Want to Join Lottie’s Cult? ‘Yellowjackets’ Lures Viewers With Easter Egg
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[This story contains spoilers from the seventh episode of Yellowjackets season two, “Burial.”]
Sunshine Honey’s Wellness Community is opening its doors to Yellowjackets viewers.
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The Showtime series launched a stunt in the seventh episode of its second season, but only a viewer with citizen detective skills at the level of Walter (Elijah Wood) and Misty could have spotted it.
In the episode, titled “Burial,” the adult main cast of Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), Natalie (Juliette Lewis), Misty (Christina Ricci), Taissa (Tawny Cypress) and Van (Lauren Ambrose) finally reunite onscreen after a season spent apart when they arrive at the wilderness compound run by their fellow 1996 plane crash survivor, Lottie (Simone Kessell). The prior episode ended with all of the survivors laying eyes on Lottie, as the camera panned out to reveal that the infamous symbol at the center of the show (one promoted by Lottie as her spiritual power appears to grow stronger in the wilderness) is etched out in the grounds.
“Burial” picks up with the long-awaited reunion, as the survivors reluctantly engage in some of the hands-on therapy offered by Lottie. And in the background, while they are receiving their assignments, there is a sign with an emergency phone number. Lottie collects all of their phones and instructs them, “You can text this land line number to whomever you think might need it.”
Shauna’s husband, Jeff (Warren Kole) ends up using the number later in a cliffhanger ending to the episode, when he interrupts the bonding moment between all of the women to inform Shauna that the police have found the remains of Adam (Peter Gadiot) — the man Shauna was having an affair with and then killed in season one, subsequently making Jeff, Natalie, Misty and Taissa accomplices in his murder.
And as it turns out, viewers can use that land line, too. Dialing (607) 478-1033 will prompt a voicemail from Lottie herself welcoming any wanderers to her wellness center, located in upstate New York at the former site of Camp Green Pine.
“Do you ever wonder where you are? Are you somewhere feeling lonely, wandering between the who and the when, or flirting with the why? If so, hello. We are here and ready to believe you,” she says, in part, on the recording, while whispering at one point, “It’s not real.”
A text to the number (remember, it’s a land line) prompts a welcome message and sign-up form to join the Sunshine Honey community.
The stunt is a collaboration between Yellowjackets and the SMS engagement platform, Community. Community allows personalization with the number’s area code matching the show’s central New York location. This marks the second collaboration between Showtime and Community, following on Shameless allowing fans to join the Gallagher Family’s Group Chat. “Coming into season two, we knew we had a fandom who doesn’t want to stop engaging with the show simply when the episode ends. And for us, authentic social and digital extensions make it so it doesn’t have to,” says Dani Calogera, Showtime’s vp of brand & digital marketing, about the stunt speaking to the ’90s era of the show.
The Sunshine Honey stunt is a clever play on the looming questions around Lottie and her intentions, as the adult survivor has been struggling in recent episodes to get a grip on reality. As the second season revealed, after the teen survivors were rescued, Lottie was so in distress that her family shipped her off to a hospital in Switzerland where she underwent electro-shock therapy. Viewers were previously informed that she had been on medication for schizophrenia before the crash.
Now, 25 later when the survivors reunite with her, she has reinvented herself as Charlotte, the spiritual leader of the purple-clad wellness community — one her old friends refer to as a cult. The latest episode revealed that the therapist Lottie had been confiding in was a figment of her imagination, and that her hallucinations and pull she felt to the wilderness are getting stronger with the arrival of her old friends.
At the start of the season, Eaton told The Hollywood Reporter she talked to co-creators Bart Nickerson and Ashley Lyle about Lottie’s potential clairvoyance. “I’ve decided that she doesn’t have a mental illness but that she’s never really trusted her own brain,” she said. “In dealing with the trauma of the crash, she’s just trying to latch onto whatever she can, which is often an energy that draws people to her even if she doesn’t know how to process it.” [Read what Eaton had to say after “Burial” in a new interview with THR.]
Kessell later shared her opinion around Lottie being the supposed Antler Queen of the series, telling THR, “The Antler Queen can kind of be anything that we deem it to be. 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 all of us, and she really was something that kind of kept these women going to survive in the wilderness. That was my interpretation of it.”
Yellowjackets streams new episodes weekly on Fridays and airs on Showtime Sundays at 9 p.m. Keep up with THR‘s Yellowjackets season two coverage and interviews.
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