Review: Yellowjackets, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” | Season 2, Episode 1

An exciting premiere establishes new status quos while confronting the “Big C” of it all

Screenshot: Showtime

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.

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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.