After the team’s plane crashes in Yellowjackets season one, Van delivers a eulogy for one of their teammates who didn’t survive. “Before we took off, I heard Rachel say that she was going to see Oasis at the Meadowlands next month. She was really excited. Now she’s never going to hear ‘Wonderwall’ again,” she says. “A Normal, Boring Life” posits that there is a difference between leaving the wilderness and going home—and that even though a lucky few of them did, eventually, make it out of the woods, they never really went home. “Wonderwall” plays in this episode when Jeff and Callie finally acknowledge that they don’t believe anyone is trying to kill Shauna and that she is far more traumatized by her experience in the woods than anyone realized. They’ve faced the reality of their situation and they’re ready to deal with it. Now, they get to go home.
Melissa (played as an adult, as many people correctly guessed, by Hilary Swank) tries to explain this—that it is possible to let go of the past, accept what happened, and fully move on—to Shauna, too, and it’s so tempting to believe her because nearly all the evidence points to it being true: She has a great life. She’s happy. And she really does seem to have dealt with her trauma in a way none of the other survivors have. Except there’s one thing that negates every point she makes, something Shauna identifies from the start and never loses sight of throughout their entire conversation: Melissa’s living a lie. She’s not Melissa anymore; she goes by Kelly now. She’s married to Hannah’s daughter, Alex, who has no idea who she really is. And she’s supposed to be dead.
The show dedicates almost all of adult Shauna’s scenes this week to the confrontation between her and Melissa. And even though their conversation is cut up into several different scenes that are interspersed with other characters’ plotlines, it’s still a lot of dialogue, and Swank and Melanie Lynskey sell every line of it. I almost wish this episode had really gone for it and just been a two-hander. Everything else feels extraneous when you’ve got two masters of their craft facing each other down with knives at the ready.
Shauna discovers that Melissa is still alive after she breaks into Alex’s house and sees Melissa interacting with Alex and their child. After Alex leaves to take their kid to school, Melissa confronts the unknown person hiding in her pantry and Shauna stalks out, gas station knife in hand, demanding to know how Melissa is still alive. According to Shauna, Melissa did, in fact, get rescued with the others. She was one of the survivors. And then, sometime after, she died by suicide. Except, Melissa tells her, “It turns out, if you leave a suicide note, even without a body, the cops will take the easy win.” The explanation is a little too neat, and her reasoning for faking her death is similarly lacking. “I had no other choice,” she says. “After we made it back, I was no longer one of you. And you scared the absolute fucking shit out of me.” The wording here is so ambiguous that the implication of it doesn’t land quite as sinisterly as I think it’s meant to. It seems like she’s saying that, after they got back, Shauna iced her out of the group, and maybe Shauna turned her menacing behavior on Melissa and it frightened her so badly that she felt she had to disappear. But even that interpretation is a stretch. This is one of those classically frustrating Yellowjackets moments where you just have to accept that it doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense if you think about it too much and it’s better just to move on as quickly as the show does.
Melissa’s story about how she ended up where she is now is more robust, if not necessarily more believable. Melissa grew close to Hannah in the woods, and Hannah asked Melissa to keep an eye on Alex if she ever made it back home. Melissa honored Hannah’s wishes and kept tabs on Alex from a distance, and somehow, after she faked her death, she ended up meeting Alex in person and falling in love.
Shauna doesn’t really care about how Melissa justifies her fucked-up relationship with Alex, though; she’s more concerned with who sent her the tape and who’s been trying to kill her. She showed up at Alex’s house because she assumed it was Alex, but when she found Melissa there, too, she correctly identified that it must have been Melissa. Melissa doesn’t bother to deny it, but she does say that it wasn’t meant as a threat. For years, Melissa held onto the tape as leverage in case any of the other survivors tracked her down, but after they all gathered at Lottie’s compound, started making sacrifices again, and Nat died as a result, she stopped sleeping. “One day I’m fine, and the next I’m having these horrible nightmares. And then they start happening during the day. Like the world’s most fucked-up daydreams. I had to do something,” she says. So she went to New Jersey on the day of Nat’s funeral and dropped off the tape for Shauna because she was trying to finally rid herself of the darkness she’d held onto for so long and she thought giving Shauna the tape might help her let go of her darkness, too. According to Melissa, it was an act of kindness, not a threat.
It’s not clear how Melissa knew about anything that went down with Nat, because as far as we know, she wasn’t there when it happened. And even if she saw it on the news, she wouldn’t have known that the Hunt was the true cause of Nat’s death. She might have overheard Shauna, Tai, and Van talking about it when she went to the funeral, or that Shauna told her about it sometime during this conversation and we just didn’t see it, but she says that it had been causing her to lose sleep for weeks before then. It’s possible she’s been following Shauna for a long time and everything she’s been telling her during this conversation is a lie, but the show doesn’t play it that way. Shauna doesn’t push back and ask how Melissa knows these things, either, which feels especially odd. Hopefully the show provides an explanation in the final two episodes of the season, because right now, this is raising major red flags.
There isn’t a whole lot of time to ruminate on that discrepancy, though, because Melissa drops a bombshell when she’s talking about leaving the tape for Shauna: She says she included a note that explained everything, so it’s wild that Shauna interpreted it as a threat when the note explicitly stated that it was basically the exact opposite. But we never saw a note when Callie opened the package, and she certainly didn’t hand one over to Shauna when she showed her the tape. If the note was as detailed as Melissa claims, it could explain Callie’s sudden obsession with Lottie and what Callie has been up to this whole season. It’s been clear for a while now that she has some sort of ulterior motive, but what it might be has been frustratingly opaque. Now it seems like this season’s final showdown might just center around her.
Shauna is still not willing to let Melissa off the hook after she explains the tape and accuses Melissa of leaving the mysterious cell phone for her to find, cutting her brakes, and locking her in the freezer. Not only does Melissa deny trying to kill her, but she also says that all of those things are probably coincidences and no one is actually out to get her. We’ve heard Jeff, Callie, Tai, and Van express that opinion, too, but Melissa is one of the only people who knows Shauna well enough to be able to analyze her thoughts and actions. “This is what you do, Shauna,” she tells her. “You create your own problems. You stir the pot just to feel alive…. You hate yourself. And you want everyone else to feel just as miserable as you are.” Based on the dream Shauna had when she was staking out Alex’s house, Melissa is not that far off base. In her dream, a teenage Shauna is working at a grocery store while Jackie taunts her: “Wow. You really did not pan out, huh? So much potential, so little to show for it.”
There is some element of dissatisfaction with her own life that drives Shauna’s behavior, and it’s something we see in the past, too. Most of the ’90s timeline in this episode is dedicated to the group preparing to leave the camp after Kodi says he can lead them back to the researchers’ pickup point. They’re finally going to be rescued, and the mood is, generally, pretty joyous, even though there are a few hiccups with Melissa being mad at Shauna for not staying to help her when she was injured and Tai expressing a sense of unease about how much they’re going to have to lie and cover up when they get back.
Nat takes charge of the group’s packing efforts, which quietly rankles Shauna—until the quiet part suddenly becomes very, very loud. Just as they’re about to leave, Lottie says she’s staying behind. “I can’t go back. If I go back…nothing will be…well. I won’t be well. I won’t be me. The me that was made out here. And that unwellness that I feel…I feel it so deeply in my bones. We’re safer here,” she says. Shauna drops her bag and tells everyone she’s staying, too, ambiguously saying something just doesn’t feel right about leaving. Tai agrees and joins Lottie and Shauna. Nat says that they’re just going to leave the three of them behind, but Shauna steps forward and finally asserts her power as the group’s leader. “No. You’re not,” she says. She’s not happy that everyone has been listening to Nat instead of her, and she’s going to reclaim her power, even if it means staying in the woods forever.
Back at Alex’s house, Melissa is still driving her metaphorical knife into Shauna. “You know what I think?” she asks. “I think you came here because you want your life to explode. It’s fun for you. It lights you up. You want to burn it all down just so you can watch.” And then she tries to drive her physical knife into Shauna, too.
Shauna is too quick for her, though, and she quickly gets the upper hand. Yellowjackets loves to end an episode on a shocking moment, and this might be one of the most visceral yet. After she pins Melissa to the ground, she bites Melissa’s bicep, tearing off a chunk of her flesh. With her face covered in Melissa’s blood, she dangles the skin over Melissa’s mouth. “Eat it,” she says. “Or I’ll fucking tell your family exactly who you really are.” If it wasn’t already clear (and it absolutely was), Shauna is not someone to be messed with. Yet, given her weird explanation about Natalie’s death being triggering for her, we’re still left wondering: Has Melissa been messing with Shauna? It’s an unfortunate distraction from what could have otherwise been a fun, twisty episode.
Stray observations
- • There are two boxes of Mr. Moo brand instant hot cocoa among all the body parts in Shauna’s Jackie/supermarket dream and they’re the only other thing on the conveyor belt beside the pre-packaged, uh, meats.
- • Misty has come up with the perfect voicemail message for someone you hate: “Hi, [insert name here]. I’m just calling to say fuck you, actually.”
- • Misty, Tai, and Van’s plotlines feel pretty shoehorned in this week. They’re all still at the hospital, where a doctor tells Tai that it’s time to think about hospice for Van. Tai tries to kill a dying patient as a sacrifice to keep Van alive but ultimately can’t go through with it. It raises some interesting questions about the dynamic between Tai and the Other One, but let’s be real: This is Shauna’s episode.
- • While everyone else is busy asking Hannah important things like what day it is and whether anyone is still looking for them, Van’s most burning question is “Did Mulder and Scully get together?” Which, honestly, is fair enough in general, but that’s also perfectly on-brand for her.
- • Jeff gets a nice little arc in this episode where he reasserts a small amount of control over his own life and confronts the Joels about the bad dinner meeting they had earlier in the season.
