Yellowjackets: Jackie's Heart Necklace Meaning Explained In Season 3

A familiar necklace returned in Yellowjackets Season 3 and it may signal big consequences for a main character.

The third season of Paramount+'s survival drama recently returned, following the team of teen soccer players who are stranded in the Canadian wilderness, and their adult counterparts 25 years after the event.

Yellowjackets is a series full of symbolism and viewers often attempt to untangle the series' enduring mysteries.

What the Heart Necklace in Yellowjackets Means

Yellowjackets Season 3 Episode 3, titled 'Them's the Breaks', sees the return of a symbolic heart necklace in the present timeline.

During the episode, Lottie (Simone Kessell) gifts Shauna's (Melanie Lynskey) teen daughter, Callie (Sarah Desjardins), a gold heart necklace.

When Shauna spots her daughter wearing the necklace she is furious. Lottie tells Shauna she gifted the necklace to Callie because "it feels right," but Shauna does not share her disposition and screams at Lottie, ordering her to leave her house. 

Lottie tries to tell Shauna that the necklace "never meant what you thought it meant."

The reason for the necklace triggering Shauna is clear, it once belonged to her best friend Jackie (Ella Purnell), who died in the wilderness and whose ghost has haunted Shauna ever since.

Jackie wore the necklace throughout their time in the wilderness, but Shauna could never recover it. This means Lottie took the necklace (presumably from Jackie's corpse) and kept it with her all these years without Shauna knowing.

Is the Necklace A Bad Sign For Callie?

Shauna's visceral reaction to the heart necklace suggests the item has bad connotations. The necklace did of course belong to Jackie, who died, but Lottie's pointing out that Shauna had tied some meaning to it seems to indicate she thinks it is beyond just Jackie, perhaps believing it is cursed. 

Yellowjackets executive producer Jonathon Lisco said as much in an interview with Gold Derby, revealing that those who possess the necklace "don't always fare so well," which explains why Shauna wanted it away from her daughter:

"That's the theory. We all know that people wearing the necklace don't always fare so well. And so when she sees it on her daughter again, the entire tragedy and trauma of the wilderness floods in for Shauna at that moment... And now this necklace is on her daughter, and she just can't deal with it. So she loses it, rips it off, and sends Lottie packing."

Whether the necklace will be proven to have supernatural properties, or indeed mark its wearer for death remains to be seen, but if true, this could be a bad sign for Callie in the future.

It doesn't seem like Lottie was attempting to set up Callie by gifting her the necklace. Instead, she seemingly gave it to her to try and forge a connection between them. 

Lottie certainly doesn't share the same fears about the necklace as Shauna does, so even if the jewelry does have some deadly qualities, it likely wasn't Lottie's intention to pass these on to Callie.

However, Lottie has been known to show a special interest in those she thinks may have a connection to the supernatural or spiritual entity that is "the wilderness" and it's something she's carried with her long past their rescue as teenagers. So if Lottie is now seeing this quality in Callie it probably still doesn't mean good things for Shauna's daughter.

Yellowjackets Season 3 releases new episodes on Paramount+ on Fridays at 12 a.m. PT/3 a.m. ET.