Shauna (Melanie Lynskey, as an adult) is not happy about the gold necklace situation at the end of the latest Yellowjackets episode.
Which is understandable. At the very least, it’s a token from her dead best friend, someone she’s haunted by the mere thought of, and sometimes scared she lives in the total shadow of (for starters). Beyond that, there’s the strangeness of its time in the wilderness alongside Shauna and Lottie (played here as an adult by Simone Kessell): What exactly the gold Tiffany necklace took to symbolize in the woods is still an open question.
The scene itself, at the end of “Them’s the Brakes,” doesn’t give us a ton to go on. Shauna recoils when she sees it and immediately seems bewildered, wondering how Lottie even has it. “It feels right, Shauna,” Lottie excitedly exclaims. “Don’t you feel it, too?”
While Shauna is completely unmoored by the idea that “it” should be given to her daughter, Callie (Sarah Desjardins), at all, Lottie is defensive, calmly trying to reason with her about how “it never meant what you thought it meant.”
Which is one of many questions that fans have been trying to puzzle through for two seasons now: So what does the necklace actually mean to the Yellowjackets?
There’s plenty of theories based on how we’ve seen it pass right now. Jackie first puts it on Shauna when they’re on the plane in the pilot episode — an act of love, since Shauna is nervous to fly. It passes back to Jackie before she dies, and passes to Nat before she dies as well (though it also “kept her safe” during her first hunt).
But perhaps most pressingly: The first place we actually get to see it is the pilot’s cold open — on the “Pit Girl” being hunted by the remaining Yellowjackets, who dies by falling on a spike trap. For whatever Lottie seems to think the necklace really means to the Yellowjackets cult, it seems like at least narratively it does not mean good things. Which makes it pretty understandable that Shauna reacted that way.
The problem is, of course, that Callie has no understanding of any of this — which, unfortunately for Shauna, is exactly what Callie finds so great about Lottie.
“I feel like Lottie is definitely more energetically open than the rest of the women, but [it] also feels like Lottie is feeling somewhat drawn to Callie,” Desjardins tells Polygon of the pull between Callie and her mom’s friend.
Lottie first noted that Callie seemed “powerful” at the end of season 2, a pronouncement that Desjardins says is absolutely fueling Callie’s interest in Lottie and her whole situation. “That is something that Callie takes in. She has no idea what that means, but I think […] Lottie has this connection to the wilderness, and I think part of that energy is like Callie is sensing an openness in a way,” Desjardins said. “I really wanted to play all the aspects we have [with] Callie feeling drawn to the energy, feeling confused by the energy.”
With Callie — like the rest of us — so eager for answers about what exactly the Yellowjackets crew got up to out there, she’s ready to turn to anyone who feels more open in that way, even if they’re offering her a creepy murder necklace. This seems like a much darker (and more accurate) take on the pull of Lottie’s cult influence than the soft matching pastels of season 2. And given that the necklace has taken on even a colloquial understanding of being marked, it seems like Callie could be in real danger.
The post Yellowjackets’ biggest moment this week was about its smallest mystery appeared first on Polygon.
