Yellowjackets' Season 3 Finale Has Unmasked The Antler Queen – And Pit Girl

Major spoilers for "Yellowjackets" season 3 ahead.

Now that it's over, it's fair to say that "Yellowjackets" season 3 rose above the early criticisms. The first half of the season dragged its heels and got dragged in turn by some critics. More than a few fans suspected the writers had lost the plot. But then episode 6 "Thanksgiving (Canada)" got the ball rolling with a new conflict: hikers stumbled on the girls, giving them the chance of rescue. That fractured the team further between those who wanted to go home and those who felt at home in the Wilderness.

The slam-dunk season finale, "Full Circle," even rectified some of the problems with Lottie's (Simone Kessell) death earlier this season, giving her a proper final scene and conclusion with Callie (Sarah Desjardins). And "Full Circle" gave us more answers than just those regarding Lottie's death.

"Yellowjackets" has finally started opening the mystery boxes it set. In "Full Circle," winter has come once more and the team decides they need another hunt to satisfy the Wilderness. As it goes on, we realize this is the same hunt we saw in the show's pilot, where the Yellowjackets were all masked and silent. The episode's title refers not only to the girls' method of choosing the victim (going in a circle and drawing cards), but also how we've caught up to the first scene we ever saw on "Yellowjackets."

We can now pinpoint who was who in those pilot scenes, including the two figures fans had speculated the most about. 

The group's cloaked leader, called the Antler Queen for her crown, is Shauna (Sophie Nélisse).

Their prey, dubbed "Pit Girl" because she dies skewered in a pit? It's Mari (Alexa Barajas).

It's thrilling to finally get answers, but neither the Antler Queen or Pit Girl's true identities are unexpected. Mari has been the main suspect for the latter since season 1 because of the length and color of her hair. The only other plausible candidates were Gen (Mya Lowe, now recast with Vanessa Prasad) and newcomer Hannah (Ashley Sutton). 

"Full Circle" cements Hannah as a Pit Girl red herring. Tai (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Van (Liv Hewson) rig the card drawing so Hannah will pick the cursed Queen of Hearts and all their friends will live. But Shauna catches on during the draw and, noticing Mari comes before Hannah in the circle, inserts herself before Mari. That means Mari draws the wrong card, and after a 30-second head start, she's running for her life. 

During the hunt, Mari ditches her jackets, pants, and shoes to confuse her hunters, leaving her in the white gown we saw "Pit Girl" wearing in the pilot. But by stripping down, Mari makes herself vulnerable to the cold and cuts her foot. Mari has never been that smart, so when thinking on her feet, she makes the wrong call on how to escape.

Shauna has been feuding with Mari since the season 3 premiere "It Girl." That episode opened with Shauna chasing Mari through the woods during a game of capture the flag, only to discover after catching her that Mari was a decoy, costing Shauna's team the game. Plus, Shauna is irritable, and since Mari is annoying and mean, she's been grinding on Miss Shipman's nerves. "I can't believe we didn't eat that b*tch first," Shauna complained — and now they have. 

This conflict was just one way that "Yellowjackets" season 3 focused on foreshadowing Mari's death. "It Girl" opened with her seemingly being hunted, and ended with her falling into the pit she'd die in weeks later. When she made it back to the group in "Them's The Brakes," Mari said, with relief, that "I thought I was going to die in [that pit]."

But in teeing Mari up to be Pit Girl, the season was also making sure she became more sympathetic. During the first two seasons, a lot of "Yellowjackets" fans hated Mari as much as Shauna did. But this season, she's been getting some funny lines (sorry, Mari, you were not too sexy to be murdered) and became Natalie's (Sophie Thatcher) ally against Shauna. Mari's death is also painful because she was one of the Yellowjackets who most wanted to go home; it's extra unfair that she had to pay the price for them staying. 

"Full Circle" reuses shots of the hunt from the pilot — some directly (like Mari falling into the pit), and some with the show's television-glitching cuts (reminding the viewer they've seen fragments of this before). Of course, now there's no need to hide the characters' identities. The pit shots include a new close up of Mari's face, and we see that one of the skewers went right through her cheek. 

But it's not just Mari and Shauna's roles that have been revealed. We can now pinpoint who each member of the fireside "Cannibal Council" was. "Full Circle" cheats a bit and retcons that there were more than the eight hunters in the pilot sitting just out of sight, which accounts for Lottie (Courtney Eaton), Travis (Kevin Alves), Akilah (Nia Sondaya), and the background Yellowjacket Robin (Anisa Harris).

Taken from the line-up in the image above the order is as follows:

• Far-left, raccoon tail hood: Gen
• Center-left, owl mask: Taissa
• Antler Queen's right hand, the butcher with the pink hood: Natalie (or so it seems...)
• Antler Queen: Shauna
• Antler Queen's left hand, skunk mask who peers over the Pit: Van
• Center-right, hooded: Britt (Silvana Estifanos)
• Far-right, bunny mask: Melissa

The trade-off of revealing all this is that the hunt isn't as scary as it was in the pilot. Oh sure, it's intense, but not as ominous because the show is coloring in the blanks itself instead of your imagination doing so. Take the lack of dialogue in the pilot episode's hunt scenes; you could read it as the Yellowjackets had descended so far into savagery they'd become nonverbal. Now, we know, the lack of dialogue was just to conceal the characters' true identities.

But context almost always makes a horror scene less scary. When the hunt was shown in the "Yellowjackets" pilot, the episode's job was to hook us by scaring us and holding back information. It succeeded, and so now it's delivering the answers we craved. For me, those answers make the Yellowjackets more human, and their actions even scarier.

The editing of the feast scene is jumpy, sparing us straight replays of the pilot scene. As the scene is narrated by Adult Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) journaling, that editing style can be read as Shauna's own memory fragments of her triumph. As "Yellowjackets" season 3 has made clear again and again, Shauna became her truest — and worst — self in the Wilderness.

It wasn't "It" that chose the Yellowjackets' prey. Shauna straight-up murdered Mari, and only for the petty reasons that teenage girls usually hate each other. When Mari pulls the doomed card, Shauna smugly smiles, "Tough break, Mari," like a mean girl right out of "Heathers." That's, of course, the whole point. The Yellowjackets still follow the hierarchies of high school, but in the Wilderness those have life and death consequences. Back in season 1, the group iced Jackie (Ella Purnell) out, but Jackie faced much worse than social exclusion. The hunts themselves, too, are just another team sport like soccer.

But in revealing how depraved Shauna got, "Full Circle" showed the other girls hadn't sunk to that level. Most of the other Yellowjackets wanted to leave back in "A Normal, Boring Life," remember, but they're all too scared of the Shauna, Lottie, and Tai triumvirate. Van and Gen chased Mari in the hunt, but they didn't celebrate when she died. Mari's death is the first time the girls have killed a friend and a teammate in cold blood. During their last hunt, they only passively let Javi (Luciano Leroux) die.

In the pilot, there was a close-up of the girls' mouths as they tore into the Pit Girl's cooked remains. There are similar shots in this one, but there's also a new close-up of Gen's eyes. As she takes a bit of the meat that used to be her friend, her eyes well up.

Stories like "Yellowjackets" about people stranded away from civilization tend to take a cynical view of people. Without laws, we become just more animals. But "Full Circle" has shown that most of the Yellowjackets, even at their lowest, still retain enough humanity for empathy and guilt. Like any group, they're also susceptible to mob thinking, and most mobs follow the strong personalities like Shauna and Lottie. Except for all of Shauna's reign, there's been a rebellion brewing and the season ends in its favor.

Season 3's ninth episode "How The Story Ends" concluded the past timeline segment with Misty (Samantha Hanratty) recovering the emergency transponder she smashed all the way back at the end of episode 2, "F Sharp." With an undamaged piece from it, she can fix the satellite phone Hannah and co. brought. Only, Natalie walked in on Misty and realized she'd had the transponder all along.

Natalie is infuriated that Misty kept rescuers from finding them, but she holds back because Misty can get them home. Looping in Van, the three hatch a scheme to repair the phone from under Shauna's nose. Natalie swaps her fur clothes with Hannah during the hunt and sneaks away. Hannah was the pink-hooded butcher who sliced Mari's throat and sat at the feast, not Natalie.

Shauna only realizes this when the group gets back to camp and Natalie has made it up the nearby mountain range, carrying the SAT phone. Misty unmasking and smiling back in the pilot? That wasn't evil glee at the hunting, that was happiness that Natalie's plan worked. This scheme, and the possibility that Natalie kept Misty's secret about the smashed transponder, also adds new context to the adult Misty (Christina Ricci) thinking Natalie (Juliette Lewis) is her best friend (and why Natalie did not share those feelings).

On the mountain Natalie gets a signal, cries for help and — as Aerosmith's "Livin' on the Edge" rings out — someone answers. Rescue is coming soon for the Yellowjackets, making this is the first season to end on a triumph and hope. 

Since the beginning, my greatest fear about "Yellowjackets" has been Showtime dragging out the series with constant renewals, the way that the network did to programs like "Dexter" or "Homeland." The ending of "Full Circle" has finally allayed those fears for me because it's clear the writers have an endgame that they're sticking to.

After Shauna dethroned Natalie in "Thanksgiving (Canada)," there was speculation Natalie would be exiled (or exile herself). Then she'd reach civilization and bring back rescue; Taissa (Tawny Cypress) said that Natalie was the reason the Yellowjackets made it out of the Wilderness. What actually happens, Natalie sneaking away and calling for help, isn't exactly what was suggested but it's similar. The same can be said about the details of the Antler Queen and her hunt.

The Antler Queen's cloak has clips of dark hair attached to it, and a common guess that each strand of hair came from one hunt. It turns out that the hair is a hunting trophy, but it's all from Mari. As for the Queen under the mask, the big four candidates were Lottie, Natalie, Shauna, or something else entirely. 

Natalie is the closest thing to a hero among the Yellowjackets, but she did become leader (queen) of the group back in season 2. Juliette Lewis' adult Natalie wore the Antler Queen costume during a hallucination in season 2. Then, during the trial episode "12 Angry Girls and 1 Drunk Travis," Judge Natalie wore the antler crown as a symbol of her authority. 

I still thought the Queen was Lottie, even after season 2 backed away from her being a villain. "Yellowjackets" fans came up with the "Antler Queen" name, and made the leap that the figure was the group's leader because of the crown, them sitting in the center of the half-circle, and the group only eating after they nod. In the actual "Yellowjackets" pilot script, the Antler Queen is called "the Shaman." That is essentially Lottie's role; she's the group's spiritual guide and authority. Both Natalie and Shauna only took over after her decree. Back in "Them's The Brakes," Shauna, Van, and Akilah all imagined Lottie as a teacher during their shared hallucination. 

This is pure speculation, but the "Shaman" name (and Lottie wearing the antler crown in "Doomcoming") makes me think when the pilot was written, the "Shaman" was meant to be Lottie. Oh sure, the antler symbolism could be a red herring, but the Shaman label absolutely fits Lottie, not Shauna. Fans really latched onto the "Antler Queen" label, though, and the writers have given the people what they want. 

Now, the mystery fourth candidate: that Antler Queen was a shared hallucination, and a personification of the Wilderness itself. Well, that's out now ... or is it? During her last scene with Callie, Lottie claimed that the Wilderness had possessed Shauna, and Shauna passed that darkness onto Callie. Shauna putting on the Antler Queen outfit can be read as her accepting the Wilderness into herself and becoming the avatar of its power.

Does such power actually exist?

From the beginning, "Yellowjackets" has played with our perceptions of time by showing us both the girls' past and their present in parallel. "Full Circle" suggests there could be more to this than just storytelling structure. In the teaser, Lottie appears to foresee her death, right down to the staircase where it happened. While peeking at her future, teenage Lottie also finds her adult self lying on a slab at the morgue, and the two Lotties speak to each other.

During the hunt, Lottie warns Mari that "[she's] been here already," because of course, the audience has seen this play out before. Travis asks Shauna "whose reality we're in," building on something Mari said about believing there are two realities in "Them's The Brakes." Travis also says he can hear Javi and Jackie's thoughts, but he did drink some berry wine right before the hunt.

Now, I'm not convinced "Yellowjackets" is going to come out and say the characters are literally caught in a time loop or parallel timeline. But this all speaks to one mystery the show hasn't answered one way or the other. Was there something supernatural out in the Wilderness that pushed the girls to spill blood in its name with alternating punishments and rewards? Or did their young, desperate minds just crack and give into shared delusion? Or do these two possibilities even have to be mutually exclusive? It's similar to Stanley Kubrick's "The Shining" in this way, which also let the audience decide if Jack (Jack Nicholson) was possessed by a demon or by his own alcoholism.

Lottie, who claims to be the Wilderness' prophet, is the lynchpin of this split. For as much as her visions sometimes come true, she is a schizophrenic who's off her medication.

The showrunners have maintained "Yellowjackets" is not a monster story, unless the monster is group hysteria. Most of the supernatural elements of the show have similar rational explanations. This season, to "commune" with the Wilderness, Lottie, Travis, and Akilah have all been getting high on mushrooms and/or toxic cave gas. But there's also enough room to keep the believers believing. Notice how there are occasional POV shots that suggest something unseen is watching the girls. In "How The Story Ends," Van (Lauren Ambrose) saw her death as her sitting on an empty flight, next to her younger self. That is exactly how Natalie experienced her death in "Storytelling." Are the girls' fates tied together metaphorically, or are their souls literally bound to the Wilderness and what lives inside it?

In "Storytelling," the adult Shauna told the assembled Yellowjackets that: "You know there's no 'It,' right? It was just us!" Lottie answered by asking, "Is there a difference?" Belief is what gives religions power, but relying only on faith instead of proof means there will always be doubters. The Yellowjackets themselves have some hazy memories about their time in the Wilderness, and have spent 25 years rationalizing the things they initially viewed as acts of a higher power. They can't be sure about what they experienced, so neither are we.

Lottie's response to Shauna is the clearest answer the show should ever give about this. Unlike Pit Girl or the Antler Queen, the existence of the supernatural is one question where a resolution is less satisfying than the mystery. If the show ever didactically spells out that there is or isn't a presence in the Wilderness, then its staying power will be reduced. The fun of "Yellowjackets" is how it asks questions and it will be best if it continues to do so even after it ends.

"Yellowjackets" is streaming on Paramount+ with SHOWTIME.