Welcome to the jungle, Joel McHale. Seven episodes into season three, Yellowjackets has finally revealed the identity of the actor’s much-discussed mystery character. “Croak” wastes no time filling in the backstories of McHale and the two strangers who stumbled upon the Yellowjackets’ camp last week (played by Nelson Franklin and Ashley Sutton) in a competent episode that effectively advances the series’ various plots. And after “Thanksgiving (Canada)” gave us one of the show’s best episodes to date, a largely unflashy entry that adds necessary context without giving too much away is a perfectly acceptable follow-up.
When I describe “Croak” as “largely unflashy,” I mean that most of the big moments and reveals that unfold throughout the episode would elicit strong “what the fuck is happening right now” responses in any other show, but are pretty par for the course in Yellowjackets. Lottie almost immediately buries an axe in the back of the male stranger’s head and spends a good chunk of the episode playing in his blood, and Shauna tracks down the person who she thinks sent her the tape and prepares to kill or at least menace them with a knife she bought at a gas station. These events are wild in the abstract, but they’re also the sorts of things we’ve come to expect from a future cult leader and a former queen of an increasingly feral pack of stranded teenagers. In that context, these moments feel, if not mundane, then at least not wholly surprising. The scenes that truly stand out in this show are the ones that speak to the humanity underneath the grotesque imagery, like the survivors cannibalizing Jackie or Natalie mercy-killing Ben.
That’s why “Croak” still comes across as a middle-of-the-road episode even though it opens with a frog orgy. It’s surprising, sure. But it doesn’t make me feel anything other than momentary confusion. It doesn’t make me think anything other than, “Are you sure this is how you want to resolve the mystery of the unsettling screeching in the woods that has plagued the group for the entirety of this season? Really? Frog orgy is what you’re going with? Okay, then.” I actually didn’t dislike this revelation as much as I disliked the Man With No Eyes reveal earlier this season. It’s campy and silly, and the show doesn’t try to play both sides by implying that the frogs might still be connected to the Wilderness entity like it did with the Man With No Eyes (at least, it hasn’t yet, but that could still change—even though the audience knows now that the frogs are responsible for the noise, the survivors are still in the dark by the time the episode ends). The sudden flip from the show heavily implying that the Wilderness is real to it immediately discarding one of the major pieces of evidence in favor of that position is jarring, but Yellowjackets has had trouble maintaining that will-they/won’t-they (“will they make the supernatural real or won’t they” edition) balance since its second season. It’s not especially surprising that the payoff to the mystery of the Nazgûl-esque noise is a bit of a letdown. At least it’s funny and unexpected.
The show has fun with the official introduction of Nelson and Sutton’s characters, too: Edwin and Hannah are two happily-in-love scientists who study frogs, and they’re deep in the Canadian wilderness trying to record the vocalizations of a rare species during its once-every-seven-years mating ritual. (The amount of lore-building in this episode around the entirely fictional Arctic Banshee Frog is, quite frankly, absurd.) They’re joined by Kodiak (McHale), a smoldering, ultra-competent wilderness guide who’s hiding something from Edwin and Hannah. McHale slips easily into his smirking, gruff survivalist character, and even though he interacts more often with Sutton via shameless flirting with Hannah right in front of Edwin, the few exchanges he gets with Franklin are great.
In the roughly 15 minutes we spend with these three before all hell breaks loose, the show establishes a few important things that add some context to the geographical weirdness of the region: Ed’s compass is acting up, much like we saw with the team’s compass in season one. He also thinks Kodi is leading them in the wrong direction, which conveniently coincides with territory marked by the show’s signature symbol. And, oh yeah, their satellite phone is broken, thanks to Hannah accidentally snapping its antenna.
When Ed, Hannah, and Kodi first encounter the Yellowjackets crew, they’re in a more precarious spot than the team realizes. In fact, Ed seeks them out after he smells something akin to barbecue because “there’s strength in numbers.” He’s not convinced that they’ll be able to find their way out of the woods on their own now that the one thing that could guarantee their safe return—the satellite phone—is broken. But to most of the survivors, the appearance of new people means that they’re saved. When Van first sees Ed, Hannah, and Kodi, she looks at them with profound hope and joy. “We’re going home,” she says, right before Lottie kills Ed, and Hannah and Kodi take off running. Shauna looks fucking thrilled afterward, but her vibe is more “let me grab my popcorn” than “I approve of what you’ve done here.” We’ve seen Shauna grow angrier and more detached over the course of this season, but it’s clear now that her priority is no longer getting rescued; she just wants to watch the world burn.
“Croak,” unfortunately, doesn’t spend much time letting everyone sit with their grief about their best chance at going home so far being so cruelly taken away by one of their own. It is a stunning and profound betrayal, though, that the show hints will have future consequences. Being deferential to the Wilderness and communing with It is all well and good when that’s the best and only lifeline you’ve got, but when the group is presented with a tangible, near-guaranteed rescue, all thoughts about pleasing the Wilderness become irrelevant. Who cares about what It wants when they won’t ever have to think about It again if they get to go home? When Lottie kills Ed because, as she says, “It doesn’t want them here,” everyone realizes they’re in even deeper shit than they thought. They’re under the thrall of a budding cult leader whose priorities are vastly and dangerously different than what they assumed.
As Kodi and Hannah run away, Kodi fires off an arrow from his crossbow, which hits Melissa in the upper right side of her chest. It’s not an immediately fatal wound, but she’s in bad shape. Gen and Mari stay behind to help Melissa while everyone else (save for Lottie, who’s busy wiping Edwin’s blood all over her mouth and mumbling to herself) takes off after Kodi and Hannah.
Lottie has put the group in a pretty bad spot; they can’t just let Kodi and Hannah go after they witnessed Edwin’s death, but they’re split on what to do. As they leave camp and break up into smaller factions to look for Hannah and Kodi, Nat instructs everyone to capture them but keep them alive. For now, they’re still willing to listen to her, even though Shauna is their new leader. They do, eventually, take both Hannah and Kodi into custody; Shauna nearly kills Hannah against Nat’s wishes when they catch up to her, but Hannah makes a smart bargain for her life. She tells Shauna she knows where they can find medical supplies, which is probably the only thing that could get through to Shauna right now. She’s already lost too many people she loved: Jackie, her baby. She’s not going to lose Melissa, too.
As an adult, Shauna’s more anarchic tendencies have mellowed out, but her drive to protect herself and the ones she loves is just as fierce. She’s got a lead on who sent her the tape: After listening to it in full, she realizes that Hannah recorded it as a message to her daughter, whom the group previously didn’t know existed because Hannah gave birth to her when she was still a teenager. After their rescue, the survivors kept tabs on press coverage about Hannah, Edwin, and Kodi, who were deemed missing and eventually declared dead. The press treated it like a standard missing-persons case, assuming they died while looking for the frogs. Their disappearances were never connected with the Yellowjackets incident because they were supposed to be 100 miles away from where the plane went down. There was no reason to think that the two groups would have ever crossed paths, which begs the question: How did they cross paths if they were supposed to be so far away? In any event, even though the Yellowjackets captured Hannah and Kodi alive, Hannah never made it out of those woods. There’s still some ambiguity about Kodi, though: Given what we know about his skillset, if he eventually escaped, he could’ve feasibly spent the past 25 years off the grid.
Shauna is convinced that Hannah’s daughter is the one who sent her the tape, so she heads off to Richmond, Virginia, where she now lives, to confront her. Tai, Van, and Misty intercept her and insist on coming along. When they’re all in the car, Misty gets a call from Walter, who says the DNA under Lottie’s fingernails belongs to Shauna. It still feels like there’s more to this story, though, and we don’t get a full explanation from Shauna, who drives off and leaves Misty, Tai, and Van behind after Misty confronts her about the evidence.
Before Shauna abandons them, Van and Tai finally get a moment alone, and Van confronts Tai about whether she was ever going to tell her that she met with Lottie on the day of her death. Tai says Van wouldn’t have wanted to hear it and that she went to talk to Lottie about what Lottie said the night Natalie died: that It was happy with them. Van, for the second time, insists that she doesn’t want to live like that—using the deaths of others to prolong her own life. “You don’t have to. I will live that way. For you, I will,” Tai responds. This is why the Other One has taken over: She’s Tai’s ruthlessness personified, willing to make the hard decisions and do the things Tai won’t do. It’s sweet, twisted, and heartbreaking all at the same time.
Later, Van ends up in the hospital after she starts coughing up blood. She hallucinates (or dreams, or maybe has a vision) as her heart rate starts to spike. She has a conversation with the teenage version of herself, who offers her a cryptic statement: “Look at you. You’re afraid. We never actually cheated death. It was always an even trade.” She also confronts the Other One, who appears as adult Tai with dirt smeared around her mouth, and asks her to let the real Tai come back because she needs her. The Other One refuses, saying she’s the only one who can save her. Last we heard, Van’s cancer had almost miraculously stopped metastasizing, but she’s not out of the woods yet. With the Other One still in charge and determined to save Van, it seems like it’ll only be a matter of time before someone else dies.
Back at the hotel, Callie has been doing her own research about the scientists and has put together a rough outline of what happened to them. She knows, at least, that they ran into the Yellowjackets and were never seen again after that. “We keep telling ourselves that mom is basically a good person and that all this bad stuff that happened to her couldn’t be helped but…what if she’s actually a bad person?” she asks Jeff. From the look in his eyes, that’s a question that Jeff has been running from for a long time.
Stray observations
- • “Thanksgiving (Canada)” cleverly hid McHale’s introduction in plain sight: Now that we know he was also present during the initial confrontation between the two groups, it’s clear that it was McHale’s silhouette that Lottie saw near the animal pen.
- • While they’re out looking for Hannah and Kodi, Tai and Van find the broken satellite phone and Edwin’s detailed maps of the area.
- • Best Jeff moment of the week goes to him telling Shauna, “I appreciate that secrecy is your love language.”
- • The most prominent theory so far about who Hilary Swank could be playing is adult Melissa, but Van definitively states that both Gen and Melissa are dead. Maybe that means we’re all wrong, but then again, the look on Shauna’s face after Van said that was highly suspicious.
