tells her fellow survivors they should play a game of poison roulette with cups of tea, pretty much none of them are on board. The girls who once zealously followed Lottie's every order in the woods are in the real world now, and it doesn't seem like a place where the rules of the forest apply.

According to Lottie, though, it is. When she pleads her case when she introduces the plan involving the phenobarbital solution, it feels like a moment of truth in which viewers must finally decide whether or not we buy into the dark magic that seems to underpin the series. "You have to consider that it's been with us all along, and we're all denying it, and that is why we're all so f***ed up," she tells Van (Lauren Ambrose), Nat (Juliette Lewis), Tai (Tawny Cypress), Misty (Christina Ricci) and Shauna (Melanie Lynskey). She continues: "And just like before, the only way to get ourselves out of this is to give ourselves fully to it." Sounds scary, but could she be onto something?

Before we try to get to the bottom of what's really going on with Lottie's strange gambit, let's humor her for a moment. While she doesn't say what the "it" in question is, Lottie seems to be talking about the wilderness in general, or some dark embodiment of it — like the Antler Queen — in specific. It makes sense for her to see the wilderness as some sort of deity, and back in the '90s, the other survivors were convinced of as much as well. After all, Lottie's rituals seemed to directly lead to instances of good fortune, including the Yellowjackets killing a bear, returning safely to the cabin during a snowstorm, bringing Javi (Luciano Leroux) back in one piece after he was missing for weeks, and keeping Shauna (Sophie Nelisse) alive during a traumatic birth.

As viewers, we know that at least one of those miracles was actually easily explained, as the latest episode shows Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) finding a warm spot under a stump that served as Javi's shelter. Lottie (Courtney Eaton) was half-dead in the attic when that discovery was made, though, and she probably also doesn't know that Javi's eventual death was less a result of the wilderness' "choice" and more thanks to the team's decision to let him drown so they wouldn't have to kill Nat (Sophie Thatcher). Without that context, Lottie's faith in her neo-Pagan system is still solid, and there's a lot of (subjective) evidence that it's worked in the past.

Lottie's also convinced that the women's lives are in shambles, and it's because — as Travis and Nat have both also stated in frantic moments — the group brought the darkness back with them. When Shauna says that the women's lives definitely aren't messed up enough to necessitate the ritual, Lottie points out that between them, they've recently killed two people and a dog, almost killed others, plus Nat nearly killed herself. She thinks the thing from the wilderness brought them all to the compound for a reason — to perform a sacrificial ritual and restore order to their lives.

"Give it what it always wants: one of us," Lottie proclaims ominously while she prepares the tea. The episode ends before we know whether or not any of the women will actually try the drink, but it does show us that they've used a similar choosing ritual in the past, picking cards to decide who will be hunted. To her fellow survivors — and to audiences at home — Lottie's idea seems far-fetched, given that the women aren't in a mentally taxing starvation situation anymore. Yet to the cult leader, whose history of mental illness is prevalent if unspecified, and whose survival has long since been tied to similar sacrifices, it's the next logical move.

When I first watched Lottie's drugged tea scene, I felt like "Yellowjackets" had finally jumped the shark with a moment that throws its ongoing balance between magical realism and grounded logic completely out of whack. Of course, drinking poison won't help these women, and it feels ridiculous that any of them might even entertain the idea. After more consideration, though, I actually think the moment is jarring by design. In the '90s scenes, we're given plenty of time to descend into hunger-fueled madness alongside the Yellowjackets, so when they finally decide on a human hunt, it doesn't seem surprising. In the present day, the show doesn't possess the same dream-like, anything-is-possible desperation of the '90s timeline, leaving us more aware than ever that the series' creepiest horror elements might actually have a reasonable explanation.

Plenty of the show's biggest mysteries are presented as potentially explainable if viewers choose not to buy into the mystical overtones. That symbol carved into trees in the wilderness? It could've been a map put there by the hunter. Javi's survival? An underground shelter explains it. Even the girls' most vivid dreams and visions pull from texts they're probably already familiar with in real life, like "Alice in Wonderland" and Greek mythology. Plenty of the show's most inexplicable elements are later explained; the Antler Queen outfit came from Doomscoming, the cannibalism was encouraged by starvation and a snow-smoked body, and Shauna's baby simply died in childbirth. The show presents and then demystifies its most disturbing imagery again and again, which makes Lottie's belief in the need for a blood sacrifice outlandish to us — but not to her.

With just one episode left this season, it seems likely that we haven't seen the last of that drugged cup of tea, whether or not all the Yellowjackets agree with Lottie's plan to, as Misty points out, go full Heaven's Gate. The series presents itself as a puzzle-box show, but in reality, it seems to be more about the malleability of our understanding of ourselves — the fact that we can be different people at our best, our worst, and everything in between. Shauna notes something similar when she confesses that she hasn't really been trying to fix the Adam situation. We've seen it in everyone else, too, when they go from getting along to hunting Natalie in a heartbeat, or from defending Lottie to letting Shauna beat her to a pulp.

"Yellowjackets" tests the limits of the world it's created again and again with each new episode, but it never tests the limits of us as viewers. Each new twist of fate has made sense, settling into the overarching mystery with the satisfying click of a puzzle piece in its proper place. The fact that Lottie's latest pitch feels so bone-deep wrong, then, seems likely to be intentional. It's Lottie reaching her breaking point, and attempting to regain control in the only way she knows how: by abiding by the primal, strange rules of the wilderness the girls left behind decades ago. Now all that's left is to find out who, if anyone, is willing to follow her back into the darkness.

"Yellowjackets" streams new episodes on Fridays on the Showtime app and on Sundays on Showtime.