Over its first two seasons — that’s around 19 hours of television — “Yellowjackets” has been finding its way back to the beginning. Because it’s been almost three and a half years, a refresher: The pilot opens with a scene of a teenage girl with long, dark hair — since dubbed “Pit Girl” by fans — running barefoot through the snowy woods, pursued by unseen attackers. She falls into (what else?) a pit lined with sharp wooden stakes and dies, only to be slaughtered and ritually consumed by masked figures in deer skulls and animal skins (and a pair of pink Converse) at the end of the episode. We still don’t know who Pit Girl is, one of several mysteries “Yellowjackets” is keeping close to its emaciated chest.
Figuring out how and why things got so grotesque has been the dramatic thrust of the series ever since. And as “Yellowjackets” heads into its third season, we’re closer to discovering the mechanics of the girls’ wilderness cult than ever before. The series toggles between 1996, when the members of the Wiskayok High School girls’ varsity soccer team — a.k.a. the Yellowjackets — crashed in a remote Canadian mountain range on their way to nationals in Seattle, and the present, where the surviving members of the team are all super f**ked up from the ordeal that followed. The girls were out in the woods for 19 months before they got rescued, and clearly things got spooky and intense out there.
Things started to get really bad — like, cannibalism bad — during the team’s first winter in the woods, which coincides with the beginning of Season 2. Popular girl Jackie (Ella Purnell) was the first to get eaten, her body conveniently flash-frozen when she went outside to sit in the snow after an argument with her best friend Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) in the hunter’s cabin where the girls sheltered during the summer and fall of 1996.
Their first act of anthropophagy was basically an accident: They attempted to give Jackie a proper funeral, but her body smelled so good roasting on the funeral pyre, and they were so close to starvation, that they started grabbing chunks of her flesh and cramming it into their mouths. Radiohead’s “Climbing Up the Walls” was playing as they did it. It was horrifying, but also kind of awesome.
Their first act of anthropophagy was basically an accident.
Their second act was also sort of an accident, in the sense that they originally meant to hunt and kill team bad girl Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), but ended up consuming Javi (Luciano Leroux), the monosyllabic younger son of the team’s now-deceased head coach, instead. (RIP Javi. Your life was as brief and enigmatic as your arc on this show.) Here’s where the spooky occult stuff starts to seep in: In Season 2, the Yellowjackets fell deeper under the influence of Lottie (Courtney Eaton), a member of the team whose lack of access to her psychiatric medication eased her into her role as the team’s unofficial guru/prophet/witch.
Lottie’s woo-woo started infecting everyone as their situation grew more desperate — especially soccer lesbian Van (Liv Hewson), who has not been the same since she was almost mauled to death by wolves in Season 1. (Cool scars, though.) Van was the one who declared that “the wilderness has chosen!” when Javi fell through the ice on a frozen lake and drowned mid-hunt. And her teammates got caught up in the moment and agreed that, yes, this “it” that demanded blood sacrifices and didn’t want them to ever leave the mountains clearly also wanted them to eat Javi to survive.
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In the buildup to Javi’s unwitting sacrifice, we also learned a few key details about how these “hunts” work, both in the past and in the present. In the present, Season 2 brought our core group of survivors — returning characters Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), Natalie (Juliette Lewis), Taissa (Tawny Cypress) and Misty (Christina Ricci), along with Lottie (Simone Kessell) and Van (Lauren Ambrose), appearing for the first time as adults — together, one by one, on Lottie’s totally-not-a-cult compound, towards a destiny they all vaguely felt but most of them wanted to deny.
We learned in Season 1 that Lottie spent some time at a mental hospital in Switzerland after the surviving Yellowjackets returned to civilization in the late ‘90s. What was revealed in Season 2 is that Lottie was very much back on her guru bulls**t, running an “intentional community” of people who all wore purple (scratch that . . . heliotrope) and could leave whenever they wanted to, although Lottie didn’t think that was a very good idea. There’s a lot to catch up on there, but suffice to say her whole deal didn’t seem that bad — Natalie in particular seemed to have found some peace during her time at Lottie’s — until Lottie’s eyes got all glittery and she started talking about “giving it what it wants.”
What “it wants” was one of the Yellowjackets dead. And while her friends vetoed Lottie’s original idea of poisoned oolong tea, they did indulge her idea of gathering for one last “hunt.” This was supposed to be a way to stall for time until an emergency psychiatric response team could arrive and 5150 Lottie, a plan that the rest of the gang agreed to at first. But it didn’t end up going down that way: Taissa, who is going through a mental health crisis of her own, secretly called off the team before the “hunt” was set to begin.
In the meantime, “Yellowjackets” cut between two rituals, one past and one present, where the Yellowjackets stand in a circle and pass around a deck of cards with the single queen Javi found when they first arrived at the cabin. One by one, they peeled off cards until someone got the queen; that person then had the option of willingly sacrificing themselves for the good of the group, or of taking off running with their friends in pursuit, wearing animal-skull masks and carrying knives. When they got caught? Well, then it was dinner time.
Let’s check in with our core sextet and see how everyone is feeling going into a third season. Bad, mostly, and understandably so.
But even though the wild hunt has commenced, there’s still a lot more occult savagery to come. The show’s dramatization of the slow breakdown of norms that can lead ordinary people to do terrible things is in line with a major influence — namely, the crash of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, referenced in Salon’s Season-2 catch-up guide. The Uruguayan rugby players stranded atop a barren Argentinian mountain range didn’t stop being themselves when they started eating each other; they were worn down, bit by bit, until the unthinkable became normal. The same is true for “Yellowjackets,” including what co-creator Ashley Lyle says is ahead in Season 3.
In an interview with Vanity Fair about the new season, Lyle references a “merging, or an overlapping” of past and present for her characters: “In certain cases, that overlap is actually quite literal in a way; in other ones, it is a demonstration … how that young adult became the person they are,” she says. “How do you change while you are in your core, in your essence, the same person you always were? How much are you hiding that, and how long are you able to do that, is a question that we’re playing with this season.”
The “literal” merging takes us back to the show’s supernatural elements — if they even exist, and aren’t just projections of our unmedicated and malnourished characters’ fraying mental states. We’ve already seen characters returning as ghosts: Poor dead Laura Lee appeared in several characters’ hallucinations and dreams in Season 2. And now that Natalie is dead in the present (more on that in a minute, too), the odds of her making an appearance elsewhere in the show’s timeline, perhaps to give guidance or a warning to her younger self, have increased. Discussing Nat’s fate, Lyle also teases a third timeline set somewhere between 1996 and the present, saying that “she has a huge part to play in the 25 years that we haven’t seen.”
There are also new characters to contend with heading into Season 3. In its ‘90s timeline, Season 2 expanded the roles of younger Yellowjackets Akilah (Keeya King in S1 and Nia Sondaya in S2+) and Gen (Mya Lowe), as well as the snarky Mari (Alexa Barajas). Mari and Gen both have the right hairstyles and skin tones to be Pit Girl, and their names come up as such in fan theories. Akilah is the wrong ethnicity, so it can’t be her. She could still be on the menu, however, especially given her sweet and trusting nature.
Van makes it sound like there are no more Yellowjackets left to appear in the present in the season-three first look teaser trailer, where she says, “The only people who know about this are either us or dead.” The natural assumption here is that “this” refers to some unspeakable act of cannibalistic savagery in the past. But these characters have all kinds of nasty secrets in the present, too. (You know, like Taissa killing her dog and putting her wife in the hospital?) So juxtaposing that line with footage of the adult Yellowjackets being threatened with evidence of their shared past — again — could be a misdirect. And if that’s the case, who the heck is Hilary Swank playing, anyway?
Previously a background character, Yellowjacket Melissa (Jenna Burgess) and her backwards baseball cap appear in quite a few shots in both the teaser and the official Season-3 trailer. So my money’s on her. Melissa is a member of a new faction we see forming in the past in these sneak previews, as Shauna challenges Natalie’s leadership of the group.
We also see them hunting each other and dining on their flesh well into the springtime — meaning, not purely for survival. “We are going to learn more about what happened in the wilderness that they are so afraid of coming out. We hope it will be both satisfying and at times unexpected,” Lyle says, adding, “There are at least two very big questions with very clear answers.”
In the short term, they’ve all got a bigger problem, as Coach Ben (Steven Krueger), somewhat hypocritically shaken to his core by the sight of Shauna field dressing Javi like a deer, is believed to have burned down the cabin at the end of the Season-2 finale with the girls inside. Coach Ben also found a cave near the cabin in the previous episode, however, and shots from both trailers suggest the team will find him there early in Season 3.
Meanwhile, the detritus from Season 1 has been cleared in the present — it’s all out in the open, including the inconvenient fact that it was Shauna’s husband Jeff (Warren Kole) who was behind the blackmail plot, making all of that murder unnecessary. Oops! I thought that the story Walter (Elijah Wood) concocted to explain away the deaths of both Shauna’s side piece Adam and “journalist” Jessica Roberts at the end of Season 2 was flimsy as hell. Joel McHale and Ashley Sutton have also been cast as guest stars on Season 3, and I could see them both as cops — cops sniffing around the pile of dead bodies that tends to accumulate around the adult Yellowjackets, perhaps?
Let’s check in with our core sextet and see how everyone is feeling going into a third season. Bad, mostly, and understandably so:
Tawny Cypress as Taissa, Lauren Ambrose as Van, Warren Kole as Jeff Sadecki and Melanie Lynskey as Shauna in “Yellowjackets” (Kailey Schwerman/Paramount+/SHOWTIME)Natalie
Past: She did not ask for this, and does not want this, but whether she likes it or not Natalie is now the acting Antler Queen, now that Lottie has decided to step down and appoint Natalie as leader of the Yellowjackets in her place. Given that she thinks most of these girls have completely lost it, she is probably secretly happy to be in charge. But being a smoking-behind-the-school type, she cannot let on that she feels this way, setting the stage for conflict with some of her more resentful teammates (ahem, Shauna) as their ordeal wears on.
Present: Dead. Dead-dead. Officially declared dead of a “drug overdose,” which is convenient for Misty as she accidentally stabbed Natalie with a syringe full of poison while Natalie tried to protect her new friend Lisa (Nicole Maines) at the height of their kinda-real, kinda-not “hunt” on Lottie’s compound. She had a moving sendoff, putting her back in the plane with her younger self and with the younger versions of Javi and Lottie, all encouraging her to go towards the light. And a first-look image of Season 3 shows the remaining cast members at what we can only assume is her funeral, making her return — at least in corporeal form — extremely unlikely.
Past: It’s close in terms of who’s the most traumatized Yellowjacket, but at this point, Shauna has to be up there. Her baby died! Her teammates might have eaten him, she’s not sure! And she’s the group’s butcher, charged with dismembering the corpses of her dead friends and breaking them down until they are no longer recognizably human. Just the aftermath of her work drove Coach Ben to arson, so imagine how Shauna feels?! And based on what we can see in Season-3 previews, she’s going to respond to all this like someone whose prefrontal cortex is not fully developed would: By turning her pain and grief back onto others, namely by mounting a campaign against Natalie that blends “Mean Girls” and “Lord of the Flies.”
Present: Jeff turned out to be a real ride-or-die in Season 2, going so far as to help frame someone else for a murder he knows his wife committed. All of which is to say that, for the moment, Shauna is all clear in the present, legally if not psychologically. Crime has brought her family closer than ever before and has opened a new chapter in Shauna’s relationship with her daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins), who we see pressing her mom for details about “what happened out there” in the official trailer. The psychopathic apple may not fall too far from the traumatized tree, is all I’m saying.
Past: Speaking of psychopaths — it’s Misty! At this point, Misty isn’t a hardened killer…yet. She is a killer, to be clear, but she feels bad about pushing Kristen/Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman) off of that cliff, okay? Teenage Misty just wants to be liked, which is sympathetic but really doesn’t justify all the murder and subterfuge. If the rest of the team ever finds out that she destroyed the plane’s flight recorder after the crash, well — I’d say she’d be dead, but we know she makes it to the present, so…
Present: Grief from murdering her “best friend” aside — quotations used because Natalie barely tolerated her most of the time — Misty’s good! Her murder was also pinned on someone else at the end of Season 2 by Misty’s new boo, Walter (Elijah Wood), who’s as insane as she is. She’s off the hook legally, has a shoulder to cry on and someone to sing show tunes with, and Walter will absolutely help her pull off additional crimes if asked. Everything’s coming up Misty, although her attachment issues will almost certainly get in the way going forward.
Past: Perhaps sensing that the dynamic between the survivors is about to get even uglier and more fraught, Lottie takes a step back from her prophetic role at the end of Season 2. In her place, she appoints Natalie as the group’s leader/target/scapegoat, using the logic that the wilderness must have a purpose for Natalie if it sacrificed Javi in her stead. Season 3 previews show Lottie conducting rituals for a group of followers the spring after the finale, however, so Lottie won’t be out of the cult-leader game for very long.
Present: It’s back to the psychiatric ward for Lottie, who seems disappointed but not terribly surprised as she’s packed into the back of an ambulance at the end of the Season 2 finale. They won’t let her wear all her fabulous flowy dresses and kimonos in the hospital, which is a loss. But Taissa and Van will probably come visit her!
Past: Pretty okay, all things considered. Trauma bonding has been an aphrodisiac for these two and given that they’re out in the snow along with the rest of the team, these teenage lovers are about to bond harder than ever before. Body heat is a great way to stay warm…
Present: Uhhhhhh, not so great? But also great? Van only has a few months left (that’s one way to avoid debt collectors), and seems determined to cram as much life as she can into the short time before she dies of terminal cancer. In practical terms, this means getting back with her ex Taissa, who is in a vulnerable place all around. (Van is definitely taking advantage of a mentally unstable person, which makes it hard to root for them.) First-look photos from Season 2 show the couple together, and the official trailer includes a shot of Taissa being distracted by a shadowy figure while kissing a red-haired woman who has to be Van.
Her imminent death has brought Van back to her old ways: She talked Taissa into calling off the emergency response team Misty requested for Lottie at the end of Season 2, reflecting Van’s loyalty to Lottie in the past and rekindling that affiliation in the present. It’s an illogical and destructive decision, given that — had Walter and Lisa not intervened — one of the Yellowjackets would have ended up dead at the end of the “hunt.” But again, Van has very little left to lose at this point.
It’s not clear right now how much Taissa has to lose. She’s still a New Jersey state senator — for now — and she still has a son to worry about, even if her wife did presumably die in that car crash her “other self” orchestrated earlier in Season 2. That “other self” is violent, and delusional, and very dangerous; she’s also likely to come closer to the surface of Taissa’s personality the deeper she goes into her old relationships with Van and Lottie.
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