Time to Go Back to the Woods
Yellowjackets Returns For Another Crazy F — -ing Season (Best Series of the Decade Alert)
When it comes to drama I’ve always been a fan of a ‘traditional’ narrative. Whether it be the procedurals like Homicide, the serialized nature of Breaking Bad & The Americans, the dynamics of such period pieces as Mad Men, or the espionage of Homeland, I always have favored them.
But there is a part of me that will, every so often, embrace the fantastic and surreal. It is why I’ve been drawn to such masterpieces over the years as The X-Files and Lost, why I found such kinship with Buffy and Fringe, why I always had such a place in my heart for the often dreamlike quality of Atlanta & Barry. But I have rarely seen ever since Fringe ended in 2012 dramas that completely embrace what should probably be called batshit when the viewer could watch a series and wonder how far are the writers willing to take it. Oh it comes up occasionally: The Leftovers was more than willing to lean into it and it looks like Severance is more than willing to take up the narrative. But few shows are willing to begin insane and lean into it hard.
Then in December of 2021 Showtime brought us Yellowjackets. And if ever there was a series that was willing to take up the mantle of David Lynch’s masterpiece Twin Peaks and perhaps go as far he might have been had the networks not forced its hand, it is this brilliant, utterly insane series which showed a bunch of teenage girls hunting, killing and eating one of their teammates in the pilot and has only gotten more bizarre since then.
While most viewers were watching the final season of Succession in the spring of 2023 I went all-in on Yellowjackets second season. My readers know what my opinion of the former series was at the time and while I did do a mea culpa during that last season there was no point I regretted my decision to fully watch every insane moment of Yellowjackets. It was at the very top of my series in 2023 and I suspect even had I been a fan of Succession at the time and had watched every episode (still not something I’m willing to commit to, for the record) I hold that Yellowjackets is a masterpiece in its own right and would match it episode for episode with the last two seasons of Succession or any of the other dramas it was competing against during that period. The only drama that was at its level was Better Call Saul and that’s a different type of masterpiece. Needless to say I’ve been waiting with bated breath for Season 3 to finally premiere and its been a long cold winter during that two years. There has been a lot of great television to fill that void, of course — The Gilded Age, Slow Horses, Will Trent — but none that have scratched that itch of “how insane can you get?” And then this Sunday, the first two episodes finally premiered.
When we last left our rag-tag bunch of fine young cannibals back in 1996, they had just committed their first ‘hunt’ — telegraphed in many ways since Season 1 — and ended up killing and devouring Javi, who had no spoken since being found early that season. Shauna had given birth and her child had died — either still-born or devoured alive, we have no way of knowing — and they had just elected the teenage Natalie as the new queen — or should I say the wilderness did. The season ended with their cabin having been burnt to the ground and it is widely suspected Coach Scott — who has become understandably terrified of his team — set the fire out of desperation.
Meanwhile in the present, the six surviving Yellowjackets (that we know about so far) had assembled in the cult led by Lottie (Simone Kissell). All of them were reeling with all the horrible things they done in the first season and a half — most of which had happened because none of them trust each other or are willing to talk to each other. And while they were getting drunk Shauna (the incredible Melanie Lynskey) said she barely remembered what happened out there. That is a lie, of course; she wrote everything down in her journal which she had on her ever since they came back. Lottie, in the midst of the insanity that has gripped her whole life, convinced them they needed to give the wilderness what it wanted. It was their intention to try and call the hospital, so they started a hunt. Only it turned real and they went after Shauna. Her daughter showed up and Lottie shot her. Misty (Christina Ricci, of course) tried to inject her with phenobarbital but she missed and got Natalie — the woman she has spent her life convinced was her best friend — in the heart.
It has been six weeks since Natalie died. (As with Lost most of the action in the present has been time compressed: we’re still in 2021 as this third season begins.) And the remaining survivors are doing — well, what they’ve been doing for the last twenty-five years. Burying their feelings and denying that anything bad has ever happened. Shauna is still trying to pretend that she cares for Cara but her daughter knows that her mother is at the very least a murderer and her father is a blackmailer. Shauna is continuing her journey of blowing everything up and pretending she cares about what she’s doing. In the season premier, she got high on her husband’s pot and didn’t seem to notice when her daughter was suspended. In the second episode she tried to say she was getting back to normal but when her husband needed her for the business she could barely be bothered to pay attention at the table and basically insulted her husband’s backers. Melanie Lynskey continues to awe as the adult Shauna someone who wants to bury her head in the sand but who in her heart embraces chaos.
Tai (Tawny Cypress) has spent the last few weeks basically continuing to burn her old life. She’s now rejected both her wife and child and her seat as a state Senator to take care of Van (Lauren Ambrose) her teenage girlfriend who she rejected for normalcy and has come back to now to find that she is dying of cancer. Van is more connected to reality than Tai but she agrees to go out to dinner at a fancy restaurant. Tai decides to dine and dash and the waiter chases after them. However because there’s always a darker edge he suffers a heart attack and dies. Tai knows this but Van doesn’t — yet.
Misty has gone into complete denial. Rather than face the fact she killed her best friend she spent the first episode going through Natalie’s storage unit, wearing her clothes and getting as wasted as she would. She didn’t attend Natalie’s funeral and when Walter goes after he tells her again that her friends aren’t good for her. The next day Misty receives a call from Shauna and again thinks that she is more important to her friends then she is. She doesn’t know they never called her for the memorial or that they openly mocked her at the wake. The only reason Shauna called Misty in the first place is because she was going out for dinner and she needed someone to babysit Lottie who turned up on her front door unannounced.
All of the adult performers are brilliant but Ricci reaches new levels in the first two seasons. One of the great things about Yellowjackets is that in the flashbacks it reveals how much the characters have changed — or in certain cases, remain in arrested development — since their time in the wilderness. The writers point out that Misty has never been able to escape who she was at any time in her life: she will always considered a loser, always an afterthought and still desperate for approval from her friends that will never come. Ricci is heartbreaking in these two seasons as she reveals she’s incapable of accepting that not even what happened twenty-five years ago has made her any more popular: she’s still a loser, still unloved, still unwanted and she just can’t accept it. If she doesn’t get an Emmy nomination this year the Citizen Detectives need to investigate.
In the past, it is now the summer and the teenage girls have all fully embraced the delusion. Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) has taken the role of the leader as the wilderness and now all are embraced in the idea of the summer festival. Van (Liv Herson) leads a narrative of the summer festival and is still perfectly happy with Tai (Jasmin Savoy Brown). They are playing capture the flag, engaging in dining, and basically in fantasy. Only the teenage Shauna (the incredible Sophie Nelisse) is still in the world of reality and refuses to acknowledge any part of their role playing. They are searching for Coach Scott (whose fate in the present remains unknown) who they all believe is the one who set the fire. Somehow he continues to survive, having found supplies and is now building traps to try and keep safe. In the first episode of the season he captured Mari (who we still don’t know about in the future) and denied setting the fire. But it is clear he has realized the monsters the girls have become though they are denying it immensely. It is possible that some of them know where he is but that remains unknown.
Lottie (Courtney Eaton) is still attempting to commune with the wilderness and is trying to use Travis to find a way to do so. By this point we know that this will eventually drive Travis crazy and possibly to kill himself but he seems to have a conduit to the wilderness. Of course, it could be a delusion: Lottie has confessed her psychotic disorder and we know that she may have infected the rest of them as teenagers.
That may be the most brilliant thing about Yellowjackets so far: even two full seasons in Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson have not yet revealed whether what is going on in the woods is supernatural or just a series of horrible events, either after the crash or in the present. Everything that is going on in the camp may have a rational explanation and the rest is so much of the disordered minds of the teenagers. Similarly every strange thing that is going on in the present — Tai’s visions, Lottie’s delusions — may be some kind of supernatural event or just the product of decades of trauma. The writers have not tipped their hand yet.
What they are willing to do is show that of the survivors (and we’re still not sure how many of them did come back yet) have spent their entire adult lives denying what happened to them and trying to bury it. All of them have failed miserably and it is clear that they would rather die — or kill — then let the truth come out. Which still begs the question: why? We’ve seen their lives as adults and they’re all essentially miserable in their own ways. Some of them — Misty and Tai — are functioning adults but none of them are remotely emotionally healthy. Van is facing death, and she seems willing to go to her grave not telling a soul. And they are so dead inside that none of them truly seemed to really be dealing with Natalie’s death, certainly not at her memorial and none of them bothered to tell Misty, the person who needed to move on the most. All of them are surviving but none of them are living.
The writers go out of their way each season to draw parallels between the past and the present. In the past, only Shauna has acknowledged the reality of what they are doing; in the present Lottie is the only one who accepts it, and in both time periods they are considered buzz-kills. In both time periods the survivors are in complete denial and they won’t accept their actions either while they are happen or when rescue comes. And it’s clear none of them are willing to accept outside help from those would offer it: Shauna refuses to deal with her family; Misty refuses to accept the affection of Wilbur (please make Elijah Wood a regular!) and Van clearly thinks her death is all she deserves.
I might have made Yellowjackets sound depressing and anybody who’s watched it knows its anything but that. It’s thrilling, it’s hysterical; it’s crazy; it’s heartbreaking and it’s fun in a way few of the great dramas of Peak TV ever have been. Even if it were merely an excuse to get some of the greatest teenage actresses together as adults, it would still be worth the time and energy. And the work of the casting director to cast teenage girls who both in appearance and personality are almost exactly like their adult counterparts truly deserves an Emmy. The fact that Samantha Hanratty and Christina Ricci could very well be mother and child at this point just shows how brilliant they are.
And the series is willing to take risks: it was a masterstroke to kill off Juliette Lewis’s Natalie at the end of Season 2. Lewis was clearly one of the greatest performers in the cast in a role of a lifetime. Someone was clearly going to have to die in the present to move the action forward but the fact it was the most engaging performer is a move I don’t think I’ve seen any series attempt since Peter Quinn died in Homeland. (And since it looks like Hilary Swank will be joining the cast this season, the show keeps finding great performers.)
It was almost certainly a coincidence that Yellowjackets debuted almost exactly thirty years since Twin Peaks ended its network run in May of 1991. But in all the years since it disappeared no other drama on any service has been more willing to embrace the mantle of Lynch’s masterwork than this series. It refuses to be pinned down and you don’t care because it’s so much fun on the journey. It has been willing to push the boundaries of acceptability in ways that you don’t think you’d be willing to (remember how everybody devoured Jackie in what appeared to be a Roman feast?!) and then continuing to double down. And no series since Lost has had viewers debating after every episode what questions the writers need to answer or what new mysteries have been revealed.
Perhaps Yellowjackets will flag the closer it gets to the end and there will be outcry that the solution was ‘disappointing’. I don’t believe that’s possible at this level, considering we’re not entirely sure what is going on yet but at this point there’s no logical ending for the show. And even it flags I don’t care. There’s something going on in those woods we don’t know, but I’m certain whatever we learn will be wondrous and strange.
My score: 5 stars.