Review: Yellowjackets, “Flight of the Bumblebee” | Season 1, Episode 8
Yet another brutal ending leaves the past fuzzy and the present clearer than ever
Amid all the horror and trauma in basically every episode of Yellowjackets, there’s a core theme that keeps the darkness from overwhelming everything: friendship. The bonds that developed among this high school soccer team were what allowed at least some of them to survive 19 months in the Canadian wilderness, and 25 years later, it’s those same bonds that keep them from imploding.
“Flight of the Bumblebee” effectively emphasizes this with two side-by-side scenes of Shauna showing empathy to Taissa, one in each timeline. In the first, Taissa has just discovered her stress-induced sleepwalking, which she blames for the big chunk missing from Van’s face. Shauna’s assurance that she’ll stay awake to make sure Taissa doesn’t go anywhere is a generous act, restoring a bit of Taissa’s peace and sense of control. And she does the same 25 years later; the resurgence of Taissa’s sleepwalking, like any inconvenient trauma response, puts her in even more danger, but Shauna is …