It’s a shame Yellowjackets killed off Juliette Lewis’ adult Natalie at the end of season two for a variety of reasons, but especially because Sophie Thatcher, as the teenage version of Natalie, has finally nailed Lewis’ specific mannerisms in season three. In previous seasons, both Lewis and Thatcher were doing excellent work, but their performances felt divorced from each other in a way that the other adult/teen pairs didn’t. Whether or not the differences in Lewis and Thatcher’s performances were intentional, it felt believable. After getting rescued, Natalie had a harder time reintegrating than the others, and it made sense that everything from her body language to her entire sense of self would shift in response. Even though she went through a lot as a teenager, Thatcher portrayed Natalie as honest and open with an unerring moral center. As an adult, Lewis portrayed Natalie as more closed-off, her moral center warped into something more self-protective and righteous. There have been moments throughout the first few episodes of this season where Thatcher echoes Lewis’ performance, little things like certain facial expressions that made young Nat look eerily like adult Nat even though Thatcher and Lewis don’t physically resemble each other. “Thanksgiving (Canada),” which was co-written by former A.V. Club TV Editor Emily St. James, pays off all that subtle work when Natalie kills Ben in the episode’s first big shocking moment and finally falls apart. After everything she’s experienced—her dad’s abuse, witnessing her dad’s death and having her mom blame her for it, the plane crash, allowing Javi to die in her place—this is the moment that breaks her.
Ben has been begging Natalie to end his life ever since Lottie saved him from execution at the end of “Did Tai Do That?”. The group ultimately spared him, finding hope in Akilah’s vision of him being their bridge home, but Ben’s existence after that is miserable. He’s tied up in an animal pen with one leg severed and the Achilles tendon slashed on the other one. His makeshift crutches are gone. It would be extremely difficult, though not impossible, to escape from this situation. But escaping would require something Ben lost somewhere in the woods, sometime between Misty telling him she chopped off his leg and being found guilty of arson and attempted murder: his will to live. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen him express suicidal thoughts, and that kind of thinking doesn’t just go away. After spending most of season two in a severe depression, Ben finally gets out of bed and heads to the edge of a cliff in episode seven. Misty finds him as he’s about to jump; he even asks her to push him, just like he asks Natalie to kill him in this episode. Last time, Misty talked him down by saying she couldn’t have another death on her hands after Shauna’s baby. Misty reminding him that they needed him is what pulled him back. Now, though, the girls have demonstrated that not only do they not need him, they actively want to kill him. They’re only keeping him alive because of some “bullshit vision,” as he says, and that’s no way to live. His constant pleas for death disturb Nat at first, but he wears her down over time. The last time Nat brings him food, he says, “Goddammit. You sentenced me to death. Now you need to keep that promise.”
When Natalie does, eventually, keep that promise, it comes after a brutal attempt to force-feed Ben clarifies her until then niggling sense that perpetuating his suffering is wrong. Maybe killing him isn’t the right answer, but neither she nor Ben can see another way out. It’s hard to judge someone in that much pain.
The scene itself is gorgeous and unflinching. Steven Krueger gives a wrenching performance as Ben dies, thanking Natalie just before she plunges a knife into his heart. When the group sees Nat covered in blood, they piece together what happened and condemn her actions, even though she tells them it was the right thing to do. “What were you thinking? You do not get to make that decision for all of us!” Van tells her. Nat is steadfast, but the act of physically killing another human being, even if it was out of mercy, has fundamentally changed her. Thatcher’s acting in the aftermath is superb; she’s detached yet present, here but not here. It’s almost like she becomes Lewis’ more self-protective version of Natalie in real time right before our eyes. Unfortunately, not being able to see the impact of this event on adult Natalie is a major structural failing of the show.
While everyone else is still trying to process what just happened, Misty takes a moment alone to say goodbye to her first boyfriend (and her first amputation). Her farewell scene with Ben’s dead body is sweet and twisted as she kisses him on the lips and it lingers too long for comfort. It’s perfectly on-brand for Misty, and the way she allows herself to experience her raw, unfiltered emotions for about half a second before she slaps herself and her hyper-competent mask slams back into place is also a nice peek into her usually impenetrable psyche.
The power dynamic in the woods started to shift in “12 Angry Girls And 1 Drunk Travis” as the group threw their support behind Shauna, and after Ben’s death, Lottie declares Shauna their new leader. It’s a dangerous, desperate gambit: Since the death of her baby, Shauna has been angry, detached, and driven by vengeance. But those are qualities Lottie knows they’ll need in a leader if they’re going to make it through another winter, which is fast approaching. Last winter, they nearly starved to death and only survived because they ate Javi. The Wilderness believers, led by Lottie, framed his death as a sacrifice necessary to keep It happy. The upcoming winter is going to be much more difficult without a cabin for shelter, and Lottie knows that whether or not Shauna believes in the Wilderness, she won’t hesitate to call a hunt if that’s what’s necessary for her survival. Lottie’s hoping she can take advantage of Shauna’s ruthlessness to feed the Wilderness’ bloodlust while also buying more time to reestablish her connection with It, since Akilah’s having trouble interpreting her visions. It’s no wonder Shauna was so suspicious of Lottie as an adult: Their relationship has always been rooted in manipulation.
Shauna, meanwhile, recognizes that playing into the group’s beliefs is an easy way to get them to do what she wants. And right now, what she wants is to punish Natalie. So she rallies everyone with a speech: “I get that you guys are angry, but we are still a team, and we can’t let this break us,” she says, giving major shades of Jackie. “When people die out here, we honor them. So tonight, we’ll honor Coach Scott, too. We’ll give the Wilderness what It wants.” With just a few sentences, she’s reframed Ben’s death as a sacrifice and a symbol of hope rather than an insurmountable obstacle that’s taken away any chance of them ever going home. She could ask the group for anything right now and they’d give it to her. What she settles on is a gory punishment: Nat is going to cut up Ben’s body and prepare it for their feast.
Shauna’s ability to manipulate people is on full display in the present timeline too, which mostly functions to advance the show’s various mysteries. Misty finds out that there was DNA under Lottie’s fingernails when she died and takes a step toward reconciliation with Walter by asking him for help identifying who it belongs to. She also tracks down Lisa, a former member of Lottie’s cult, and Lisa tells her that Lottie gave her $50,000 in cash and she saw Lottie meet with Taissa just hours before her death. It’s suspicious, especially since Tai’s storyline focuses on how strangely she’s been acting recently. At one point, Tai’s asleep when she suddenly screams, “Van! Van! Please, you gotta help me!” Van tries to get Taissa to explain what’s going on, but Tai’s face immediately melts back into a placid, calm mask. She lays back down and says, “Why are you still up, huh? You should really get some sleep,” as if she didn’t just pull a Sigourney Weaver from Ghostbusters. Instead of Zuul, Tai’s body has been taken over by the Other One, seemingly for the entirety of this season. The clues were there from the beginning, but the question of why this is happening remains.
Misty and Tai’s subplots are compelling but tangential; the real focus is Shauna’s character-building, which follows a thematic through-line from the past to the present. After Callie finally reveals the tape to Shauna (it’s a DAT tape, not a standard cassette) and says she never listened to it, Shauna tells her family that someone’s trying to kill them and they all pack up to stay at a hotel. It’s a toss-up about whether she actually thinks someone is trying to kill them or she’s just hiding something from them and trying to buy time while she deals with it, but this episode highlights her manipulative tendencies several times, including when she lies to get Jeff out of the room so she can privately ask Van for help playing the tape.
The show also does a nice job of mirroring Shauna’s behavior in Callie. As Shauna heads off to listen to the tape, Callie slips her phone, which is open to a voice recording app, into Shauna’s purse. Later, when Shauna confronts her about it, Callie says, “I just want to be close to you. I thought you wanted that too,” which is a transparent lie but a decent attempt to play on Shauna’s emotions. It’s a move straight out of Shauna’s Manipulation 101 handbook. Too bad Shauna’s already moved from playing on emotions to threats when she tells Callie, “Join your father before I do something I regret.” How long will it take before she resorts to threats as the leader in the wilderness, too?
The tape itself contains a recording of a woman whispering, “Testing, testing, one two three. Oh, my god. What is this?” The voice doesn’t sound familiar, but what comes next does: It’s a chorus of people howling and whooping, similar to the sounds we’ve heard the group make when they’re on a hunt. Then, someone screams, “No!,” and Van immediately stops the tape. “The only people that even know about this are either us or dead,” Van says. Shauna’s response is odd; she tries to downplay it as a threat directed only at her that Van and Tai don’t need to worry about, and it seems like she’s trying to hide something from them. Yellowjackets has always framed the teens and the adults as having experienced a collective trauma with shared secrets to match; if Shauna is keeping wilderness-related secrets even from the people with whom she was stranded, it risks deemphasizing the compelling group dynamics in favor of a focus on the individual. It makes for a good mystery, but not necessarily one that works with the show’s themes.
In the final scene of the episode, the group feasts on Ben. The celebration quickly devolves into something uncomfortably animalistic; they howl, scream, and dance around the fire. In fact, it sounds an awful lot like what we heard on the tape. When Lottie sees a silhouette at the edge of camp and screams “No!,” it becomes clear that this is indeed the moment from the tape.
A man and woman, dressed in typical ’90s hiking gear, approach the camp. They look well-groomed and healthy, not like they’ve been surviving in the woods for an extended period of time. The man greets them, and when the group just stares at him in return, he turns to his right and sees Ben’s head displayed on a tree stump. He recoils, the episode ends, and we’re left wondering the same thing as him: What the fuck? Maybe rescue is coming sooner than we thought. Or maybe Shauna, Van, and Tai were so freaked out when they heard the recording because they killed and ate the strangers to cover up what they’d seen and someone having evidence of that is extremely bad. Yeah, it’s probably that.
Stray observations
- • Nelson Franklin (Veep, New Girl, Black-ish) plays the mysterious man who shows up at the end of the episode, though his name doesn’t appear in the credits. His companion’s name isn’t listed, either, but she was too far away from the camera for me to identify her.
- • I’m still not convinced that Tai (or the Other One) killed Lottie, though I do think that Lisa was telling the truth about them meeting up on the day Lottie died.
- • Van stopped the tape before it was over; something tells me Shauna’s going to discover that there’s more to it than what we heard in this episode.
