The Yellowjackets are again! It’s been nearly two years since we left the women out within the woods, and the Showtime breakout hit returns tomorrow, on Valentine’s Day—a weirdly canny advertising and marketing selection for a present about highschool ladies who board a aircraft for Seattle, and as an alternative crash-land someplace within the coronary heart of human depravity.
by Megan Burbank
The Yellowjackets are again! It’s been nearly two years since we left the women out within the woods, and the Showtime breakout hit returns tomorrow, on Valentine’s Day—a weirdly canny advertising and marketing selection for a present about highschool ladies who board a aircraft for Seattle, and as an alternative crash-land someplace within the coronary heart of human depravity.
Like Misplaced for goths and bisexuals (to paraphrase a line from season two),Yellowjackets has every thing: an absurdly stacked forged of Gen X icons, two linked narratives 25 years aside, and, uh, ritualistic cannibalism.
It’s additionally my consolation present (hear me out). There’s a deranged coziness to Yellowjackets—like Little Ladies if the March sisters have been murderers with no grownup supervision. It’s additionally a few of my favourite queer illustration on TV. So forward of its third season, I did a full refresh of the place we left off two years in the past, so that you don’t must. Let’s study this wealthy and upsetting textual content! (Additionally, if you happen to haven’t seen Yellowjackets and wish to stay spoiler-free, please cease earlier than it’s too late. We’re going deep into the lore!)
Season 1: Worst Ladies’ Journey Ever
If you happen to watch Yellowjackets, it’s most likely as a result of the primary scene hooked you. It opens to a black display screen with panting, panicked breath. You possibly can’t inform the distinction between the haunting sounds of nature, and the haunting human voices on the wind. Within the unidentified wintry woods, a woman is chased right into a pit the place she’s impaled, retrieved, and bled out into the snow. Her physique is consumed by a gaggle of faceless individuals, one in a veil and an antler crown. Who’s the lady within the pit? Who’s the Antler Queen? For probably the most baroque theories, you’ll be able to ask this subreddit, the place I’ve sadly spent hours of my one wild and valuable life.
However we are able to’t go down that Okay-hole now, or we’ll by no means get out. After this horrifying chilly open, we flash again to 1996 suburban New Jersey, the place a ladies’ soccer group is getting ready to go to the nationwide championship sport in Seattle. They’re actually going to be in a aircraft crash and devolve into the terrifying figures within the present’s opening, although we but don’t understand how or why.
As a substitute, we see what their lives have been like earlier than the crash: Jackie (Ella Purnell) is fashionable and dedicated to performing heterosexuality together with her boyfriend Jeff (Jack DePew) whereas clearly pining for Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), her moody greatest buddy who likes journaling and Liz Phair (identical) and who’s channeling her personal obsession with Jackie into secretly sleeping with Jeff.
Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) has an lovable shag haircut and likes to do medicine, partly as a result of her homelife is terrible. Similar goes for Van (Liv Hewson), the group’s goalie, who’s in (requited) love with Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown). Lottie (Courtney Eaton) has a historical past of psychosis, however nobody is aware of. Her father pays for the women to fly personal to nationals. Misty (Samantha Hanratty) is the group’s gear supervisor and a social outcast. And Laura Lee (Jane Widdop) is a really Nineteen Nineties evangelical Christian, and in addition the one actually good particular person on the group. If you happen to’re a millennial who performed highschool sports activities, you most likely knew a Laura Lee.
In a storyline set in 2021, we see the place these ladies ended up 25 years later. Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) is a disaffected housewife who butchers rabbits out of boredom and is married to Jeff (Warren Kole), who has candy himbo vitality however can’t join together with her.
Taissa (Tawny Cypress) has compartmentalized her trauma and turn out to be obsessive about achievement: She’s working for public workplace, and hires an opposition researcher (Rekha Sharma) to look into the surviving Yellowjackets to ensure they received’t squeal if pressed about what they obtained as much as within the wilderness.
Nat (Juliette Lewis) is contemporary out of rehab—not for the primary time.
And Misty (Christina Ricci), now a nurse, is a cheerful sociopath who wears scrubs printed with whimsical animals as she tortures aged geriatric sufferers. The remaining Yellowjackets come collectively as a result of somebody is sending them menacing postcards and threatening to go public with their secrets and techniques.
The blackmailer seems to be Himbo Jeff, who simply wants cash as a result of his furnishings enterprise is failing and he’s in debt to mortgage sharks (very regular, very relatable), however within the meantime, the grownup Yellowjackets get into some actually horrible conditions: Shauna initiates an affair with a youthful man who she thinks is behind the blackmail and finally ends up murdering him earlier than she finds out she was flawed; Taissa’s son tells her a few “girl within the tree” exterior his bed room window; this seems to be Taissa herself, who has violent sleepwalking episodes she doesn’t keep in mind, and that are linked with the ghostly look of a Man With out Eyes (Warning: Sure, the canine does die). Nat investigates the mysterious demise of their coach’s son and her ex-boyfriend, Travis, and relapses, regardless of Misty’s valiant efforts to intervene by doing Nat’s cocaine herself (“I’ll Venmo you!” screams Christina Ricci). Nat finally ends up suicidal, about to shoot herself when somebody breaks in and kidnaps her; we hear a voicemail from Nat’s sponsor, who’s finished some digging on Travis’ connections, and oops, appears like Lottie remains to be alive and as much as hijinks!
Whereas nearly each episode focuses on a distinct character’s perspective in a means that recollects early Misplaced, the 1996 timeline is closely targeted on the dynamic between teenage Shauna and Jackie, whose mutual animosity would most likely be resolved if they’d simply kiss. However they don’t—and never due to any obligatory heterosexuality (thank god). Yellowjackets has a few of the greatest queer illustration I’ve seen on TV in years within the relationship between Tai and Van (and I don’t imply good illustration within the sanitized sense: Nobody on this present is an effective particular person, and that’s what’s so compelling about it).
Within the wilderness, the highschool social order is upended instantly. As a result of she has wilderness abilities from taking the Crimson Cross’ babysitting class (twice!), Misty is newly fashionable. She’s so completely satisfied about this that she destroys the aircraft’s emergency transmitter. Shauna turns into a reliable butcher, chargeable for skinning and cleansing lifeless animals. And Nat hunts them, as a result of she’s the one Yellowjacket who is aware of the way to use a gun. Jackie doesn’t have a job. She’s dangerous at wilderness stuff, and the social energy she had earlier than the crash is slowly leeching away.
At first, the women are organized and resourceful, and their non permanent society hums together with shocking order. Accompanied by a number of different surviving teammates, together with Travis, his brother Javi, and their assistant coach Ben, the women shelter in an deserted cabin within the forest as soon as owned by a hunter who additionally left behind a small, moss-covered airplane.
However issues rapidly devolve: Shauna finds out she’s pregnant with Jeff’s child (a DIY abortion doesn’t take), Van is attacked by wolves (!!!), Taissa begins wandering round consuming dust in her sleep, and Lottie runs out of her meds and begins having visions she thinks are indicators from the wilderness (they usually is perhaps; the present leaves it ambiguous). Laura Lee tries to avoid wasting everybody by flying the aircraft to get assist, however after takeoff, the aircraft bursts into flame, and she or he dies beside her teddy bear.
With Laura Lee gone, there’s no moderating pressure among the many Yellowjackets, they usually embrace Lottie’s mythology, culminating in a psychedelic-fueled bacchanalia within the woods that leads them to assault Travis; Javi runs away in concern. This whole sequence is principally an adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae, about girls devotees of social gathering god Bacchus who tear a person aside in a drunken frenzy. (There’s a complete JStor article about this if you happen to really care.)
Within the midst of this chaos, Jackie, who’s found the reality in regards to the supply of Shauna’s being pregnant, embraces nihilism and seduces Travis so she received’t be a virgin when she dies, and the Yellowjackets all activate her, as a result of Travis is in love with Nat. (Did I not point out this? As a complete further subplot, the 2 of them got a firearm to exit and hunt sport. Romance blooms, naturally). After a brutal argument with Shauna, Jackie leaves the cabin in a rage, rejected by everybody who issues to her, none of whom trouble to verify on her.
Jackie manages to construct a hearth, but it surely doesn’t matter: In a single day, the primary snow of winter falls, and by morning, she’s frozen to demise. Shauna begins grieving Jackie and by no means stops, and Lottie’s thriller cult finds its first followers in Misty and Van.
A lot of the intrigue of Yellowjackets’ first season lies in not understanding if anybody however Shauna, Misty, Nat, and Taissa made it out of the wilderness alive. When it’s lastly revealed that Jackie died by chance, it subverts the expectation that Grownup Jackie is perhaps on the market someplace, looking for revenge. The primary time I watched the sequence, I needed that to be how season one ended, and I had already dreamcast Sarah Michelle Gellar, which can be a Megan Downside, as a result of they don’t actually look alike, and in addition, on my latest rewatch, I discovered Jackie’s demise a a lot sadder and simpler narrative selection as written. Whenever you’re in highschool, you may suppose you need the favored lady to die, however you don’t really: She’s only a child.
Season 2: Physique Horror Intensifies
In season two, the women are ravenous, delusional, traumatized, and simply straight up not having a very good time. Resident grownup Ben is in a dissociative state, Javi remains to be lacking, Taissa remains to be seeing the Man With out Eyes, Lottie continues to be off her meds and is complicated her personal psychosis with messages from the Wilderness, JV group member Akilah (Nia Sondaya) begins speaking to a lifeless mouse she retains as a pet, Shauna is being haunted by Ghost Jackie, and when the frozen corpse of Actual Jackie loses an ear, Shauna eats it, as a result of, oh yeah, Yellowjackets is a David Lynch tribute present now.
I’m critical! Misty additionally has a imaginative and prescient of her fowl, Caligula (John Cameron Mitchell), serenading her towards the backdrop of a pink curtain in a void, an apparent Black Lodge reference. And there’s even a heart-shaped necklace that, like Laura Palmer’s broken-heart pendant, turns into a significant plot level.
It comes out first when the women resolve it’s time to cremate Jackie’s physique, however a quirk of the climate signifies that as an alternative of being burned into ash, Jackie is barbecued. The women eat her physique in a frenzied state of shared delusion. Coach Ben abstains. Poor Coach Ben. Are you able to think about being the one grownup on this situation? The caffeine withdrawal alone could be brutal.
The one 1996 Yellowjacket having an okay time is Misty, as a result of she has a buddy: Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman), a personality whose late-breaking introduction didn’t upset me due to how effectively she’s used. In a match of giddy self-disclosure throughout the grossest conceivable chore run, Misty confides in Crystal about destroying the aircraft’s emergency transmitter. Misty threatens to kill Crystal if she tells anybody, and by accident shoves her off a cliff throughout this change—what follows is likely one of the uncommon shows of regret we see from Misty, who’s then tasked with attending to the delivery of Shauna’s child, who dies, however not earlier than Shauna can have an prolonged, traumatizing dream in regards to the child being eaten by her teammates.
Shauna wakes up bereft and livid, and beats Lottie to a gory pulp. Satisfied that Lottie has taken on an excessive amount of, the women resolve it’s time to discover a solution to survive, they usually choose the format for the hunt we see to start with of season one.
Nat is the primary sufferer. Javi, who’s again and alive after discovering a mysterious shelter, tries to assist her to security, however he falls by means of the ice on a close-by lake. The women let him drown to allow them to eat him. Lottie nominates Nat because the crew’s new queen. Coach Ben relocates to Javi’s secret underground cave. Simply when it looks as if issues are coming to a conclusion, the cabin catches fireplace whereas the women are sleeping, they usually barely make it out alive earlier than their solely shelter is engulfed in flames to the menacing riffs of Echo and the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon.”
Within the 2021 timeline, Shauna and her household are being investigated for homicide (households that cowl up crime collectively keep collectively), Nat’s being held towards her will in a cult run by Lottie (they deliberately interrupted her suicide try, which is the excellent news; the dangerous information is now she has to reside on this bizarre intentional neighborhood the place everybody wears purple), and Taissa, shedding her thoughts to sleepwalking episodes, hitchhikes to an lovable video retailer (Whereas You Have been Streaming!) run by Van, who remains to be alive and performed by Lauren Ambrose!
Misty groups up with a brand new character, Walter (Elijah Wooden at his most profitable and bizarre), to search out Nat, and the surviving Yellowjackets convene at Lottie’s cult compound for a gaggle remedy session that turns right into a reenactment of the hunt from the wilderness. Walter efficiently sabotages the police investigation into Shauna and Jeff, however when the hunt reenactment is disrupted by one in all Lottie’s followers, Misty by accident kills Nat with a shot of phenobarbital. With Nat lifeless and Lottie about to be reinstitutionalized, solely 4 Grownup Yellowjackets stay, their destiny hanging within the steadiness simply because it did after they have been youngsters, the implications of their actions as soon as once more violent and profound.
If this all sounds unwieldy, that’s as a result of it’s. Yellowjackets’ second season is messy. As mysteries are solved, extra are launched. However it’s additionally bold and formally ingenious, with a wobbly VHS impact that generally invades the characters’ views. Because the season progresses, it’s clear that this can be a sign we’re seeing a reminiscence, however like a VHS tape, a reminiscence degrades each time we revisit it. In these moments, we aren’t seeing a crisp, objectively-framed flashback like those in season one, however an associative, unreliable second caught between previous and current.
We wish solutions, and perhaps in season three, we’ll get some. However we’ll doubtless get simply as many new questions. Can’t wait.
