Dumb girl shit is the name of the game for Yellowjackets’ two-episode season 3 premiere.
“It Girl”
We open with a fun little fakeout: teenage Mari is being chased through the woods in a clear callback to Pit Girl’s winter flight in the pilot. But it’s spring, and she doesn’t fall in a pit to her grisly ritualistic death; instead, they’re playing Capture the Flag Bone as exercise, or morale boosting, or deciding who gets what duty for that night’s (non-cannibal) feast, or all of the above.
Despite Yellowjackets season 2’s Wilderness plotline ending with the team grimly watching their cabin burn down in the dead of winter, they seem… pretty OK!? We encounter them on the eve of the summer solstice, roughly three months after someone burned down their cabin. As Van helpfully exposits in a pre-solstice storytelling performance jokingly presented as “previously on The Yellowjackets…”, the fire actually kept them warm and alive for 12 days as they kept feeding its blaze. (If ever I’ve heard a more apt metaphor for teen girl fury…) Since then, they’ve created a village complete with private huts, a mini-barnyard to raise goats and ducks for eventual consumption, and more rituals that lean on hierarchy but shy away from meat eating. As Mari will later tell Coach Ben (yep, he’s alive), they haven’t done that since Javi.
Nat is still Queen, having passed on some of her hunting expertise to the other girls, but she seems unwilling to mediate between the prickly Mari and Shauna, obviously locked in a bear’s trap of grief and postpartum depression. Not one for Van’s upbeat retelling of their grim survival, she’s venting in her journal for lack of a sympathetic ear (no ghost!Jackie yet) and feels disconnected from the Yellowjackets’ fairy-tale commune. But she finds an unexpected kindred spirit in Melissa, a teammate (and cast member) who’s been in the background the whole time but reveals herself to be snarky in a way that gives Shauna a flesh-and-blood venting partner.
Despite Taissa’s suggestion that Nat settle whatever is brewing between Shauna and Mari since Capture the Bone, she deems it “dumb girl shit” that will resolve itself. Except that its resolution is Shauna spitting in Mari’s venison stew at the solstice feast, with the latter wasting that precious non-human food. Nat sentences them both to a week of solitary confinement in their respective huts, but Mari storms off instead.
In the present, the surviving Yellowjackets (that we currently know of) convene for Nat’s funeral, which turns out to be kind of a non-event. Her mother makes a bleak and truncated eulogy, and then everyone decamps to the bar to ponder their own twisted eulogies. Van blithely mentions their past cannibalism in public—she’s dying, what does she care—while Shauna is being twitchy about seeing flashes of someone, though we don’t yet know who she thinks is watching them.
It’s not Misty, who no one told about the funeral (aww), but who knew about it anyway and elected not to go. Instead, she grieves in her own fashion by visiting Nat’s storage unit (discovered courtesy of Elijah Wood’s Walter) and inventorying her keepsakes and trash. Nat’s leather jacket Misty keeps for herself, wearing to a bar with racoon-eye-eyeliner and getting wasted on whiskey shots until she threatens to light some random guys on fire and passes out. Walter picks her up not because he knew where to find her, but because the bartender tried everyone in her recent contacts and he was the only one who picked up.
Despite Van being at the end of her life and Tai blowing up her marriage and career, the old flames haven’t yet properly rekindled things. To make things a little more romantic, Tai proposes a fancy tasting menu that she has to pull strings to get, only for them to decide to dine and dash. But when the poor waiter chases after them, he narrowly avoids getting hit by a bus and then has a heart attack anyway. They don’t notice this, too occupied as they are with making out in an alleyway, even when the Man With No Eyes lurks in the corners of Tai’s vision.
All things considered, Callie is taking her mom’s near-murder at the hands of her ritualistically-possessed former teammates pretty well. At least, until some bitchy girls at school giggle over rumors of human entrail orgies that Callie’s mom supposedly participated in. So she DoorDashes an order from the butcher (don’t worry Jeff, it’s pig) and dumps it all over the girls in the lunchroom. She’s suspended, but Shauna is not-so-secretly proud of her daughter’s chutzpah.
But despite the mother/daughter bonding, Callie still has her suspicions about everything she doesn’t know. A late-night knock at the door offers up a mysterious envelope addressed to Shauna, with the Wilderness’ mysterious symbol. Callie extracts a mysterious cassette tape, which she hides from her mom.
Back in the Wilderness, Lottie has been forcing hallucinogenic mushroom tea on Travis to get him to connect with “it” again. She clearly doesn’t really know what she’s doing, and can only react when he freaks out about hearing the trees screaming. Later, during their solstice celebration, Lottie is leading the group in honoring the dead, including Shauna’s stillborn baby boy, saying their souls are still with them. But as they send up some floating lanterns in a lovely moment, the woods around them erupt in chittering and rustling and, yes, screaming.
Meanwhile, yes, Coach also made it through winter in the Wilderness, though it seems to be by the grace of Queen Nat, who’s set up traps for him. He also stumbles upon a hidden rations store in a pit, where he finds such luxuries as peanut butter and hot chocolate, and sets a trap for some “dumb little prey.” At the end of the episode, instead of a deer, he finds a screaming and injured Mari.
“Dislocated”
Despite his initially creepy demeanor (definitely big Silence of the Lambs vibes), Coach Ben actually gets to perform his pre-Wilderness purpose in talking Mari through how to reset her dislocated knee since he can’t do it for her. But once he pulls her out of the pit, he trusses her up like game and drags her back to his cave despite her panicked assurances that she won’t tell the Yellowjackets she saw him. It’s all very whiplashy; there, he gives her hot chocolate (!) and acts shocked to hear that the cabin burned down; but then later she hears him talking to himself—or to the cabin ghost, or to his ex-boyfriend? Who knows, but Coach seems to be in a bad place.
While out looking for Mari, Misty cottons on to the fact that Nat has been helping Coach, and makes the—strategic? needy?—choice to tell Shauna, which only gives her more ammo against their Queen. It parallels nicely with adult Misty and Shauna’s current dynamic, in which the former is still trying jumping at any chance to get on Shauna’s good side. Despite, or perhaps in spite of, Walter’s astute point about the other Yellowjackets only reaching out when they want something, Misty rushes to Shauna’s house… only to discover she’s been roped into babysitting Callie and Lottie while Shauna and Jeff go out to a business dinner.
Oh, yeah—Lottie is out from her psychiatric hold, showing up on the Sadeckis’ doorstep because she has literally nowhere else to go, her cult disbanded after the madness of last season. Jeff needs Shauna for this dinner with the hotel bros, but she can’t risk Lottie deciding to just spill her (metaphorical) guts to her daughter.
Shauna should perhaps have been more concerned about Callie herself; she instigates an intergenerational sleepover, mixing up rum milk punch with grenadine for everyone—Misty’s spiked with cold medicine—and tries to trick them into some Truth or Dare cannibalism confessions. All that it seems to achieve is making Shauna believe that Misty is a raging alcoholic, while also not caring that she makes Misty drive home clearly still inebriated. Walter may have his own creepy attentions on Misty, but he’s not wrong about this.
Meanwhile, Tai and Van had sex after their prix fixe prank, though both agree that Tai should actually settle up their bill. Van has to go to urgent care after she accidentally stomps on a glass and gets a shard in her foot, not wanting to risk infection. Otherwise she would have joined at Pas D’âme when Tai discovers that their server died; the restaurant is holding an eerie wake for him, and they recognize her before she dashes yet again, this time having snatched a matchbook in tow. Stumbling into a nearby place of worship with an altar, she lights the entire matchbook by dropping it into a lit candle. When they reconvene to discuss their days, both are clearly lying to each other; Van’s twitchy energy is matching Tai’s reticence, which makes you wonder where she went instead of urgent care.
Speaking of withheld details, the hotel bros dinner: The two Joels clearly think they’re too good for earnest Jeff, and they openly berate Shauna for having her phone out at the table, so she lets them have it in a beautiful mini-monologue. (“Joel, you painful little boner. Do you really think that I give a shit about what you think of me? I promise you, you absolutely do not exist, you fucking nothing.”) This is after she’d escaped to the bathroom, where a mysterious stranger stood ominously in front of her stall, left a phone blaring Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts” from the next stall, and turned off the lights before leaving.
A clear yet bizarre message to send, and Shauna plays amateur detective by returning the phone to the host stand then calling to check on who might have picked it up. She gets a physical description, which, judging from the look on her face, seems to confirm a suspicion.
Back in the Wilderness, Travis does not appreciate being microdosed and turned into Lottie’s oracle, so he tries to steer her toward Akilah as someone more in tune with “it,” which won’t go poorly at all. Elsewhere, Shauna is visibly shaken by Lottie’s solstice tribute to her son (among the other dead) and exhumes his body to bury it somewhere else that’s only hers. But when she later discovers that Melissa has left an offering on his grave, she nearly guts the other Yellowjacket. Shauna holds a knife to her throat, threatening to disembowel her for witnessing her vulnerability, but then Mel shocks her by kissing her. And Shauna surprises all of us—OK, maybe just some of us—by full-on making out with her (knife still in place, of course).
Commentary
Right off the bat, the new season of Yellowjackets is falling into that trap of a series becoming too self-referential in an attempt to capitalize on its previous success: teenage Shauna lampshading Melissa’s elevated character with “did you grow a personality?” was just tongue-in-cheek enough, but combined with adult Shauna’s “speak to the manager energy” joke and callback, it started trying too hard. Season 1 near-perfectly established the series’ compellingly weird mix of familiar ‘90s nostalgia and standout horror, while season 2 suffered a bit of the sophomore slump exacerbated by too much time between seasons. To be honest, the show is cannibalizing itself a hair too much.
Not that I’m not a fan of how Yellowjackets examines the ways in which we self-mythologize—or self-eulogize—our lives to extract meaning from adolescent traumas and middle-aged disappointments. It’s just much more effective in the Wilderness portions, probably because of the richness of the Yellowjackets’ rituals and the fact that so much more needs to happen before they’re the dark tribe that we glimpsed in the pilot.
Last season’s finale, in which the Yellowjackets began to refine their rituals, showed that the hierarchy isn’t as simple as one queen in a deck of cards. Nat is Queen of the moment, at least until the next shuffle, but Lottie occupies her own powerful position as shaman/priestess; not to mention Van solidifying her place in the tribe as storyteller. And we still haven’t even met the Antler Queen; whether she’s an evolution of one of these roles, or a third central figure, is yet to be seen. Not to mention, there’s a solid six months left before their rescue. Here’s hoping that later episodes regain the self-confidence of just letting fans follow along wherever the story is at.
It’s fascinating to see how the fandom has taken the Shauna/Melissa kiss as a retroactive canonization of Shauna/Jackie, at the very least unrequited. The reasoning being, if Shauna is queer, then it changes how you read all of their interactions, especially Shauna stealing Jeff, Shauna eating Jackie’s ear, Shauna wearing Jackie’s clothes—I want to be you, I want to consume you, you know, the normal teen girl stuff. In fact, I love this series’ constant motif of the girls and women wearing each other’s clothes: Shauna with Jackie’s butterfly T-shirt, Misty with Nat’s leather jacket. It works so well on both levels, the familiar “we’re teenage girls and we swap with each other” energy but also the dimension of “I want to get inside your skin” as the only way to truly understand someone who meant so much to you.
Even though the present portions with the adult Yellowjackets are muddled in comparison to the Wilderness portions, the ensemble is still so fun to watch. Initially it was a head-scratcher how everyone seemed pretty chill with Lottie after they all almost killed Shauna at her urging just a few weeks ago, but much like the adult Yellowjackets, it seems like we have to shrug and go with it to uncover whatever motivations are buried beneath.
I am really excited for the likelihood that we’ll see adult Melissa this season. Do I think she’s some long-lost romance for Shauna? No. Do I think we’re about to see some messy queer drama with our cannibalistic rituals? You betcha. Could Hilary Swank be playing her? Buzz buzz buzz!
Fingers and Ears
- “Our credenzas are a regular fuck-fest”—you can hear the hyphen in Jeff’s delivery, it’s perfect.
- Same with Misty’s deadpan “I don’t know… do I?” while wearing the tiger face mask.
- I would watch an entire season of Repo Divorcées, I hope it shows up on every background TV screen going forward.
- “Pas D’âme” means “no soul,” but does that mean that the Man With No Eyes was stealing a soul, or was what was merely an awful coincidence all in Tai’s head?
‘Til next week!
