The creators of Yellowjackets know how much is riding on this final season

It’s a formidable task to conclude a TV show as intricate as Yellowjackets, which has generated wild theories among fans since its 2021 debut. Co-creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson were acutely aware of this while working on the final chapter of the Emmy-nominated series. “It was the most frightening thing we’ve contended with over the course of making this show,” Lyle tells The A.V. Club during a recent Zoom call. “There are TV endings that go down in history as either incredible or incredibly disappointing. It’s intimidating,” she admits, before the husband-wife duo attest to how proud they are of the series finale, which the rest of the world will have to wait until early 2027 to witness. “We knew the ending we wanted, even though the specifics kept shifting and evolving. But I felt good about the place that we got to,” Nickerson says. 

Yellowjackets, which returns in November, has 10 more episodes to unravel the mystery of what happened after the young survivors of an all-female high school soccer team—whose plane crashed in the Canadian wilderness in 1996—were finally rescued after 19 months. Season four wastes no time following up on the events of season three’s finale, in which teen Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) contacted a stranger via a satellite phone. When the show returns, the girls are struggling to acclimatize to their hometown of Wiskayok, New Jersey because, despite reuniting with their families, favorite foods, and proper mattresses, it doesn’t feel like home anymore. Husband-wife duo Lyle and Nickerson tell us they wanted to take the time to explore how the teens adjusted and grew into the adult versions we met in the Yellowjackets‘ pilot. “It’s a full loop,” Lyle says. 

For the past three seasons, the Yellowjackets have been stranded in the dense, difficult woods. To survive with little to no resources, they resorted to chilling hunting games, murder, and, ultimately, cannibalism. They’ve witnessed deaths, a birth, and the unexpected arrival of frog scientists (two of whom they killed). How can these experiences not follow them to New Jersey and into their adulthood? “The biggest mystery is how they became the way they were, and what it was like to be back in a cage or a box [after the wilderness],” Lyle says while discussing the show’s psychological thriller aspect. Nickerson adds: “A part of the story of them coming home that we’re telling is that because they’ve had this experience, people whom they once knew now look at them a certain way.” 

Take teen Shauna (Sophie Nelisse), for example, who lost her way while trying to be the queen bee in the woods. She channeled her grief over her dead newborn son and Jackie (Ella Purnell) into something darker and more violent. So much so that, in season three, she stopped the group from getting help. Now, based on this exclusive The A.V. Club image above, Shauna’s supporters seemed to have turned on her. One of the season four timelines takes place between Natalie’s S.O.S. call and when the girls were actually rescued, leaving enough time for the others to pick apart Shauna’s behavior (and maybe throw in a punch or two, considering she’s lying on the ground, surrounded by her very angry peers).