Well, another messy season of Yellowjackets comes to an end. I’ve given up on hoping for greatness with this show; there were glimpses of it in season one, but the series became a less interesting version of itself shortly after that, and it has never really recovered for very long. There was a solid stretch of good episodes in the middle of this season, getting some emotional resonance out of Coach Ben’s downfall and injecting some fresh energy with the introduction of Hannah’s group, but there were just as many perplexing decisions as last time and almost just as much boring abstraction around the existence of the supernatural.

And yet … I’m still here, and not just because I was assigned to write about the show. I’m in this until the end regardless because I am still curious about what happens to these characters, and about what choices the writers make in dictating where their stories go. Perhaps the source of my frustration is the fact that I do still see glimmers of promise in almost every episode of this show. Hell, I watched six seasons of Glee because it kept me on the hook, occasionally airing a really good episode that reminded me of those first couple years. I’m on the hook for Yellowjackets in the same way.

“Full Circle,” for example, is a really good finale overall. That’s not enough to paper over this season’s biggest issues, and there’s no real reason to expect a more consistent season four, but it’s enough to give me a slightly brighter outlook than I had after season two. Shifting the major action to the present day in “Storytelling” made that finale really land with a thud, especially with the unsatisfying ending for Natalie. This finale makes the wise decision to keep the bulk of the story where it belongs: in the wilderness.

Read more

Sometimes watching and writing about season three of Yellowjackets feels like an exercise in willing a TV show to be better than it is. It’s always two steps forward and one step back with this show, if not one step forward and two steps back; if you asked me whether season three was an improvement on season two or a downgrade, I genuinely wouldn’t know how to answer. Going into next week’s finale, I’m certainly still interested to see what will happen—these last five or so episodes have been less predictable than the equivalent stretch of last season, and I’m still invested in the characters, generally speaking—but I also have many questions that I don’t anticipate the finale answering.

Van’s death in “How the Story Ends” didn’t piss me off to the same extent as Natalie’s death, but it also didn’t move me emotionally, like, at all. My dominant feeling in the wake of this turn is confusion, really, mixed with a sort of detachment and a…

Read more

In season three, we’ve seen a very different version of Shauna Shipman, Yellowjackets’ main and possibly still best character. In the wake of losing both her best friend and her baby boy in the flashbacks, she has become hardened, cold, even sadistic, leaning fully into the darkness because she can’t bear the veneer of peace and camaraderie maintained by the girls who haven’t suffered as much. This isn’t really a show about good characters and evil characters, considering the moral flexibility of practically everyone, but Shauna is kind of the villain now, in the wilderness and potentially even 25 years later.

The centerpiece of “A Normal, Boring Life” is a conversation between Shauna and Melissa, two people who once knew each other intimately. That’s right, Hilary Swank was playing Melissa all along, like everyone expected. She does a great job embodying an older version of the character, for the most part, though the backwards ba…

Read more

Ever since the trial episode, season three of Yellowjackets has settled into a decent groove, sticking largely to conflicts rooted in character rather than dwelling constantly on the supernatural question. That’s not to say that element has been absent—the wilderness religion founded by Lottie is the basis for most of the team’s decision-making now—but that ongoing ambiguity has largely felt productive instead of frustrating. While it’s too late for this season to reach the same level of consistency and narrative efficiency as season one, these last four episodes have achieved a much better balance of the mystical and the psychological, using the former as a tool to explore the latter.

I’ve also gotten better at simply ignoring the supernatural teases when they do come. When we hear an unmistakable, otherworldly screeching straight out of Lost, what are we supposed to do with that—treat it as proof of a monster, or just shrug and w…

Read more

Earlier this season, while looking for a quote from showrunner Ashley Lyle to quote in a review, I stumbled upon one particularly unenlightening interview excerpt. “Another thing I think I can elaborate on slightly without being too spoilery is that one of the big, primary, macro, over-arching questions that people have is: What did they do out there?” Lyle said in a feature that dropped the same day as the first two episodes of season three. “That’s something raised in the very first episode of the show, and I think I can say with a lot of confidence that we learn a lot more about what they did out there this season.”

I immediately texted the quote to my sister, laughing at how little information it actually conveyed. “We’ll learn more about what they did out there this season? No shit,” I said. She played along, replying, “One thing we learn more about in this season of TV is what happens in it.”

After watching “Thanksgiving (Canada)…

Read more

When it comes down to it, I can forgive a lot of pacing issues and inconsistent characterization if what I’m watching is still fun. And at this point in season three of Yellowjackets, I’m definitely starting to have fun—or at least starting to let go of my expectations that it will be much more than that.

Is the show done testing my patience entirely? Obviously not. It remains strange that the premiere would raise so many questions about the tape Callie discovered, only to neglect it until sometime in the second half of the season (along with new announced characters played by Hilary Swank and Joel McHale, the former of whom is most likely adult Melissa). But now that Lottie is dead and a murderer is likely on the loose, the present timeline feels like it matters again, and that even extends to the sitcom hijinks that felt like a waste of time for most of those first four episodes. Watching Shauna and Jeff volunteer at Misty’s seni…

Read more

I try not to be the type of Yellowjackets viewer who dismisses the potential supernatural elements. Throughout season two and especially season three so far, my problems derive more from the refusal to confirm anything one way or the other, a choice that continues to hold the show back from really having fun or even clarifying its emotional stakes again. But then there’s an episode like “12 Angry Girls and 1 Drunk Travis” where the focus is squarely on the human elements, with barely any mentions of the wilderness spirit …and I can’t deny it. It’s just so much better this way.

This is an episode about the mock trial of Coach Ben Scott, obviously, but gathering all the characters in one place allows it to become an episode about everything happening at camp. I’ve been a bit tough on the general lack of story going on—the cave hallucinations, while successful on their own terms, didn’t allow for much plot advancement—but it’s excitin…

Read more

In a recent interview with Yellowjackets co-creator Ashley Lyle, she explained a shift in the writers’ mindset going into season three. “The first season, you’re just trying to get a show made and that’s incredibly difficult,” she said. “Season two, we did try, as much as we could, to put in the back of our heads that season one had maybe made more of an impact than anyone anticipated. But with season three we and the entire writers room were like, ‘Fuck it, we’re just going to do what we think is fun.’”

Maybe the writers room and I just don’t agree on what’s fun! Broadly speaking, I went through the same series of reactions while watching “Them’s the Breaks” as I did for the previous two episodes: I enjoyed my first watch well enough, then the second watch reminded me of all my frustrations with the show’s pacing. But this installment is probably the least satisfying yet, even if it (hopefully) moves the story into a place where s…

Read more

Among the most galling choices in the season-two finale of Yellowjackets was the heavy implication that Coach Ben had barricaded and burned down the cabin in an attempt to kill the entire Yellowjackets team. It just didn’t ring true to the character as presented, even despite his growing horror at the lengths the girls were willing to go. So the reveal in “Dislocated” that maybe Ben didn’t actually start the fire does go a decent way in undoing one of that finale’s biggest offenses.

That complication gives this episode be a slight leg up on the premiere, even if there still isn’t quite as much urgency as there should be, especially in the present. But most of this episode’s wilderness story revolves about the search for Mari, and it’s a solid enough vector for the tensions currently at play: Misty and Shauna now strongly suspect that Nat knows where Ben is, which will surely play into the ongoing power struggle as Nat’s leadership comes into question.

Mari makes for a good scene partner for Ben; they don’t have much of a strong preexisting personal relationship outside of general mutual irritation, so there are built-in trust issues on both sides, with each afraid that the other wants them dead. But the scene with Ben coaching her through popping her dislocated knee back into place is a welcome bit of that classic Yellowjackets grossness, and it’s satisfying to see them later open up and exchange information, with Ben revealing that he apparently didn’t even know the cabin burned down.

Read more

Welcome back to Episodic Medium’s coverage of Showtime’s Yellowjackets, which returns for a third season. This first review is as always free for all, but subsequent reviews—beginning with the second episode of the season tomorrow—will be exclusively for paid subscribers.

Subscribe now

Coming off a rocky season two, there’s a lot of work ahead for Yellowjackets. Those nine episodes still had some devastating and thrilling moments—I’m not someone who thinks the show totally fell off a cliff—but they also lagged a lot in places, especially the present-day storyline. More broadly, the sense of purpose and clarity from season one seemed to slip, especially without a focused character-centric narrative to tie everything together like the tragedy of Shauna and Jackie’s friendship breakup.

We’re heading into this season with much less to look forward to than last time around, as I mentioned in my finale review: the show already ripped off the cannibalism Band-Aid, and revealed the gruesome reality of what happened to Shauna’s baby, and established the origin of the selection ritual and hunts. (It also cut one of its best characters’ arcs short due to everyone collectively losing their minds—but not in a fun, scary way.) There’s a higher degree of difficulty going in, even outside the pressure from disgruntled fans, because nobody in the present timeline has hinted much at anything in particular that happened during the second half of the Yellowjackets’ time in the wilderness. Outside of the first “pit girl” hunt from the opening of the pilot, everything ahead in the past timeline is a blank slate.

Of course, a blank slate could be helpful at this point, with plenty of opportunities for Yellowjackets to get back on its feet. If the show does plan on introducing a new threat (either physical or emotional) or going in a new direction, though, it might take some time. As a premiere, “It Girl” is more of an aftermath episode than anything else, picking up more or less where we left off and establishing the characters’ various emotional states without shaking things up in any real way.

As an aftermath episode, though, it does its job. When Nat died at the end of last season, I was a little too pissed and confused to really grieve her loss, but now watching Misty work through her own feelings away from her teammates gives me the space to do that. Thankfully, a grieving Misty can still be a very funny character, as when she picks a fight after downing seven whiskeys at a dive bar—but she’s becoming isolated from the others again, and it seems her not-quite-boyfriend is eager to push her further in that direction. Will Walter turn out to be the Big Bad of season three? That would make sense.

When it comes to the larger group, there isn’t much direct reckoning with what exactly happened out there that night, and how quickly they agreed to the insane selection ritual. The funeral itself is unsentimental, as is their casual bar-hang afterward. And Shauna actually takes a backseat to Callie as the main driver of the Sadecki family story, continuing to set up the newly complicit (and surprisingly eager) daughter as a potential major player in the series. Her material here isn’t exactly riveting stuff—for one, the cool-girl bullies make extremely easy targets for her pig-guts stunt—but Shauna’s mild (and later actively permissive) reaction to the news of Callie’s prank is a good insight into why the girl gets away with what she does.

There’s also enough good comedy to remind us why the Sadeckis make for such a good hang, even when a particular story (say, the Adam Martin cover-up) outstays its welcome. Warren Kole’s delivery of “Our daughter was suspended for assaulting girls with guts?” alone justifies the existence of this storyline, along with Melanie Lynskey’s nonchalant stoned chip-chomping and the multiple uses of “chronic.” There’s no real urgency in these stories yet, but the character work is solid for what it is, so I’ll reserve my complaints—especially since the premiere hints at some other threats to come, based on the arrival of that package at Shauna’s door.

Now that Taissa’s senatorial run is officially kaput, her present-day story is primarily about reigniting her relationship with Van, which plays out across a couple kind-of charming scenes. The biggest moment here, though, isn’t their slow, passionate kiss after dining and dashing; it’s the moment that shortly precedes it, when the waiter chasing them collapses on the ground after almost getting hit by a truck. Is the man dead, and would that imply something supernatural is afoot, another exchange of souls? What about the brief reappearance of the man with no eyes before Tai kisses Van?

These are the types of vague teases that started to wear out their welcome for me last season, and they’re common to both timelines. Case in point: the loud screeching/growling/roaring sounds that everyone hears at the end of the episode, the most blatant Lost parallel since, I don’t know, ten minutes ago when Coach Ben discovered a big buried case of emergency rations that might as well read “Dharma Initiative” right on the label.

Look, if the debut of this Smoke Monster-esque presence means the show is actually intent on confirming the undeniable existence of a forest spirit—we’ll call it “It,” like they do—I’ll be happy that they’re done pussyfooting around. But I’m still reluctant to really take something like this as “proof,” because the characters themselves still can’t agree on an interpretation, nor does the show feel ready to settle on something. My biggest concern is not just that the flashbacks won’t ever make meaningful progress in that mystery, but that they can’t due to the lingering ambiguities the present-day timeline took pains to establish.

Generally speaking, I’m still putting more stock in the interpersonal drama than the supernatural question, even if I’m skeptical of the potential war to come over Coach Ben. There’s still plenty of potential here, particularly at the intersection of the Shauna-Nat power struggle and the mutual hatred between Shauna and Mari. As Tai warns Nat, everything is life or death out here; a personality mismatch combined with some private psychological turmoil can easily result in murder, especially once food becomes scarce again.

It’s easy to understand Shauna’s fury and isolation in these moments, even if it makes her hard to like. From her perspective, everyone else is deluding themselves with all this talk of sacrifices, miracles, and bravery. After the sheer horror and brutality of what she has experienced in the past almost-year, Shauna doesn’t have the luxury of those coping mechanisms. She needs hope more than anyone else, but she can’t see it anywhere—ironic, since this is the brightest era they’ve experienced out there in the wilderness, between the plentiful food and the warmth of spring.

That dissonance could make for some really interesting character-based conflict in this season, if the show takes advantage of it. If we take it as a given that violence will erupt over the course of these ten episodes, what would trigger it? If indeed it’s true that “the cannibalism cat is out of the bag,” what could happen to justify eating more humans during a time of abundance?

For the time being, the little shelter society formed here in the wake of the cabin burning down makes for a homey new setting to watch these conflicts play out. For those counting on an unequivocal comeback season, this more patient premiere likely won’t deliver enough to win you back; it’s unclear at this point what specifically the story will be about on a narrative or thematic level. At least for me, though, it feels good just to be watching this show again, warts and all.

Stray observations

• Mari running through the woods in the opening, and her fall at the end: foreshadowing that she’ll be the pit girl, or a cheeky reference to that common theory?

• There’s still no real rigorousness when it comes to situating us in the nineties, as demonstrated by Taissa saying “handy lesbians for the win.”

• “Wait, do you like, actually have a personality?” This meta line seems to indicate the show actually plans to develop Melissa as a character. About time! She could work nicely as a new ally to Shauna. We also learn that Gen (previously played by Mya Lowe, now played by Vanessa Prasad) is responsible for hunting the deer that have been keeping them fed. Glad to see the newbs get something to do, though they’re not technically newbs anymore.

• Travis heard those same tree-screeching sounds after drinking the shroom tea, which seems notable. But what I want to talk about most is that scene’s rare look at Lottie talking openly about her mental illness to a friend, something I’ve specifically requested. Travis’s reaction to learning about the medication she stopped taking is interesting. Is he starting to wonder if there’s really anything spiritual to Lottie’s hallucinations after all?

• No on-screen appearance from Taissa’s wife or son, and but we do find out from a phone conversation that Simone is keeping little Sammy away from her. At least that’s something!

• The show always finds a way to keep Randy involved. This time he’s the “SwiftEATS” delivery guy who transports the pig guts to Callie.

• In addition to the envelope Shauna receives, somebody seems to be following her—and Shauna seems to notice in the bar but doesn’t say anything about it. Very intriguing.

It’s no secret that the second season of Yellowjackets has struggled compared to the first, for a lot of reasons. And yet while this season won’t crack my top ten at the end of 2023, I still have a strong attachment to the show as a whole. I still care deeply about (most of) these characters, which makes it even more frustrating when the writers fail to keep them consistent over time.  So while the wait for season three might not be as difficult to handle as the wait for season two was, I still look forward to its return, and I’m curious about how the next few seasons will shake out, on both a plot and character level.

That said, my experience of watching “Storytelling” didn’t differ much from my experience watching most of this season. There are parts of this finale that work—the same parts that have always worked, really—and there are parts that don’t, especially in retrospect.

As in the season one finale, the majority of wilderness scenes in this episode deal more with emotional fallout than action, following an intense penultimate episode. This is something Yellowjackets always handles well: the slow march to a tragic inevitability, which in this case means everyone eating Javi. Travis hasn’t had a ton of material this season, but it’s still painful to watch him grapple with what his friends have done to his brother—and what makes it so fascinating is that beyond a few weak protestations he really can’t argue with any of it. Javi is what will keep all of them alive a little longer, including Travis himself, and refusing to eat his brother would mean wasting a sacrifice. Like Shauna taking the first bites of Jackie, Travis is given the honor of the first bite of Javi’s raw heart, an expression of reverence more compelling than the wilderness worship.

It’s eerie and sad to watch this process play out step by step, to the point that in retrospect I kind of wish the Jackie feast was treated with the same brutal realism. Season one gave every act of violence weight, but as we blow through these big moments—the first acts of cannibalism, Shauna’s labor, the first selection ritual, the first hunt—it feels like we’re losing things to look forward to. While I respected the writers’ willingness to get to the cannibalism before the wait became tedious, there may be far less to speculate about during the wait for season three.

If there’s a Jackie equivalent in season two, it’s probably Lottie. But in the end, there’s just no comparison between the amount of empathy those respective characters generated. Jackie spent season one slowly losing her grip on authority and lashing out, but besides a couple rare moments, Lottie has faced no challenge to her authority this season, nor has she grappled much with self-doubt outside of her and Nat’s hunting contest, nor has she had any sort of ongoing interpersonal conflict with any other characters. And while it’s an interesting idea to suggest she was embraced as a spiritual leader before she was really ready for it, it feels like too little, too late. We could’ve spent this season watching her wrestle with that burden, especially with constant challenges from Nat and Shauna, but we didn’t. So when Lottie reacts with horror to Misty’s news about how her message was weaponized, it’s an interesting character beat, but one that should’ve been introduced far sooner.

The end of this story sets up a potentially interesting season three with the team skeptic in charge, especially if there’s a power struggle with Shauna. This show was originally conceived as a “metaphor for teenage hierarchy,” but it has moved away from the subject a bit, so I like the idea of returning to those human tensions in the future. Again, though, the show never really leaned into Nat and Lottie’s friendship, even in the present-day timeline, so the passing of the torch doesn’t have the weight it should.

Worse, the final moments of the episode are spoiled by the reveal that Coach Ben seemingly attempted to murder a dozen teen girls by barricading the cabin doors and burning the place down. And as much as I want to get excited about the war this potentially promises, I just can’t square Ben’s actions with the guy we’ve been following for two seasons. Season two’s repeated dips into his psyche were helpful in seeding his eventual death from suicide or starvation, but at no point did I believe he’d resort to mass murder.

The stakes here are strangely abstract: how can Ben even afford to be all high and mighty about cannibalism when he’s starving, too? Is he simply getting by with less sustenance, and hovering even closer to death than everyone else? How does he mentally rationalize a pointlessly violent act against a group of kids who have still never technically murdered anyone, let alone threatened him? It’s hard to conceive of a scenario where he’d actually let Nat die, especially after hearing her fairly valid justification for what she did to Javi.

While the wilderness story functions as a grim epilogue in this finale, the present-day story is a proper climax. And it must be said that there’s way too much for one episode to handle here, from the resolution of the Adam Martin investigation to the hunt. It’s hard not to wonder why every single conflict needs to reach its climax at the same time and place, especially considering Kevyn Tan and Saracusa are trapped in their own dark comedy with Jeff, Callie, and Walter, never even coming into contact with the Yellowjackets. Karyn Kusama says that certain scenes from these last episodes were cut, including a deeper explanation of the cannibalism ritual’s origins, and that vibe comes across throughout.

I can’t say for sure that stretching out this episode an extra half-hour would improve it, but the amount of material apparently left on the cutting room floor is a good indicator of this season’s fundamental pacing issues. I won’t self-indulgently map out what my version of this story would look like, but here it only really feels like all these things are happening at the same time because that’s what happens in season finales. The Adam Martin cover-up is the most obvious candidate for a story that could’ve ended early in this season, especially if everyone had remained in the same orbit. Here it comes to a merciful end, with Walter somehow whipping up a corruption scandal and framing a dead Kevyn for the murders of both Adam and Jessica Roberts. Does it make much sense? Not really. Is it a little too convenient, especially given how much Shauna and Callie have been through up to this point? Definitely. Am I grateful for it anyway? Sure am.

The Jeff subplot does have a lot of charm, especially with Elijah Wood going full friendly psycho killer. But I found the actual Yellowjackets storyline pretty frustrating, especially the slightly inexplicable pivot point where Shauna’s friends stop acting and get caught up in the hunt. I just don’t buy how abrupt that shift is after 25 years; if the present-day storyline is meant to set up a full-blown regression to their feral wilderness selves, it needs a lot more time to set that up. When Shauna reminds Lottie that it was just them, not some “it,” Lottie shoots back, “Is there a difference?” But in this case, the answer is yes, of course there is—one scenario might justify murder, but the other certainly doesn’t.

In the end, though, Nat is the one who winds up dead. This should feel like an earth-shattering event, but with its abruptness and the slight silliness of the mechanics, I didn’t totally feel the heartbreak I wanted to, outside of hurting for Misty. Again, compare this death to Jackie’s, which felt like an organic and fated conclusion to her arc. Nat’s death doesn’t have the same tragic significance, outside of paying off a supposed request from some entity 25 years ago. It’s just disappointing, both because Juliette Lewis has brought so much to the show and because it punishes a character who actually put in the work and improved as a person. It feels like this is only happening because Nat’s story ran out of steam, though her time at the wellness center was never quite as compelling as it could have been.

So much of this finale feels indicative of the season’s problems as a whole, including the ongoing refusal to answer the big supernatural question with any certainty. Again, season one excelled from that ambiguity, but here it feels like events are increasingly contrived to allow for as much vagueness as possible—and season one never really felt vague, even though we knew much less than we do now.

When I started this review, I didn’t realize I was going to be quite so hard on this episode; it might be too extreme to call this a wet fart of a finale, given how entertained and occasionally moved I was while watching it. But the more I think about it in retrospect, the more disappointed I am, and the less sure I am about what the future holds for this show. I’ll certainly be tuning in, but the confidence that I once had has been shaken.

Stray observations

• Season three could also stand to use a lighter touch with the music supervision. I love “Zombie” as much as the next guy, but really?

• Taissa felt almost completely absent from the wilderness story in this episode, which is disappointing. I know the writers are playing the long game with the Other Tai idea, but you should still probably have some conclusion to her season arc.

• And basically nothing at all from Mari, Akilah, Gen, or Melissa. Let’s hope those four get some more screen time next year—besides Ben, they’re the only remaining survivors who could be hunted and eaten, so you’d think there’d be some more urgency there. Shouldn’t we be worried about what’s going to happen to them?

• So Nat and Kevyn died separately in the same place at the same time. Curious to see how season three frames Kevyn’s murder in retrospect, since he’s by all accounts a well-meaning, good guy. Nat typically would be the character we’d see mourning him, but so much for that.

• Is Lottie directly referring to Van’s cancer with her cryptic “you’ll see” comment there at the end, and if so, how did she know? Is it another mysterious case of “Lottie knows things”? In any event, I fully expect Van’s cancer to disappear as soon as the show returns.

• Some nice material for Callie in this episode, inching closer to becoming a killer like her mom. And Sarah Desjardins has a really fun chemistry with Warren Kole, so I’ve enjoyed their scenes together these last couple episodes.

• Where’s Crystal?

• For more of me complaining about this season, check out my essay about Lottie over at Vulture.

• This late review brought to you by a networking event that took up my time last night, and also the lack of screener.

• Thanks to everyone for reading and commenting this season! This is a show that really benefits from weekly discussion, and it’s been really enlightening to see the range of perspectives on this shaky season. See you for the next one.

When I rewatch a given episode of Yellowjackets before reviewing it, I often color-code my notes: individual character subplots in different colors (Misty blue, Taissa purple) with larger group stories in black. And it has become impossible to ignore a particular pattern over the course of this season: generally speaking, the blacker the text, the better the episode.

It’s not surprising, really. No matter the genre, TV shows with large ensembles often benefit from regular cast interaction, rather than stranding everyone in their own individual time-consuming stories. (It turns out soccer isn’t the only thing Yellowjackets and Ted Lasso have in common this season.) But it’s especially the case with this show, where the team dynamics are often the whole point. “Qui” was arguably the strongest episode of the season because it featured a story that involved everyone, not just Shauna. And “It Chooses,” predictably, is another absolute banger, finally letting loose and uniting each cast to tell propulsive stories in both timelines.

Read more

What does starvation feel like? It’s a difficult sensation to convey on screen: the gnawing in the stomach, the emptiness longing to be filled, the inability to stop thinking about it at all hours of the day, even when you’re asleep. Yellowjackets has dramatized this before, especially throughout this season; hunger has changed these young women on a subconscious level, opening them up to ideas that would’ve been unthinkable even months ago. Eating a human being doesn’t seem so ridiculous when everything in your body is telling you to find nourishment wherever you can possibly get it.

But as we near the conclusion of this season, it feels like we’re reaching a breaking point. There’s a sense of exhaustion here, a weariness combined with lightheadedness that makes everything else feel secondary. That even includes grief; for the past few months especially, Shauna’s baby became a source of hope that everyone needed, not just Shauna, and yet for most of the survivors t…

Read more

Since the pilot, Shauna Shipman has been the closest character this ensemble has to a protagonist. Her tumultuous friendship with Jackie provided the overarching structure for the first season’s wilderness story, and in season two she was the first character to resort to cannibalism, a moment the whole series was building toward. Still, at times Shauna has drifted from focus, especially in recent episodes. If I had to say what this season was “about” on a character level, I’d say it’s the push and pull between Lottie’s spiritual teachings and Natalie’s skepticism, with various characters moving between sides, including Lottie and Nat themselves.

I’ve had a lot of issues with that central focus, especially because besides a few effective moments (like Nat and Lottie’s post-hunt reconciliation), the show has struggled to make it emotionally involving without addressing the supernatural question head-on. So it’s refreshing to take some time with Shauna in both timeline…

Read more

Early in “Two Truths and a Lie,” we hear a story from Akilah about the elaborate ritual she and her teammate Rachel used to practice before every soccer game. Sure, it didn’t do much to break their frequent losing streaks, but that wasn’t the point. “It just felt good, like we could pretend it made a difference,” she says. “It’s not like we really believed in it, not deep down. But we still did it before every game.”

Not only is this a nice character moment for Akilah, but it gets at the heart of the series as a whole, especially this particular season. People rely on rituals to feel safe in times of fear and trauma; the familiarity of a regular routine can provide an illusion of control where there is none, especially with a spiritual component. That’s why Lottie has been able to attract a substantial following in the wilderness. It’s not necessarily that everyone believes she can really communicate with some forest spirit, though enough coincidences have piled up …

Read more

A couple weeks back, Yellowjackets co-showrunner Jonathan Lisco made a comment about the decision to finally pull the trigger on people-eating in season two. “We’re not in the business of manipulating the audience for something they already know is coming,” he said. “It didn’t feel satisfying to introduce this concept of ritual cannibalism in the pilot and then make the audience wait to see when they actually cross that Rubicon.”

But while I admire the writers’ choice to get to the point and deliver some on-screen cannibalism in the first two episodes of this season, in other regards these recent episodes have lagged slightly. The most obvious example of this is in the present-day timeline, where the central four survivors from the first season continue to be isolated from one another, not even exchanging phone calls like they often did last year. With the group brought together in the final episodes, there was an opportunity here to continue forward with them as a …

Read more

It’s come to that point in a season of Yellowjackets where the initial fireworks have died out and we’re back to slowly percolating character drama. It’s a familiar stage: much of what I expressed in my review for “The Dollhouse” in season one also applies to “Digestif.” Part of enjoying Yellowjackets means not expecting something truly shocking or game-changing in every episode, and this is definitely a case of prioritizing smaller character drama over plot momentum.

Most of these character stories work well enough, but I still couldn’t help wishing for a little more excitement, or at least a more satisfying ending. Take Natalie and Lottie’s present-day storyline, for example. It makes sense to soften Nat a little by putting her in a position to witness the real healing effects of Lottie’s teachings, testing her kneejerk skepticism of all things spiritual. But as an audience, what we want most is to see Nat uncover Lottie’s secrets and take this place down. It kill…

Read more

For roughly the first half of “Edible Complex,” I felt slightly antsy. It felt like a comedown from the explosive ending of last week’s premiere, perhaps overly concerned with reminding us of the basics: Taissa is still having serious sleepwalking problems in both timelines, Travis still can’t accept that his little brother is almost certainly dead, Shauna is still haunted by the various ways she betrayed Jackie, and both Natalie and Tai continue to reject their partners’ willingness to buy into Lottie’s whole deal.

It’s not that this stuff is boring, by any means, and it probably works better if you haven’t recently watched the first season. But the episode suffers a bit without a strong thematic or narrative center, especially when you compare it to the corresponding episode in the first season. There was a lot going on in that episode, but structuring the story around Misty allowed the show to really deepen an important character. While Yellowjackets generally does a great job balancing and pacing its various stories, I’d like to see more episodes structured around individual characters like that, especially with the growing ensemble. It feels more satisfying to get one complete character study over the course of an episode than to inch forward five different plots.

Read more

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s weekly coverage of season two of Yellowjackets, which debuted on Showtime’s non-linear platforms today ahead of its linear premiere Sunday. As always, the first review is available to all, but subsequent reviews—which will continue to post on Friday evenings—will only be available to paid subscribers, alongside “remindercaps” for the first season that have been posting throughout the new year. You can find out more on our About Page.

Subscribe now

When the pilot of Yellowjackets opened with the haunting flashforward of teen girls killing one of their own, it was a gift and a curse for the show. It was a gift because it immediately hooked the audience with its promise of gruesome folk horror involving cannibalism. That brief glimpse of a horrifying future—or horrifying past, depending how you look at it—has been the source of the series’ biggest mysteries: who was the “pit girl” they trapped for food, and who was the Antler Queen ruling over them all?

Perhaps that’s why this opening was also a curse: to some fans, decoding the first scene of the show would inevitably become all-consuming, like any mystery in this type of puzzle-box show. Delaying answers for years on end can be risky, especially for the segment of the audience whose hearts were broken by Lost. (Perhaps those of us who fiercely defend the Lost finale are more predisposed to roll with the punches.)

With season two, Yellowjackets faces an even taller order: the longer a cannibalism drama puts off the cannibalism, the more impatient viewers will get, five-season-plan be damned. The season one finale showed that keeping the focus tight on character work makes the wait easier to bear, but the idea of putting off the gnarly stuff until 2025 or 2026 isn’t very enticing. That’s why the final moments of “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” are such a massive relief—and why I found myself pumping my fist in the air at the sight of a 17-year-old girl chowing down on her dead best friend’s ear.

That’s right, folks, we have liftoff: cannibalism is officially happening on Yellowjackets. And it’s in a completely different context than what I originally imagined (some grim team meeting leading to a painful but necessary choice). It’s much more rooted in character. For Shauna, eating a piece of Jackie isn’t just about helping satisfy the dull throb of hunger she and her baby have surely been feeling for months now. It’s an expression of what this person meant to her: someone she loved dearly, but also often wanted gone. By literally consuming Jackie, some part of Shauna is trying to stop herself from being consumed.

That ending, set to Tori Amos’s “Cornflake Girl,” is the biggest bombshell of this very promising season premiere, but there’s a lot to be excited about here. For one, I have to say that I’m actually intrigued by the apparent plans to flesh out at least three of the previously unnamed Yellowjackets. To be sure, their introduction here is a bit awkward, just like the famously awkward introduction of Nikki and Paulo in season three of Lost; it’s always going to feel weird to pretend that new characters were there the whole time. But for now, this initial conversation between Gen (Mya Lowe, returning after being a credited extra in season one), Melissa (Jenna Burgess), and Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman) suffices. And using Crystal to explain Misty’s love of musical theatre makes her feel more vital, even if it’s a bit unbelievable that they wouldn’t have made this connection in the previous seven months.

Much of this premiere is about establishing the new status quo, but that task alone can be thrilling when we’ve been itching for new developments. Two months have passed in the wilderness, and in that time Lottie’s spiritual expertise has become more accepted, with Nat and Travis submitting to protection rituals whenever they go out to hunt and search for a still-missing Javi. Season one primarily defined Travis’s vulnerability in relation to his sex life, and that continues here: he finds it hard to be affectionate with Nat when he knows she thinks his brother is dead, but the hope that Lottie offers during a panic attack unexpectedly arouses him.

It makes for an interesting sort of love-triangle-but-not-quite, with Travis pulled between the allure of Lottie’s faith and the logic of Nat’s skepticism. It’s not much different from Taissa and Van’s differing attitudes toward Lottie, which we saw last season. But Travis’s need for Lottie to be right about Javi makes her perspective even more persuasive. Everyone out here relies a little on denial to get by—that’s especially clear in the case of Shauna, whose conversations with a dead Jackie in the meat shed allow the show to keep Ella Purnell around a little bit longer (albeit with a distracting wig).

The 2021 segments are marginally less interesting so far, mostly because the core four survivors are once again isolated in their own storylines. Part of me hoped that the successful disposal of Adam’s body at the end of season one meant that season two would move on, but it seems like Shauna and Jeff’s story still revolves around him—and the cover-up could get tedious, especially with contrivances like the conveniently intact ID photo that Callie finds in the ashes left by her parents.

Still, lingering on the Adam of it all isn’t automatically a bad thing, especially if the story continues to involve other characters like Misty. Season one never really had time to deal with the emotional ramifications of Shauna’s affair, treating it as roughly equivalent to Jeff’s own betrayal (the blackmail). This premiere’s trip to Adam’s art studio leads to some interesting material when the script stays focused on what it means for the characters: Shauna has always been attracted to chaos, but Jeff is much less comfortable with it. He may be amenable to Shauna’s fantasies, and he clearly has some of his own dark impulses, but at the end of the day his go-to outlet for a bruised ego is (hilariously) blasting Papa Roach in the garage.

All of this admittedly feels separate from what could become the most significant story in this timeline: Nat’s captivity at the commune/cult run by one Charlotte Matthews (Simone Kessell), aka Lottie. Just like last season, season two is already threading together the past and present very cleverly: Nat’s skepticism of Lottie clearly parallels how she felt out in the wilderness, and Travis is still both coming between the two and bringing them together. The difference is what exactly Lottie is peddling.

Kessell seems like a solid addition to the cast, but going forward, what I’m hoping for Lottie is that we come to really understand her as a person in both timelines, separate from her somewhat generic cult-leader talk about the danger of “making ourselves sick” and the importance of “finding our most authentic selves.” I don’t have a strong emotional attachment to Lottie, compared to the main four women and Van, and the show’s unwillingness to clarify exactly how correct her convictions are could prevent it from really engaging with her relationship to her mental illness.

I’m optimistic about how the show will handle this, though, especially thanks to the premiere’s other mind-blowing moment: the year “1998” flashing across the screen early on, signaling a new timeline. I didn’t think we’d see any of the team’s rescue for several seasons, so these brief flashes are tantalizing. They function as both flashback and flashforward, bridging the continuity to show that Lottie got electroshock therapy and medication upon returning to civilization. That means the “Charlotte” we see immediately afterward is likely more stable and grounded in reality than the unmedicated Lottie of the wilderness.

What’s unclear is what that indicates on a deeper level: does the present-day Lottie view the past Lottie’s beliefs as delusions, or is she still convinced? Relatedly, how does the past Lottie perceive her own schizophrenia? Does she think the medication would’ve restricted her from channeling this forest spirit? Her bond with Laura Lee in season one had to do a lot of work to sell her embrace of something greater than herself, but I’d like for Lottie have an honest conversation about her diagnosis with someone else. Does anyone even know she was on medication, and would that realization shake the team’s confidence in her? I hope that the writers’ need to withhold answers and live in the ambiguity doesn’t stand in the way of exploring these parts of the characters; understanding and connecting with Lottie may depend on it.

Watching “Friends, Romans, Countrymen,” it’s possible to see places where this season could go wrong. But loving a show means putting your trust in it, and I’m not too worried about Yellowjackets losing its interest in character. When the credits rolled on this premiere, I found myself grinning—dying to talk to somebody, anybody, about what I’d just watched. There aren’t many shows that can accomplish that on a weekly basis. In my book, that’s worth risking heartbreak.

Stray observations

• Nia Sondaya is replacing Keeya King this season as Akilah, which was momentarily confusing, but shouldn’t be too distracting going forward.

• It’s very sweet when Van assures Taissa that she’ll never be scared of her, but maybe she should be a little scared, based on what we know Taissa is capable of doing in her sleep.

• I love whenever Shauna and Jeff get to joke around, so I very much enjoyed Jeff’s failure to come up with a punchline to his own “What did the bun say to the hot dog?” joke. Shauna has some good ideas: “Maybe something about how the bun is tired of having its identity tied to the hot dog? ‘Other stuff can go in me too, you know?’”

• “Smells like chronic in here.”

• There’s something both heartbreaking and darkly funny about Taissa’s new dog wandering into the basement shrine with poor Biscuit’s head, and Taissa assuring him, “This was a mistake. I’m gonna do better with you.” Curious about how prominently Simone will feature in this season; she seems less and less relevant, but threatening Taissa’s new position is pretty nuclear.

• Lost Parallels of the Week: where do we begin? As I mentioned, we’ve got some Nikki and Paulo-esque new characters, but that 1998 scene felt especially Lost-ish. Strong Oceanic Six vibes.

Starting next week, Ben will be covering season two of Yellowjackets on Fridays as episodes stream on Showtime. To read those reviews and catch up his Remindercaps of season one, become a paid subscriber. In the meantime, here’s a free look at his review of the first season finale.

Subscribe now

When I first pitched covering Yellowjackets for Episodic Medium, I singled out “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” as the episode that had really stuck with me in the year since this first season aired. Of course, endings tend to be what we remember best, especially in the long wait for a new season. (I also haven’t stopped thinking about the Severance finale.) But there’s so much about this episode that impresses me, especially on this re-watch.

It’s not that it’s a perfectly satisfying finale, definitively resolving most (or even many) of the mysteries that have accumulated over the first nine episodes. Compared to the aforementioned Severance finale or any season finale of Lost, there are few moments of brain-breaking ecstasy here; like any Yellowjackets episode, this one raises as many questions as it answers. Even more notably, it doesn’t feature any cannibalism, which the whole season has arguably been building toward. Teen girls eating each other is one of the central hooks for this series, promised from practically the first scene. And yet even though I came into this episode a little skeptical about the sustainability of the series’ premise, I left feeling reassured.

Because the fact remains: Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson are going forward with their five-season plan, confirmed by Lyle as recently as this month. And while I’m always down for a sprawling mystery box show, five seasons feels ambitious for a story like this—especially with dual timelines constraining the number of directions the “primary” one can go. Will we have to wait until season four or five to get to the cannibalism?

“Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” doesn’t answer that question, but it also makes it feel surprisingly incidental. With winter looming, hunger will clearly be a problem in the near future, and the bear that Lottie kills is only a temporary solution. In the meantime, there are still people hurting, all going through their own experiences of this awful thing that happened to them. In this episode, the clearest example of that is Jackie Taylor—and while I never specifically thought of Jackie as the main character, in retrospect this season sort of feels like her story.

Jackie is perhaps the clearest example of someone who just couldn’t cope with living in the wilderness—she went from queen bee status to the bottom of the food chain, with the personal betrayal of her best friend making her feel even more alone. Selfless communal living didn’t come easy to her, and I don’t say that out of judgment; Jackie isn’t a bad person, just a young and realistically self-centered one. She’s somebody who, with a bit more time and perspective, likely would’ve grown up and lived a calm, content life—maybe not one that could top her high-school peak, but a peaceful one.

It’s tragically appropriate that Jackie dies after failing to light a fire by herself, too prideful to get help just like Shauna is too prideful to offer it. All of this grows organically out of the tensions that have been gestating between Shauna and Jackie since long before the plane crash. And their inevitable explosive fight is just heartbreaking to watch; as in any serious fight between best friends, these two people know exactly how they can inflict the most pain. There’s a lot of truth to both of their cruel diagnoses.

After it’s all over, this ending for Jackie feels like the only way it could’ve happened. Many of us were fixated on the possibility of Jackie being the flashforward victim, but her arc has always been a more grounded story about unwittingly becoming a lone wolf, cast out from her pack. You don’t need human traps and cannibalistic rituals to see how that can kill a person. Particularly gutting is the nightmarish glimpse at Jackie’s final fantasies as she freezes to death: Shauna apologizing and inviting her into the warmth, with her whole team lined up to tell her how much they love her.

The episode makes this sequence even more emotional by continuously reminding us how long this pain will linger for Shauna, cross-cutting with the high school reunion 25 years later. Another of this season’s greatest accomplishments has been just how seamlessly it connects two stories in vastly different settings, and this is a great example: the side-by-side scenes have a direct relationship, with the past still existing in the present moment for the surviving Yellowjackets. In fact, the past feels realer than the actual present.

I also always admire this show’s ability to balance tones, and I’m relieved that this finale features a decent amount of comedy, especially during the body disposal scenes. And yet the show doesn’t downplay the seriousness of what’s happening here; Shauna and Taissa may appear casual about covering up a murder, but after it’s over they both go home and separately break into sobs. Shauna’s description of her numbness and paranoia even helps Nat realize that Travis probably did kill himself, a reveal keeping with this finale’s pattern of slightly subverting the expected thrilling ending in favor of sticking to what makes sense emotionally.

Along those lines, the body disposal story wraps up pretty quickly and efficiently, at least for now, with the stinger resting on Callie’s reaction to the news of Adam’s disappearance. Callie has gone in and out of the narrative, and I’m not sure I have the investment in her to crave a Paige Jennings arc, but it’s an effective enough reminder that nothing can really ever stay buried in the world of Yellowjackets. Same goes for Taissa’s horrifying shrine that her wife discovers in their basement, with poor Biscuit’s head as the centerpiece—a very gnarly image in an episode that mostly eschews anything graphic.

As this season comes to an end, it feels like the writers have pulled off a subtle trick: they’ve successfully drawn our attention away a bit from the larger and most pressing mysteries, keeping us satisfied with emotional resolution. I’d call it a pivot, but really, the focus has always been the characters, and your level of investment in the show will likely depend on caring about them enough to be okay with that. The resolution of the New Jersey Senate election matters because winning could exacerbate Taissa’s severe sleepwalking issues, which now have a death toll; the (partial) resolution of the Travis mystery matters because of the devastating realization that Nat no longer has anybody to blame; Misty’s kidnapping of Jessica ends in the only way it could, with her murder happening in a deliciously twisted, very Misty way.

Of course, there are still exciting cliffhangers here, including the reveal that not only is Lottie alive in the present day, but she was the one who emptied Travis’s bank account after he died. If Nat’s robed kidnappers do indeed belong to a cult run by Lottie, these final moments could be pointing to Lottie as a new Big Bad, proving Nat right about Travis after all. But the truth is likely more complicated; it wouldn’t be true to the ethos of this show to completely renege on Nat’s latest, most haunting realization.

This is a complex show with a lot of narrative strands, but it’s not one to really indulge in byzantine conspiracies, even if the characters themselves do; despite season-long hints of the paranormal, for example, so far nothing has happened that can’t be explained in real-world terms. What’s eerie about seeing Van and Misty kneel at Lottie’s side during her bear heart offering isn’t the idea that they are actually communicating with some forest spirit trapping them there; it’s the sign that they may be the first real recruits of the Antler Queen, the leader who has a whole lineup of willing cannibalistic followers by the time of the opening flashforward. Taissa is probably right when she points out that Van’s embrace of Lottieism is coming from a place of trauma. But that’s not enough to kill the appeal for Van—or for any of the other survivors who have begun to come around to Lottie’s way of thinking. Everybody needs something to survive out here, and I’m not just talking about food.

It’s a sign of the series’ confidence at this point that we’re leaving the season with a clear sense of the type of story we’re experiencing, even with so many ambiguities. Despite the natural constraints of the structural conceit, the possibilities for the next season—or the next four—feel wide open. Sure, there’s still room for growth, and some of the remaining mysteries could get tedious if they linger too long. It’d be foolish to assume a strong debut season guarantees a consistently strong five-season run. Some characters could use more definition, including Lottie, which seems like a crucial task for next season.

But more than anything else, “Sic Transit Gloria Mundi” assured me that this show can afford to be a little stingy, as long as it keeps telling grounded, emotional stories the way it has been. I guess that makes it not much different from a Lost finale after all.

Stray observations

• Nat’s lack of bitterness about Travis and Jackie’s hookup is refreshing, and I was very moved by her genuine concern about what he went through, along with his declaration that he “fucking loves her.” Always hoping those crazy kids will make it, even though we know that they, uh, won’t.

• I was legitimately worried Misty would do something creepy or violent to Ben after he rejected her once and for all, but I think that would’ve happened in this episode, so hopefully Ben actually made it out of that situation unscathed (aside from, you know, the leg she chopped off).  

• Okay, what are our biggest questions or predictions going into season two? I’m personally curious when Misty’s destruction of the black box will come up again. That’s a pretty foundational part of the story, but I don’t think it has been referenced since the second episode.

• Nice callback to last episode when Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” plays at the reunion. Beyond the simple pleasures of a throwback ’90s soundtrack, I really like how this show uses songs and other pop cultural touchstones in the present day as visceral reminders of that vivid time in these women’s lives.

• “Well, I hope this cat behaves itself. It’ll wind up in the chili pot.” I love seeing Shauna and Jeff getting along, and it’s a good sign that Jeff is comfortable with dark humor.

• It’s been very fun revisiting this season, and I’m going into season two now even more excited for it than I was already. Looking forward to unpacking it with y’all!