It’s full-blown winter in the plane-crash timeline, and Natalie and Travis bundle up as best they can before preparing to trek into the snowy wilderness to look for Javi. Lottie stops them before they go outside and spends some time anointing their palms, pricking her finger and then making them drink from the mug she mixes her blood into. When Nat grouses that it’s not like the “wicca bulls—t” is doing them any good, Lottie replies: “Well, you keep coming back alive, don’t you?” Touché. After they leave, she puts her finger to the fogged-over window and draws one of those stick figure-y things we’ve seen so often in this show.
The reality is that there’s just about no way Javi could survive all alone in the frigid conditions, and when Natalie gently broaches the subject while she and Travis sit in front of the fire, he has a gasping, choking panic attack that only abates when Lottie puts her hand on his chest and gently instructs him to breathe. As soon as she touches him, he has visions that include the altar from the season finale, glowing; he simultaneously recovers and realizes that he’s sporting an erection. “Your brother’s alive. I know he is,” Lottie tells him as he scrambles to pull a blanket over his lap.
Van and Taissa are still together and very much in love, yet Tai is troubled by her uncontrollable habit of hurting her girlfriend in her sleep. Van reassures her that she can handle it, but the bruises on her body are pretty significant. Tai begs her to lock her up at night, but Van resolutely refuses.
One evening, Tai rolls over in bed and starts kissing Van, who’s asleep. But what seems like a prelude to mid-slumber sexytimes turns weird when Van (whom we learn is also still asleep) bites her lady’s lip, hard. Van’s yell wakes Tai, who immediately starts trying to break up with her in order to protect her. “I’m not scared of you, Tai. I’m never going to be scared of you,” Van says softly, asserting that the nocturnal activity “isn’t you. It’s just something that’s happening to you — happening to us.” Then she does something both sweet and gross: She dips a finger in the blood from her bitten lip and writes “I [heart] u” on Tai’s forearm. It’s the first time she’s said it, and Tai says it back, then they engage in a fully conscious (and hopefully less injury-prone) makeout session.
At home, Tai sees blood near the crawl space in the basement and finds the altar with Biscuit’s heart and Sam’s creepy doll. She starts to cry. When Steve comes to see what’s up, she hugs him. “This was a mistake. I’m going to do better with you,” she sobs. (Ha!)
Misty questions the clerk at the motel where Natalie was staying, and when he’s reluctant to give up any information, she out-weirds him and he relents. He divulges that Nat left in the middle of the night and paid cash. Unsatisfied, Misty breaks into her friend’s room and cries… until she notices that it looks like the door was forced open. Also? There’s a security camera outside.
Somewhere else, Natalie is chained up on a bed in a room with bars on the windows. A woman enters with food on a tray; she’s wearing a pendant of one of Lottie’s symbols from the woods. Natalie sweet-talks her captor into undoing one of her handcuffs so she can eat. When the woman returns to clear the plates, Nat stabs her with the fork and escapes.
It’s nighttime, and a small distance away, Natalie sees people chanting around a fire. Eventually, they chase her. She eludes them long enough to run through some forest and come to a group of people wearing white robes and animal masks.
They disrobe a man and lay him in a ditch, then everyone shovels dirt on top of him. That’s when Lottie (played by Obi-Wan Kenobi‘s Simone Kessell) appears in flowing white robes of her own, which causes Nat to grab a huge piece of wood and come at her with violence on her mind. But Lottie just breathes deeply with her eyes closed and isn’t bothered at all. “I have a message for you,” she tells her former teammate. “From Travis.”
