While Yellowjakets second season finale will air live on Showtime this Sunday evening, the episode is already available on the Showtime streaming app. This article will contain spoilers for all of season two of Yellowjakets, up to and including the season finale. Do not read this article if you have not seen all episodes of the second season.
With a burning house – and the tragic death of one of our core Yellowjackets – season two of Showtime’s Yellowjackets came to a close. While this season of television was much more uneven than the smash hit first season of the series – I’ll get into just what worked and what could have used a bit of extra relish to help balance the series a bit more (and what I’m hoping will balance the two parallel tales being told during the upcoming third season of the series) – there was still much to enjoy about this tale of the traumas visited on a group of teenagers trapped in the wilderness and how those traumas continue to manifest themselves within their adult counterparts.
While the two stories being told are, by nature, intertwined, I’m going to break my piece up by timeline, as it’s clear that one half of the dual story remains stronger than the other (which, of course, isn’t particularly shocking considering one is telling a story of survival at all costs while the other . . . is telling a lot of smaller stories that only connect when needed for dramatic purposes). So, let’s dig into the past before we get into the present.
1996 Wilderness Timeline
The continued question of whether or not there’s something supernatural at work in the wilderness – or if what’s happening is simply the result of a group of teenagers trying to wrap their heads around an increasingly dangerous and deteriorating situation, which is the theory I personally ascribe to at this stage in the game – lingered over the second season of Yellowjackets. With an increased focus on the additional team members trapped with our core group of girls (you know, the ones we know make it to adulthood), the writers wisely took steps to try and make us care about the potential victims for the cannibal cult as the team took major steps to accepting that cannibalism is going to be their way to survive the harsh winter and make it to summer. Of course, thanks to Coach Ben’s moral compass telling him that the girls are now a danger to themselves and anyone else not in their cult, the girls have a major problem on their hands with the torching of their cabin – but that’s an issue for season three.
The wilderness storyline was, much like in season one, the strongest aspect of season two. Now, much of that comes from the fact that watching teenagers succumb to cannibalistic rituals in the Canadian wilderness is, on its face, more inherently interesting than watching middle aged women try to grapple with their personal demons. But this section of the series almost always had a rawness, an emotional depth that was lacking in its other, more buttoned-up, half. Like a live wire, the power shifts within the hierarchy of the characters felt seismic. Lottie’s stumble from believer in the power of the wilderness to a lost acolyte, unable and unwilling to keep her role as leader of the pack was a turn I, personally, didn’t see coming. I thought for certain Lottie would be our Antler Queen, lording over the rest of the team, dictating the hunts to come. Instead, Lottie passed the torch to Nat, allowing her to finally feel a sense of belonging that she never did back in high school.* The outsider, who just let someone die in her place – something that would haunt her for the rest of her life, as we would see in the finale – is now the queen bee. Of course, knowing this show and the fickleness of teenage girls, her reign may be short-lived, but it’s interesting to see that the person who ends up the most guilt-ridden and emotionally damaged of the survivors had a time where she was the top of the food chain.
*Perhaps the most interesting part of the season finale was the brief snippet of Shauna’s journal that we were privy to before the fire became the major focus of the season’s final moments. Much like Nat, Shauna never saw herself as the focal point of the team. She always saw herself in Jackie’s shadow. However, here, in the wilderness, she’s become the butcher of the team – the one person they look to to complete the dirty work the others lack the stomach to handle. And her jealousy that she has been overlooked for Nat is something we will need to keep an eye on in season three. We saw that adult Shauna was rather dismissive of adult Nat – and that the pair never really got along all that well, which certainly might have roots in a potential power struggle that happened in the past.
Of course, the major question of the 1996 story is just how far the girls will go before they get rescued. We know that the hunts will continue until the end – we saw one in the opening moments of the series, shortly before the survivors were rescued. From context clues in the conversations of their older counterparts, it sounds like the hunts were the worst of the atrocities they committed within the wilderness. But how much of the ritualism was believed and how much was an act? In the present, Shauna claims that there was never a spirit and that the evil entity was, in fact, the girls themselves. Which prompts Lottie, a former believer in the spiritual presence – who also happened to be in the midst of a full-blown mental health crisis at that moment – to opine that it doesn’t matter if it was them. The point is, something evil happened there, and they must continue to feed those impulses to survive.
So, will there be more individuals who don’t fall in line? Coach Ben is already on the chopping block. Teen Shauna is angry and hurt. Might there still be a schism in the team? There’s something magnetic about watching a story for survival in the hands of some excellent performances (Sophie Nélisse and Sophie Thatcher, teen Shauna and teen Natalie, respectively, were the MVPs of this arc). Sure, I could have used a bit more of a look into the psyche of Lottie – we saw her faith wavering throughout the season but the series never spent enough time decoding where she stood on the supernatural. And Van’s descent into fervent belief in the strength of the wilderness wasn’t fully explained as well as it should have been (I’m hoping season three is Van’s big season, both in the past and present). But we have another season to get deeper into what makes some of our survivors tick. Still, it’s a tad worrisome that the writers, while being able to find the right tone for this part of the series (forcing the audience to become complicit in the girls’ actions by unflinchingly showing us Javi’s butchering and the results of the work was smart, not allowing us to look away from the violence and refusing to let us forget who Javi was), still haven’t quite found the right mix of narrative work and character development. We receive character beats in fits and starts, never really getting a full picture of a character at any point in time. Some of this is sleight of hand to keep secrets from revealing themselves too quickly, but we have spent two seasons with these characters and still know far too little about them across the board. Shauna and Misty remain the characters with the greatest nuance in the past – while still maintaining a air of mystery in the present, which can be frustrating as well – but there’s plenty of room to allow us to know more about the rest of the survivors. And we’ll need to in the coming seasons if the series wants to cement itself among the television greats.
2021 Present Timeline
While the past offered a story arc that felt fully finished, the present was much more of a mixed bag this season. The chief issue, as many have noted throughout the season, was that the story kept the survivors siloed in their individual arcs for much too long. One of the key components that makes the past storyline work so well is that the characters are always close enough to interact with one another throughout an episode. Sure, they may only work with one or two other characters, but that sense of familiarity and the ability to bounce off characters we care about is always present. In the adult timeline, we didn’t get that until the final episodes of the season and that was too late to make the arc really hit the way it needed to. The most complete arc of the season fell, fittingly, to adult Natalie (the great Juliette Lewis, who made the most of her swan song on the series). But the other women were left much less fulfilled. Simone Kessel did her damnedest with a Lottie who started off quite compelling but who kind of fell apart at the end into a jumbled mess of mental illness tropes without a ton of grounding in the story as a whole (I do hope that a brief hospitalization brings out a new, medicated, and lucid Lottie later in the series, so we can see Kessel’s take, because she’s absolutely electric on screen). But even with a hell of a cast to work with, the adult storylines fizzled when they should have been essential to linking the past to the present trauma of the story.
But let’s take a moment to talk about Nat’s final sacrifice. As soon as teen Nat let Javi drown, I had a sneaking suspicion that adult Nat wasn’t long for this world. Looking at everything she has endured to get to that moment where she steps in to save Lisa from Misty, it’s evident that Nat’s guilt over Javi’s death never left her. Like the other survivors, she tried to ignore her trauma – in her case, self-medicating with drugs and alcohol – but she could never shake the feeling that it should have been her that died and not Javi. And that’s a hell of a feeling to carry with you throughout life, compounded by her continued close relationship with Travis (who also spent his time self-medicating). Losing Travis brought back the feelings of losing Javi – a feeling of impotence at not being able to stop him from taking his own life, much like that paralyzing fear of watching Javi die to save her own. Her time with Lottie allowed her not to forgive herself, but rather gave her the chance to understand that she can’t make right the past, even if she tried to save Lisa from herself throughout the season. Lisa became her Javi stand-in, and when the chance came to step in and accept the fate she felt she was due, she did it. After all, like adult Shauna, Natalie was well aware that the wilderness didn’t choose Javi to die. Rather, the girls refused to act, causing his death. Much like Walter White watching Jane choke to death in Breaking Bad, sometimes intentional inaction is just as damning as acting. While it’s disappointing that we won’t get to watch Lewis continue to grace our screens as Nat, it’s absolutely the smartest move the series could make at this juncture. Natalie’s arc had, at this point, played itself out*. The only way to continue her story would be to have her accept her actions and grow, but this is a series that cannot have its characters reach that level of self-awareness at this juncture. Instead, they are doomed to continue to bat away at their respective traumas, slowing drowning themselves until they can reach a point of acceptance or succumb to the water slowly rising above their heads – which can’t happen when we have several more seasons to get through.
*There’s an argument to be made (and I’ve seen it made by several TV critics) that the series just didn’t know what to do with adult Natalie and the choice to kill her off felt rushed in light of how much the character was solely defined by her grief over Travis’ death and her aborted attempt to reveal Lottie to be a fraud. And to be honest, I can absolutely see this as a valid argument. It’s true Nat never got a storyline a la Shauna or Misty – wherein she held down a corner of the narrative solo until the threads converged to bring the group together. And yes, teen Nat has much more to do, with her ascension to Antler Queen for season three. But I’d argue that the path this season pushed Nat to her inevitable death. It was all there, laid out to be anticipated. If you want to argue that the show should have given Lewis more to play over the two seasons, well, I’d absolutely join you there. I would have loved more time fleshing Nat out in season one and more to do in season two. But I think the narrative arc for Nat was fully realized this time around.
And that’s a major issue with this facet of the series that can’t get easily solved. We now have four core Yellowjackets in the present arc who can’t seem to get out of their own way and grow – and the writing needs them to keep staying in this state to drive the story until it gets close to an endgame. Shauna’s murder issue appears to be solved (which, at least, frees her up for something a bit more interesting than dodging the cops next year). Misty is in emotional free-fall after killing Nat, although she has Walter to try to keep her steady (that makes three known kills for Misty at this stage, which is a lot). Perhaps this death will shake her in ways that push her story into a more interesting place than the kooky homicidal gal who has a penchant for killing her best friends? Either way, I hope it gives the great Christina Ricci something new to play and keeps Elijah Wood around, as their chemistry is nothing short of compelling.
And then there’s Van and Taissa. As I mentioned above, I’m really hoping season three is a Van-focused one, as she remains the show’s biggest cypher of all. Adult Van’s late introduction in the season didn’t give us much time to get to know her – and what we did see was an untrustworthy characterization. She claims to have a terminal cancer, but she also expertly manipulated Tai into calling off the psych consult – which, in turn, led to Nat’s death. Perhaps adult Van will be more impacted by the death of a friend than teen Van was with the death of Javi? And how will this decision impact the growing relationship between her and Tai (who seems to have conveniently forgotten all about her comatose wife, son, dog, and job as a Senator)? Lots of holes in this section of the story that only hurt the series and the character development along with it. We know Tai continues to have her other personality, both in the past and present, but again, this plot point was conveniently dropped in the back half of the season to allow for Lottie’s psychosis and Nat’s sacrifice to take precedence. Perhaps it’s a case of having a too expansive cast, but really, the writing needs to be more focused and tighter. And we need to keep the adult characters together for as long as possible in season three, as the story needs them connected in order to truly flow from the past arcs.
And, ultimately, that’s what the series needs to do moving forward: There needs to be a propulsive element to the present story to match the past. Without Natalie and Lewis’s firecracker presence, that storyline is already down one of its strongest assets. Yes, the great Melanie Lynskey has been holding it down even when Shauna’s story hasn’t been particularly compelling this season (spending so long slogging through the Adam Martin arc was not great, even if Lynskey got some killer monologues to go along with it). But we need something within this timeline that will create the same burst of energy we get in the past arc each week. We need these women to get together and truly start grappling with their trauma – we need them to talk about what happened then (at least as far as we’ve seen) and what has happened in the present to get them to this point. This is a chance for the show to allow a connection between these women that it has denied us thus far. There’s a lot to be reckoned with moving forward and rather than separate them again and allow them to process separately, the writers absolutely need to keep the gang together. You have some of the best actresses of a generation. Let them have a chance to do the work together.
Final Thoughts
So, there you have it. The mixed bag that was season two of Yellowjackets. When the writers were able to clearly place the spotlight on characters, their actions, and the ripple effect those actions had on the past, present, and psyches of the characters, the series felt fresh and compelling. The twists and turns in the past felt, for the most part, earned. But there was a tendency to tell rather than show with some key moments. I would have loved to see just how the card game was chosen for the hunt, and what led Van to be the master of ceremonies in the past (again, we need more clarity into Van in season three). I would have loved to see our adult characters converge on Lottie’s compound in episode five, giving them time to work out some issues, learn about each other, and see where the fault lines fell in the group much earlier. Then, perhaps, that finale would have felt more earned on an emotional level for everyone involved. And, while the Adam Martin arc needed to wrap up (and we got some fun comedy out of it along the way thanks to the always wonderful Warren Kole as Jeff), it could have been less of a slapstick situation in the finale and more finessed throughout the season.
But, even with these issues, watching Yellowjackets each week was so much fun for me. I don’t buy into the supernatural elements that are being teased, so I’m not someone who looks for clues throughout – sorry if you came here looking for something like that – but I genuinely enjoy watching the characters grapple with their trauma and inner demons week in and week out. I hope that in season three, we get more of the adult Yellowjackets working together (or even at cross-purposes) and even more characterization to help flesh out these women in the past and present. There’s a lot of time still left in the wilderness and plenty of scars to explore in the present. I’m excited to see what’s in store for season three.
