After a shaky season, Yellowjackets returns with two intriguing, relatively grounded episodes
"I can't believe we didn't eat that bitch first."
Photo: Kailey Schwerman/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME
[Editor’s note: This recap contains spoilers.]
Feint left, then cut to the right. If Yellowjackets has a playbook, that’s its main play. The very first episode of the show opens with a scene of a woman running barefoot through the woods. There’s snow on the ground, and she’s not wearing any shoes or pants; she’s clad only in a thin white nightgown as she flees from unseen pursuers. In that first shot, she runs across the screen from right to left. The camera never shows her face, not even when she falls into a pit trap, impaling herself on sharpened wood spikes and bleeding out. Based mostly on her hair and build, viewers have guessed that “Pit Girl” is Mari (Alexa Barajas), but the show hasn’t explicitly confirmed this yet.
The first episode of Yellowjackets season three, “It Girl,” opens with a scene of a woman wearing sneakers running through the woods. There are leaves on the ground, and she’s wearing leggings and a long white T-shirt as she flees from unseen pursuers. In the first shot, she runs across the screen from left to right. The camera quickly shows her face: It’s Mari, and she’s playing a game akin to Capture The Flag with the other survivors roughly one year after the plane carrying the Wiskayok, New Jersey, high school girls soccer team to the national championships crashed in the remote Canadian wilderness, stranding the group without hope of rescue. The opening scene is a fakeout, a winking callback that teases an answer without actually giving one. “The other team’s sweeper is really weak on the right, so run directly at him, feint left, [and] when he turns his hips, cut hard [in] the other direction,” Natalie (Juliette Lewis as an adult, Sophie Thatcher as a teenager) tells Kevyn’s (Alex Wyndham) son in the present day when she stops by his soccer game later in season one. After Kevyn tells Nat that her tip helped his son’s team win the game, she smiles distractedly. “Funny,” she replies. “Whenever I tried to do it, it never worked for me.”
Season two’s nine-episode-long feint about Lottie (Simone Kessell as an adult, Courtney Eaton as a teenager) and her “intentional community” (read: cult) didn’t work either. The 1996 timeline remained compelling throughout, but the present-day story went off the rails, resulting in Natalie’s frustrating death at the hands of Misty (Christina Ricci as an adult, Samantha Hanratty as a teenager). It was the first sign that the show, which had, throughout the first season, done a pretty good job of walking the line between “there’s something supernatural in these woods” and “there’s nothing supernatural out there—this group of people just developed a coping mechanism to deal with an unthinkable trauma” might not be able to maintain that balance, and that the answers to the mysteries it set up might feel like a cop-out.
“It Girl” picks up a few weeks after season two’s cliffhanger ending, in which the cabin where the team had been sheltering all winter burns to the ground. Spring has arrived, so if the plane crashed in May 1996, it’s officially 1997. They’re now living in makeshift huts crafted out of sticks. We don’t get a good explanation of how everyone survived the last days of winter without a shelter, only a passing mention that the cabin fire lasted 12 days and they all think Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) is responsible. I don’t know how a fire could have burned for almost two straight weeks (even if they purposefully fed the fire, as the show states, they definitely didn’t have the tools to control an inferno of that size) without destroying most of the surrounding wilderness and creating an environmental disaster that surely some non-stranded person would have noticed from an airplane or a helicopter. Maybe It—the wilderness, the supernatural entity, the collective delusion—was responsible, but the show doesn’t play it that way. It presents this story as something we just have to accept rather than something we should question in the same way it hand-waves an explanation of Taissa (Tawny Cypress as an adult, Jasmin Savoy Brown as a teenager) impeaching herself before she even took office as a state senator.
During the episode’s opening chase, Shauna (Melanie Lynskey as an adult, Sophie Nélisse as a teenager) takes Mari down hard, tackling her to the ground in a bid to grab the game’s “flag”: the bone necklace that Lottie crafted for Van (Lauren Ambrose as an adult, Liv Hewson as a teenager) in season one. When Mari refuses to give up the necklace (which, it turns out, she never even had because she was just the decoy), Shauna bites her hard enough to draw blood. There’s something different about Shauna now, an unrepentant hardness in the gaze she turns on anyone who questions her. She’s rightfully angry after the death of her baby and she’s found a new target for her anger after nearly beating Lottie to death at the end of season two. Nat and the rest of the team separate Shauna and Mari after the attack and let them walk it off, but the tension between them is palpable. While Van kicks off a Summer Solstice Festival at the team’s new camp, Shauna retreats to her tent, scribbling angrily in her diary and providing a counternarrative to the one Van tells the rest of the group.
In the present, it’s six weeks after the confrontation at Lottie’s retreat that left Natalie and Kevyn dead, and it’s the day of Natalie’s funeral. Misty has apparently been experiencing a severe depressive episode since Nat’s death but her reaction doesn’t ring true. This isn’t the first time Misty has lost a best friend—this isn’t even the first time she’s been responsible for her best friend’s death (R.I.P. Crystal). And she was arguably closer to Crystal than she ever was to Nat because Crystal actually reciprocated Misty’s friendship. But she bounced back from Crystal’s death quickly by compartmentalizing it as necessary to keep her secret about destroying the plane’s emergency transponder. Maybe she’s having a harder time with Nat because she can’t lie to herself about Nat’s death being unavoidable, but it still feels off-brand for her. Misty is the stand-in for the audience’s feelings about how unnecessary Nat’s death was (one of the main criticisms of season two), but it goes against everything we know about Misty as a character. I don’t think using Shauna or Tai to reflect those feelings would’ve made sense either, but Van has consistently proven herself to be one of the most empathetic characters on the show. Even though she and Nat didn’t stay in touch as adults, Van feeling sad about Nat’s lost potential and the tragedy of her life as a whole would’ve felt more appropriate than Misty experiencing profound grief for seemingly the first time in her life.
Misty skips the funeral, but Walter (Elijah Wood) manages to coax her out of bed with a ruse that feels much more true to Misty’s character. Walter leaves a mysterious key on Misty’s dresser, knowing she won’t be able to resist asking about it. He tells her it’s the key to Nat’s storage unit and that someone should probably take a look through it to make sure there’s no incriminating evidence in there. Unable to resist snooping or investigating a mystery, there’s no way Misty’s passing up the opportunity to do both at the same time. In the storage unit, Misty doesn’t find anything incriminating, but she does find one of Nat’s black leather jackets, which she wears while she has a very sad time getting drunk alone at a bar and attempting to set two other patrons’ dicks on fire like she once did with Natalie. Meanwhile, Shauna, Tai, and Van attend Nat’s awkward funeral and go out for drinks afterward, where Shauna feels someone watching her from across the room.
Back in the woods, Shauna and Melissa (Jenna Burgess) bond while butchering a deer. Melissa is one of the J.V. characters that was added in season two, though we didn’t get to know her much. Shauna’s still fixated on Mari, muttering, “I can’t believe we didn’t eat that bitch first.” To Shauna’s surprise, Melissa responds, “Mari’s so dumb I heard she chipped a tooth on her vibrator.” “Wait. Do you, like, actually have a personality?” Shauna asks. The joke leans toward being too meta, but Nélisse nails the delivery. Akilah (Nia Sondaya) offers Shauna a special crown she made for Shauna to wear at that night’s ceremony, which we don’t yet know much about, but Shauna refuses it and Melissa backs her up by stepping on it after Shauna knocks it out of Akilah’s hand.