Yellowjackets – Full Circle Review

I just . . . don’t understand what the writers are trying to do with these final three episodes. I really don’t. The revelation of who killed Lottie – while earned in the sense that it was hinted at in previous episodes with the evidence Walter and Misty found – makes little to no sense in terms of how Callie has acted in the preceding episodes. The introduction and sudden disappearance of Melissa – including the murder of Van – seems to be a footnote in the story at this point. Why introduce the character to send her off into the wind with a host of loose plot threads? And in the past, I honestly cannot understand why no one is simply killing Shauna at this stage of the game.

I’ll start with Lottie’s death. So, we still don’t know precisely why Lottie didn’t get a plane sequence with her teenage self, but she did get a strange prophetic dream before she died that showed her in the morgue with Teen Lottie awaiting the coming of the “child of the Wilderness,” so I guess that has to be good enough? Which seems to indicate that Lottie knew she was going to die at the hands of Callie in the stairwell? I really don’t get it. I can understand Lottie fully believing, in her psychosis, that Callie is the child promised to the Yellowjackets for the one It took away. That tracks. But I genuinely don’t get Callie pushing her down the stairs and then spending the ensuing episodes having zero reaction to, well, anything that includes Lottie. She doesn’t get nervous, she doesn’t freak out, she’s not at all guilty. Now, maybe she is Shauna’s daughter and can turn her empathy off at the drop of a hat, but I don’t think so.

I don’t think Callie is pretending when she talks to Jeff about what she did. I do think she’s scared about what might happen to her. And I suspect she would have been scared about the consequences from the moment she left Lottie, dead at the bottom of those stairs, until the moment Misty confronted her. And she wasn’t. Not even a little bit. And we spent a lot of time with Callie in between those moments. Which lends me to believe that either no one told Sarah Desjardins that she was the killer or the writers just didn’t write to that ending. And that’s sloppy across the board. (And, for the record, I’m still incredibly frustrated with the entire Lottie arc this season.)

You know what else was sloppy writing? The entire ending to the Melissa arc. Because boy, was that a waste of time on every level. Sure, Melissa will likely be back in some iteration in season four (at least she better be to wrap up some of the many untied threads surrounding her), but she kills Van, runs away, and then . . . what happens? Well, Tai apparently wraps Van’s body in a rug and she and Shauna leave to bury Van in a random wooded area – which is idiotic on any number of levels, since someone/something will dig Van up. Did they clean the house? Did they just, I don’t know, leave blood all over the place and drive away in a rented van (which will also have blood/fibers/other damning evidence left in it)? What happens when Alex returns home? Is Melissa on the run or just biding her time before she returns to her family, knowing that her former teammates are out there, able to absolutely destroy her life. I guess there’s a threat of mutually ensured destruction with all of them at this point – and the threat of Walter turning on Misty is also hinted at in the episode – but really, what was the point of this? What was the point of Van getting killed at this stage of the game (something that Lauren Ambrose, in her post-episode nine interviews, also didn’t seem to understand – much like Simone Kessell in her post-episode four interviews, regarding Lottie’s death)? And why introduce Melissa just to kill Van? I honestly don’t understand the purpose behind this piece of the story, because if you wanted to give Tai a reason to team up with Misty, there were a host of better ways to get us to that point.

Over on the teen side of things, at least we finally got the long-awaited reveal that Pit Girl is Mari (kudos to Alexa Barajas for some stellar work in that chase sequence) and the Antler Queen is Shauna. But again, I don’t understand just why the anti-Shauna faction doesn’t rise up against her at any point in these final episodes. Why continue to follow a despot when you have the numbers to take her down? When you have enough people to decide, okay, we’re going to pack up and leave? Especially once Hannah makes it clear to Natalie that she is willing to do whatever it takes to get out of there alive. I also don’t quite grasp why they agreed to the hunt – and why even those who were not on board followed along. Gen getting Tai away from Shauna and over to Van proved that there were people who weren’t okay with what was happening and they were only going along because they thought they had to. The idea that maybe Mari would get away would have been more interesting if we saw that other pockets of resistance weren’t chasing her – which I assume was the case.

Now, here’s the thing. From the first episode – which I went back and re-watched after watching the hunt sequence in this one (and yes, they are very close to identical, so good work there) – there’s been a debate over if everything going on around the. Yellowjackets is supernatural or if it’s psychological. I’m pretty sure the hammer has fallen on the side of psychological at this stage of the game. Lottie is the only person who seems truly bought into the Wilderness as an entity – Shauna is using it as a tool to try and keep everyone playing along. But everyone else seems to be putting stock in the Wilderness solely because they know that if they don’t, they will appear to be “othered.” And that makes sense – it’s psychologically sound. And yet, the series doesn’t seem to want to fully commit. The teens stay trapped and under Shauna’s control because they fear what might happen if they step out of line – a common result of dealing with a punitive, despot, albeit on a smaller scale. Yet, when they hide away to talk about their resistance, they clearly have the numbers to actually do something. So, I don’t get the disconnect. This isn’t a shared psychological situation – none of them, save Lottie and a drugged-up Travis seem to truly believe in the Wilderness. But no one will do anything.

And now we come to the crux of my problem with season three on the whole – and something I worried might happen in past seasons. In the present, there’s no true external threat to the survivors. There’s no one trying to expose them anymore. There’s no one killing them off. Instead, they’ve created all the threats that exist to them on their own. Melissa is a loose cannon who already killed one of them. Shauna has murdered someone and covered it up with the help of the other three survivors – well, two, since Nat is dead. The only threat is each other. Hell, at this point, Jeff and Callie aren’t threats because they were both involved in murders on their own. They can only hurt one another from here on out. And that’s not particularly compelling. Tai, Misty, and Shauna are pretty awful people. I certainly don’t care if they live or die – and I’m almost hoping they die by the end of the series for all the pain they’ve caused others who have had no connection to their time in the wilderness.

On the teen side of things – which has always been the more interesting part of the story – we’ve also reached a narrative impasse that I’m not sure there’s a way out of. We know multiple characters still alive aren’t by the time of rescue. Which means the body count is going to rise before they leave. And yet Nat has taken their one hope for rescue and gotten a response on it. So, if we know they can’t all get out until many more bodies hit the floor, is all that is left murder and mayhem before they get free? Does anyone really want to watch that? I don’t. I don’t want to see Shauna’s reign of terror for another season, with more hunts – or other deaths – only to reach the inevitable end where the eight survivors make a pact and leave. We might not know the minutiae of what is to come in the story, but we know the major strokes of the painting. Do the writers force the audience to sit through the bloodshed to reinforce what we know will shape these characters as adults? Or do they skip over it – show us bits and pieces in the remaining time before the rescue? Or does Nat somehow get rescuers to arrive before the group is thinned and there’s a big surprise waiting in terms of the survivor count? That feels like it would be sloppy writing, but who knows at this point. I just know I don’t want to sit through a fourth season where Adult Tai and Misty try to take down Adult Shauna for ten episodes while Teen Shauna continues a reign of terror over the team and no one does anything about it (because we know Shauna is getting out of the past alive).

It’s rare that I finish a season finale as frustrated as I was when I finished this one. And I’m so frustrated because this is a series that had so much potential for so many things. All it had to do was avoid all the pitfalls it fell into this time around. Running the teen arc into a wall because we know enough about where it ends to not necessarily need to sit through the rest of its telling. Killing off characters with so much potential in ways that ended up having so little resonance to the plot of the season. I had high hopes for where things would go this season – hell, I had those hopes mid-season when the introduction of the scientists shook things up in a great way! – but here, at the close, all I am is utterly disappointed at where this story stands.