Yellowjackets Season 2 Premiere Reveals What Happened to SPOILER After the Wilderness

Yellowjackets returned for its second season on Showtime this week and the fan-favorite series wastes no time in immersing viewers in the dark and twisted world that the survivors of the plane crash are dealing with — both past and present — when it picks up shortly after the end of Season 1. Part of the series hitting the ground running in its second season includes bringing into focus some characters we only started to get to know in Season 1 — including Lottie Matthews. As was revealed at the end of the first season, Lottie is one of the girls who ultimately survived both the plane crash and the wilderness and is alive in the present timeline, but. now the Season 2 premiere, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen", reveals not only a bit more about what adult Lottie is doing in the present day, but what happened to teen Lottie after the girls were rescued from the wilderness.

Warning, spoilers for the Season 2 premiere of Yellowjackets, "Friends, Romans, Countrymen", beyond this point.

The episode picks up in the 1990s storyline a few months into winter to reveal a cold and somewhat dire situation for the survivors due to a shortage food, but it also flashes viewers to 1998, 19 months after the crash, when the survivors are finally rescued and brought back to civilization. It's then that we find out what happened to Lottie after that. As fans will recall from Season 1, Lottie already had mental health issues and took medication for schizophrenia, which she ran out of following the crash.  Now, in Season 2, we learn that when Lottie returns home, she's apparently very traumatized from her experiences. We see her sitting seemingly nonresponsive as her parents talk to a psychiatrist about her, telling the doctor that she hasn't spoken since returning home, doesn't sleep and wanders house at odd hours.

Her parents plead with the doctor to fix her and then we're shown what that entails. Lottie is put through electroshock therapy, which appears to give her flashbacks to the mysterious visions she had when she was baptized by Laura Lee. Lottie is also institutionalized and appears to be doing better as we see demonstrated when a fellow patient has a breakdown and Lottie goes to her, places her hand on her chest and tells her that they can make her better, just like they did her. It's unclear, however, how long after her initial electroshock therapy or her return from the wilderness this apparent breakthrough actually is.

Whatever that breakthrough is, it appears to have some lingering impact. In the present, an adult and seemingly healthy Lottie is the leader of her own group where she's telling her followers that only they can help themselves — their truest and most authentic self — and everything that they've been through isn't real because only they are holding themselves back. However, Lottie's group has a bit of a cult-like feel, with everyone dressed in shades of purple — not to mention the fact that she had Nat kidnapped at the end of Season 1 and brought to wherever it is that she has her wellness retreat. We even get a glimpse of a bizarre ritual of sorts that Lottie is presiding over that has some very strange "wilderness" vibes, though the ritual is cut short by an escaped Nat.

"She's completely recreated herself from the Lottie that we know from Season 1," Simone Kessell, who plays adult Lottie, recently said of the character. "She's been in and out of institutions. And the Lottie we see today is love and light and healing and spirituality."

"When we meet Lottie, she's a whole different person who's gone through this rehabilitation at a Swiss mental institution," co-showrunner Jonathan Lisco said previously. "This woman is a guru. But she's also, like many self-proclaimed gurus, very volatile. She's able to give you the scorpion's tail at any moment. That's part of the hold she has on her followers."

"We're hoping that even the Lottie you've seen so far in the wilderness can come across not as a cult leader or the overt founder of a new religion but rather as a kind of reluctant messiah through which the darkness can speak," Lisco added. "She doesn't want to be this person, it's not a choice, it's an inexorable feeling that she has that she must communicate to the others."

Yellowjackets is now streaming and on demand for all SHOWTIME subscribers. New episodes make their on-air debut Sunday nights at 9 pm ET/PT as well.