All the Fan Theories to Know After 'Yellowjackets' Season 2, Episode 7
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
It's finally Yellowjackets season. The hit Showtime series returned for its second season this weekend, checking back in with the survivors of a 1996 plane crash across two timelines: months after the crash as the girls face their first winter in the woods, and twenty-five years later as the now-adults live with the trauma of their unspeakable past. As the mystery-filled series airs over the next few months, we'll be following all of the most compelling plot theories week by week. Read on for the biggest fan theories following the season 2's seventh episode, "Burial."
The Yellowjackets' next "special meal" will be chosen randomly.
Even though the team has never been closer to the Antler-Queen-ritual-sacrifice dynamic we saw in the series premiere, none of my theories for the next "special meal" have come to fruition. Coach Ben is still alive by the end of episode 7, and now that Misty's determined to keep him from hurting himself, it's likely that he's going to stick around for a while. (Misty's determination could power most small countries.) Next on the list is the recently deceased Crystal/Kristen, except she might not even be dead. When Misty finally goes to search for her bestie's body (to be far, everyone was shook in the wake of Shauna going into labor), the corpse is missing.
I generally go by standard TV rules—no body means they're still alive—but even if the fall itself didn't take Crystal out, the blizzard likely did. She could be buried down even further (unlikely), could have crawled a ways away at the start of the blizzard (more possible). Or her body was taken by something else out in the wilderness needing sustenance. Some Redditors are guessing wolves, but others are pointing out that Javi's mysterious "friend" is still out there somewhere. That would be a fascinating mystery to come up as a cliffhanger, if the mystery friend comes out from wherever they're hiding.
As for who gets eaten next, the bleakness of the group's post-blizzard vibe has prompted me to shorten the show's timeline. It seems like the girls are becoming more accepting of eating one of their own, so it's only a matter of time until they turn their efforts to find food on each other. They may soon leave it up to the wilderness to decide who's sacrificed for the larger group's survival.
Mari will be the Pit Girl.
Now that the non-surviving (we assume) Yellowjackets are getting more screen time in season 2, we can start investigating who will end up being the poor victim of the series premiere's pit trap. As of episode 2, the most-likely victim is Mari, who has the same dark long hair as the Pit Girl in the flash-forward. She's also been mean repeatedly mean to Misty throughout this season, which could explain why Misty had looked so happy to chow down, as u/Top_Marionberry1663 notes.
While Mari's "Pit Girl" identity seems pretty solid, there's also room for Mari theories about the mysterious dripping sound, which she hears but no one else can. She has kept noting it for the past couple of episodes, and it isn't clear whether she has cabin fever or it's something more sinister. The dripping could just be the beginning of Mari's hallucinations, but multiple Redditors pointed out in this thread that episode 3's score includes a dripping sound during a scene when Tai's in her sleepwalking state. Odds are more clues will pop up throughout the season.
Lottie and Shauna will have to work together as leaders of the group.
One of the major plot points of the 1996 timeline this season has been the "wilderness" believers vs. the skeptics, with Lottie and her "powers" standing firmly on one side and Shauna and Natalie on the other. Javi's return and the Jackie team meal both fortified the idea that the team will survive if they become one with the wilderness, and even Tai has at least accepted that Lottie's methods have a mysterious legitimacy. This week we learned that even the menacing force has limits; the group doesn't eat Shauna's stillborn child, and she's able to give it an emotional burial.
Even though Shauna's vision of the team eating her baby was just a dream, the feelings of fear and betrayal get mixed up into the trauma of her labor. Lottie understands that Shauna needs to let those feelings out, so she lets Shauna use her as a punching bag. This scene feels like the climax of the believers vs. skeptics storyline since the outburst is in response to a wilderness ritual (even if it only happened in a dream). I think this will serve as another horrifying moment of bonding for the team, as everyone rallies around Lottie and Shauna works through enough of her hesitance to work with Lottie as one of the team leaders, possibly balancing her spirituality with hard facts. Sure, it would be a less dissimilar dynamic than the team completely splitting into two, but the girls will also need to be united in the future against anyone else who's living out there in the wilderness. (I'm going all in on Javi's "friend" becoming an antagonist in later seasons.)
Javi was hiding in underground tunnels.
All of those fan theorists were right: Javi's still alive! The kid somehow survived two months alone in the wilderness following the group's mushroom-fueled Doomcoming, with Tai and Van finding him in episode 4. Those aside, Lottie was right about Javi all along, and now Travis knows that Natalie had faked finding Javi's bloody clothes to Travis would stop torturing himself looking for him. That's going to drive a big wedge between Travis and Natalie, and maybe Travis will end up getting with Lottie, but the more important, non-love-triangle question: How the hell is this kid still alive???
In episode 5, Javi refuses to talk or explain where he was, until Ben finds a drawing Javi made of some tree roots. At that point, while the pair are alone, Javi tells the coach that he met a "friend" while he was gone, who "told [him] not to come back." These are all very vague clues, but several Redditors did notice that the drawing may include the mysterious "she" that Javi mentioned. Both the hidden figure and the way the drawing's vines resemble the mossy snowless trees dotted through the woods are strong clues toward a less supernatural theory of how Javi survived.
A significant Reddit theory from u/murderousbitch postulates that Javi has been living in a series of underground bunkers for the past two months. The theory connects back to Lottie's altar (which the Redditor calls the Summer Stump), explaining that there could be a bunker underneath the stump that's generating enough heat to melt the snow, and guessing Javi could have found the bunker either right before or while running away. This would also connect to the bunker imagery throughout season 1, including a vision that Lottie had of herself in what appeared to be an underground cement hallway when she was baptized in season 1. If this theory was true, not only would Travis finally catch a break (the kid's been through a lot), but Lottie being right about Javi's survival could be another step towards the bulk of the team becoming the Antler Queen's disciples.
Adult Lottie is having blackouts like Taissa, and she killed Travis during one.
After an entire season of questioning whether Lottie had really denounced the wilderness, episode 7 confirmed that the “intentional community” leader is still in communion with whatever she tapped into in 1996. It turns out that the psychiatrist Lottie’s been seeing all season has been a hallucination, and she even transforms into the Antler Queen herself at one point. This reveal comes at a perfect, concerning time, when all the former teammates are together and they’ve all at least become more open to Lottie’s therapy (thanks in part to Bruce the Goat and a human Caligula played by John Cameron Mitchell). It’s taken a while for the present timeline’s endgame to become clear, and now we know that it’s gonna be rough.
The therapist hallucinations also explains what happened to Lottie’s visions after Travis’s death. Whether that episode was the first one since the team was rescued, or if Lottie has been fading in and out of consciousness without even knowing is unclear. Either way, I’m sticking with my theory that Lottie is disassociating in a similar way to Taissa. When she reconnected with Travis and had the vision of Laura Lee during his death, that could have been the moment where the wilderness spirit took over and killed him. Then, when she comes to, Lottie doesn't remember the murder but covers it up and takes his money so she can continue to take care of her cult. Travis and Tai were the two people with the most connection to the spirit (a.k.a. weird, unexplained hallucinations) in the woods and they had dealt with hallucinations in adulthood. Maybe after so long holding them off, they finally took Lottie over.
Shauna and Jeff will be arrested for Adam's murder.
The Sadecki family's bumbling efforts to keep Shauna out of jail for Adam's murder appear to have been for nothing. Now that the artist's remains have been found, Detective Saracusa is going to come straight for Shauna as his number one suspect, even if Adam's body doesn't yield any actual proof pointing in her direction. Unfortunately, the deciding evidence against Shauna still could land in the cops' hands, courtesy of a certain citizen detective.
Walter is Adam's old friend or relative.
Misty and Walter have been set up all season to become a tragic love story: boy admires girl online, boy tracks girl down at her place of employment, girl and boy team up to find girl's kidnapped frenemy, girl runs away from boy's obvious feelings for her. After Misty finally realized her feelings for Walter via sensory deprivation therapy, it looked like maybe the two crazy true crime-obsessed kids would make it after all. But the would-be couple still have to deal with the Adam dilemma, and several Redditors think that Walter may have a way bigger connection to the artist than we think.
The show is barely given viewers details of Adam's past, a mystery that season 1 theorists ran with to guess that the mystery man was actually adult Javi. (That theory has since been debunked by the show's creators.) However, we do hear part of an anecdote about Adam's past in season 1, episode 3, in a conversation where he tells Shauna about "a giant bank safe dangling above the streets of Chelsea." That's a very random piece of backstory for what seems like a relatively unknown artist. However, u/writergal3118 points out that Walter has a similar, construction-related backstory, since he became a multimillionaire from a settlement after loose bricks from a scaffolding company landed on his head.
Everything about these Walter and Adam anecdotes are extremely random, except for their similarities to each other, so I wouldn't be surprised if the characters' pasts are also somehow connected. Even if they both just happen to have suspension-related stories, there's still the question of why Walter has even cared about Adam. Maybe he knew Adam's mother was dead because he's Adam's old friend, or even a relative. It would be awesome if the two backstories were a carefully planted nod to the characters' connection.
Maybe there are wilderness spirits; maybe it's poisoning.
While there have been many hints that something supernatural is happening in Yellowjackets—most recently the POV shot of an unknown spirit pushing the snow onto Jackie's incinerator-turned-oven—there is the chance that the mysteries of the show are less sensational. Several Redditors (including u/boreleafclover) have written on the theory that the Yellowjackets are actually camping out in an extremely mineral rich area. Redditor u/justaguyinqueens speculates the ground specifically has cinnabar in it, aka "oxidized mercury that is used in a number of industrial processes."
So after all this speculation, low-grade mercury poisoning could be responsible for causing some of their hallucinations and strange behavior. u/justaguyinqueens also notes that "cinnabar crystals are a bright red," and the Yellowjackets previously found a "river of blood" that they attributed to Lottie's visions. The poisoning theories even have offshoots explaining some of the team's strange behavior. Taissa's hallucinations as an adult could be the long-term effects from eating dirt laced with mercury during her wilderness stress sleepwalking. u/haveone-onme argues Tai "might be eating dirt because her body is craving nutrients and minerals." In this case, the no-eyed man of Tai's nightmares as a kid could be a recurring waking nightmare brought on by the poisoning and mental trauma.
Another non-supernatural theory which could ties both the mineral poisoning and the Javi's-somewhere-underground postulations together was actually posted during season 1, when u/boreleafclover (who also credited u/bo174 and u/eshmeem) suggested that show's stick-figure symbol is actually a map to a hidden mining shaft. They wrote that "the circle is a sun, the lines and triangles are overlapping mountains, [and] the hook is the actual mining shaft." They also suggest that the dead guy in the attic was the mine's owner.
This week, a thoughtful post from u/theflyingwhisker tied those three thoughts together in one of the strongest not-spirits-but-poisoning theories so far: They found that the show's symbol looks derived from Alchemy charts from the 17th and 18th century, which assigned symbols to certain minerals. An underground mine could have been harvesting cinnabar or another material, with gas and other matter rising up from the surface to poison the water supply and the animals who drink from it (hence why Natalie and Travis can't find any fame). The warmth from the mine could also be heating the Summer Stump. Not only that, the man in the attic could have died from poisoning and "put the symbol in front of him as a warning."
I think this very plausible scientific theory is the perfect foil to the show's supernatural tones. I've been a solid ghost/possession theorizer since the season 1 finale, but after reading u/theflyingwhisker's post, my brain has gone into a spiral. If what happened to the girls was really scientific instead of supernatural, would that raise or lower the stakes of everything they're about to do (or did, considering from the present timeline)? How would they move forward if the source of their years-long struggle was a rare but ultimately natural phenomenon? What would it mean for the show's examination of the ways people react to trauma and its long-lasting effects?
You Might Also Like
