Yellowjackets Season 3 Summary & Speculation
“What if NONE of this is happening for a reason?”
“What if all of this were happening for a reason?”
Any fan of Lost remembers the first time Locke asked this question of Jack. It was in ‘White Rabbit’ during the first season. We knew very little about the survivors or the island by that point, the biggest concern of the survivors was finding a water supply. We weren’t yet clear that these two men would represent one of the major conflicts of Lost by that point, either.
What we did know was that there was something strange about the island. Locke had his reasons to think it was beautiful, Jack had reasons to think it was hell. The question was about whether the survivors of Oceanic 815 had just happened to crash on an island in the Pacific or whether some other force would be involved. It would take pretty much the entire series and a lot of deaths — including Locke’s own — for us to learn that the survivors had been chosen by a guiding force to come that island and that in fact ‘all roads lead here’.
In the penultimate episode of Season 3 of Yellowjackets — ironically titled ‘How the Story Ends’ — in the present Van (Lauren Ambrose) is standing over the body of Miri (Hilary Swank), another survivor who faked her death and was being held prisoner by Shauna and the other survivors mainly because they had no idea what to do next. Van stood over her Miri with a knife and Miri said something that none of the other survivors in the present day were willing to acknowledge about what they did out there. “You know none of this real, right?”
At the end of the third season it’s clear Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson are asking using Miri to put into words what may very well be the thesis statement of Yellowjackets. It is the polar opposite of the question Locke posed to Jack and indeed it goes against everything that Lottie, essentially the Locke of this show, posed when she began to argue for ‘The Wilderness’ in the first season.
The consequences have been far greater since they accepted her as The Queen: in the second season they committed their first act of cannibalism and then engaged in their first hunt of a teammate. Lotte surrendered the crown to Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) but the belief in the mysticism was fully embraced, nevertheless. And by the time rescue arrive, so many of them were committed to the myth that when it walked it, Lottie’s first action was to drive an axe in one of the research team.
We’ve already seen that the teenagers don’t care about survival any more or even really being rescued. They abandoned morality when they sentenced Coach Scott to death when Shauna bullied them into the verdict (I still think she set the fire, though the show hasn’t confirmed it yet), planned to execute him until Lotte said a vision said they needed him for rescue and then after Natalie killed them Shauna (Sophie Nelisse) used it as a power grab, even though she’d wanted Scott dead in the first place. There is now a fundamental divide in the survivors about whether or not to go back but while at least some of them are trying to find a way to cover up what they did, it’s clear Shauna is only interested in holding on to power. She doesn’t care about any of the other survivors, she made it very clear when she shot Mari, her biggest acolyte in the penultimate episode when she tried to defy her. Shauna clearly just wants to be in charge and she’s more than willing to kill anybody to stay alive.
By this point it’s clear that more than a few survivors have come to believe that everything that ‘the wilderness’ is just Lottie’s mania. It’s also clear quite a few other people do agree with this but a kind of traumatic delusion has essentially hung over most of the survivors. They don’t want to stay but they don’t want to go back. When Van points out just how horrible the coming winter will be Tai (Jasmine Savoy Brown) tries to deny it. Van makes it clear: “We ate a f — -ing kid” Not even that seems to deter Tai about it; by this point its very clear she is doing the best job of compartmentalizing what happened.
It’s also clear in the present why there’s such a divide between Misty and the rest of the Yellowjackets. During the end moments in the past in the penultimate episode Misty (Samantha Hanratty) revealed for the first time that she’d kept the transponder from the plane — which she had broken in the first place because she felt she had friends. When Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) learned this fact, she was justifiably furious: we will learn by the end of the season finale that rescue could have come had she just revealed this initially, and everything in the series could have been avoided. And it’s pretty clear that everyone who came back eventually learned that truth and has justifiably been holding it over Misty ever since.
It’s clear now Misty has spent the last twenty-five years trying to both atone for her role in what happens while denying her fellow survivors justifiable disdain. It’s also clear no matter how much work she does to clean up the messes of the survivors (something she’s repeatedly done over the series) they’re never going to either appreciate her or even consider her one of them. It also explains why Misty has been going to such lengths with Walter and everyone else to argue she has a bond with them that matters; if she didn’t keep up the lie, she’d have to face the truth about her role in what happened and she can’t do it.
But to be fair, neither can any of the other survivors. Which brings me to the next point of this. Many of them — particularly Shauna and Tai — have spent the last twenty-five years denying their responsibility in what happened all those years ago. As a result all of the survivors have been suffering from a toxic blend of survivor’s guilt, trauma and massive paranoia. If Lost had characters who refused to share information with each other led to horrible consequences, in Yellowjackets we see the long term consequences. The survivors have done a much better job than The Oceanic 6 did at maintaining ‘the lie’ in terms of how long they’ve been able to cover it up. But the difference is from the moment they learned that people stopped looking for them after a year — and more importantly to them, that the world had moving on — many of them began to develop a complex about being forgotten, anger at the world that some have never let go. So there’s a very good argument that the whole reason everything that’s happening in the present is for one reason: they want attention.
There’s also a bigger argument that the trauma has affected them so deeply — Shauna in particular — that she sees enemies everywhere. Throughout the season Shauna has become increasingly convinced that everyone was trying to get her — and tellingly her alone. That everything that happened to her had a rational explanation — Misty herself explained what happened with the freezer was an accident — has done nothing to alter Shauna’s mindset one bit.
It’s been fascinating to watch Melane Lynskey during the third season. Shauna has been trying to deny the horrible side of her for the past two seasons and she’s still doing it throughout the third. Shauna has increasingly become reckless and more inclined to embrace her violent and psychotic side, yet she still is determined to argue that she’s the victim. She’s now convinced there is a massive conspiracy held by everybody she meets about knowing the truth about what she did and everyone else, not just her fellow survivors but even her husband and daughter, are incidental. Like Walter White during his days as Heisenberg, she has become convinced that everyone’s actions are all about her. She’s also made it clear that ‘the only way to be safe is to be the last one standing’. That those actions might lead to the truth coming out doesn’t enter her mind.
But she’s not the only one convinced of that delusion. Throughout the season Tai (Tawny Cypress) has been using the idea of ‘the Wilderness’ to argue that giving it what it wants has been helping Van stay alive. Van was horrified by this and suspects Tai of killing Lottie as a sacrifice. Tai denied it, but in ‘A Normal Boring Life’ we saw her willing to smother a man with a pillow in an attempt to keep Van from dying of cancer.
This led to the confrontation at the end of How The Story Ends where Van had a chance to kill Melissa but couldn’t bring herself to do it. Melissa took advantage of her lapse to kill her with that same knife. Van’s death hit me hard, even though it shouldn’t have come as a shock. Given her diagnosis — it was clear she was headed for hospice care regardless of intervention — it was a matter of time before it happened. That it was a violent death at the hands of one of her former friends shouldn’t have come as a shock either: at this point every death that happened in the present is a result of one or more of the survivors.
And as the Season 3 finale — fittingly called Full Circle — unfolds we see the hunt that unfolded in the opening of the series through new eyes. At first it seemed to be a picture of a united front; now we know from the start that it was an unnecessary tragedy. We saw the animals being poisoned by Akilah (it’s still unclear at this point whether she’s alive in the present) because she no longer believes Lottie’s visions. Like Travis she is convinced that what is going on is a delusion and that Lottie is leading it. We see Shauna doing everything in order to make sure Mari is the target of the hunt, even though it has been rigged by Van this time to make sure that Tai and she are safe. It’s now clear there was far less unity to what happened then before and that in many cases division unfolded. While this was happening we see the monster Shauna has no become with Melissa who spent the season as her hanger on and now has lost any belief in her. Even when she tries to kill Shauna at the end that doesn’t earn her respect: “I knew you were boring,” she says echoing Jackie’s line.
As the season finale in the present unfolds we finally learn who actually killed Lottie: Callie. What’s clear is that Lottie was just as deluded in the present as she was in the past and we can’t rule out the possible that what happened was a combination of guilt and her illness. Was she trying to force Callie actions in that final scene is unclear but her belief that Callie is what Shauna couldn’t be is very much the sign of her own madness. Callie confessed her sins when confronted first to Misty and then to her father and clearly felt remorse and guilt in a way we have never seen in Shauna either as a teenager or in the present. And it’s clear that Joel realized that he has failed his daughter and now knows the only way to stay safe from Shauna is to get as far from her is possible.
It’s clear at this point in the series that Shauna’s madness had completely overtaken her. In her final confrontation with Misty she seems uninterested in what Callie might have done and more about blaming Misty for her role in it. Shauna sees no responsibility or accountability in what she’s done and that is very clear in her manifesto at the end. Shauna’s statement in which she says that they haven’t remembering what happened to them is not because of the trauma but because it was when they were having so much fun, killing and hunting their friends, is a sign of how she still refuses to acknowledge responsibility. By the time she was a ‘warrior queen’ no one who was following her trusted her or even liked her any more and as we have seen she was completely outwitted by Natalie and her allies who managed to complete fool her long enough for Natalie to summon rescue.
Indeed Tai’s memories at the end of the episode are clearer. When she tells Misty that Shauna instigated much of what happened, she is negating her role in it (something that she can now do safely that Van is dead and in the ground) but is completely justified about what is happening in the present. Adam’s death did come at her hand and Van would still be alive had Shauna acted independently. Blaming her for what happened to Natalie is a stretch but there is little doubt she’s doing it to earn Misty’s trust in the present. And Shauna was responsible indirectly for every death we’ve seen in the past this season and she definitely did not want to get rescued.
The Season 3 finale more than anything we’ve seen so far is the biggest confirmation that ‘The Wilderness’ in both timelines is all in the heads of the survivors which they use to their own advantage to either maneuver for power or excuse their actions. And now that rescue seems eminent (it almost certainly will happen at some point in Season 4) a lot of the actions of the characters in the present are perfectly logical.
Travis and Natalie were the most damaged of the survivors in the present because they did were the most fervent non-believers in the Wilderness while they were out there and have the most guilt for what happened. The isolation from Misty makes perfect sense as does Misty desperate attempt in the present to cling to the ‘trauma bond’ between them. It’s her form of denial for the fact that everyone knew her role in their being there all that time and Natalie certainly never forgave her.
Lottie never truly got over her delusion for the rest of her life, preferring to believe the idea of the Wilderness then accept her own responsibility in all of the deaths that happened out there. There is a possibility she set her own death in motion at the end of the episode rather than face her role in it or that her own madness told her it had to happen.
And it’s very clear to me that Van basically never forgave Tai for what happened after the researchers came along. It is not just that she denied the possibility of rescue initially but that she decided to essentially sacrifice Mari for it — and didn’t feel any real guilt about it even 25 years later — was too much for their relationship to exist. Ironically Van’s death is at least partially Tai’s fault: it was only when she reached out to Van that she was lured back into the madness, leading her to die before her time — albeit not before that.
The biggest question to answer in the past right now is who really set the fire? In the present the only survivor who is still not accounted for in the present is Akilah. Her fate will no doubt have to be resolved in Season 4 (assuming it happens, but given the high ratings for Season 3 over all that seems a matter of time)
I should also mention I’m not surprised at the backlash that seems to be online about some ‘fans’ of the show who have argued either the pace is too slow or have problems with the character arcs. Indeed 20 years after Lost dropped I imagine the attention span of the TV fan show is shorter. I don’t know if this is just frustration as to Paramount+ or Showtime for daring to only drop one episode a week or the usual nonsense by fans who want all the answers at once and then aren’t happy when they come. I’m inclined to think it’s the latter given that no matter what the answers are they can never be better than the speculation and we know that’s never going to change.
As for the attitude of some fans about the changes in character arcs, well, this shows that no matter what some female character does on any TV show, she’s damned if she does and damned if she doesn’t. Skyler White tries to stop her evil husband to protect her family? Out the knives come for Anna Gunn for being a killjoy. Walter White goes from Mr. Chips to Scarface? Everyone loves it. Shauna goes from June Cleaver to Elizabeth Bathory (google the latter if you don’t know it). How dare they? The fact that Shauna is played as a grownup by Melanie Lynskey, who as a reminder launched her career played a teenage girl who used her fantasy life as an excuse to become a murderer in Heavenly Creatures, really should have been the biggest blinking light as to the idea that Shauna hadn’t changed that much as an adult then she was as a child. (The actors who are playing the adult versions of the Yellowjackets were not cast by chance.)
And the possibility that what’s happening in the Wilderness in 1996 and in the present has a completely rational explanation? Well, that’s gotta piss off the fanbase who really needs there to be some kind of supernatural presence on this show. In a sense they want to think, like the question I posed at the start, that all the horrible things we’ve seen are happening for a reason. Because if they aren’t, if everything that’s happening in the past and is happening now, is just all in the girl’s heads — then what does it say about the viewer that they love watching a bunch of teenage girls hunt, kill and eat people in one timeline and behave so horribly to everybody in another? If “we know that none of this is real” then some viewers have to question why they’ve been enjoying this show so much. They might have to ask questions about what kind of person that makes them.
Perhaps that divide might exist among the gender and sexual preferences of so many fans who’ve wanted to consider Yellowjackets an antidote to all the series that have white male antiheroes do horrible things and receive acclaim for it. Perhaps they’ve wanted to have it both ways for awhile and ‘The Wilderness’ gives them an out for loving this show so much. If that out is taken away, well, then we’re left like Shauna at the end of the season, writing a manifesto acknowledging that the horrible things she did were not something she ashamed of but are actually the happiest memories of her life. What does that say about her as a woman? What does that say about us as a species? Better to say she’s a victim of bad writing then to admit our own darkness, something that we’ve seen the characters wanting — even preferring — to give in to then live with in the real world.
None of this, I should add, has troubled me one bit watching the roller coaster that was Season 3 of Yellowjackets. It remains very much a contender for one of the Best Shows of the Decade and indeed the Emmys really need to consider it seriously for Best Drama in a still relatively wide-open field. Those who still want more from this after everything that they’ve seen this just go to prove that haters are gonna hate and at this point, I knew they were going to be boring. Maybe there is no reason for the actions in the past or the present but that doesn’t make me love this show any less. Yellowjackets went out of its way to embrace the insanity that was all things of both the original and the return of Twin Peaks. And while Lynch sadly left us before Season 3 aired I think he would tip his cap to everything Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson have done to this point, including infuriating the fan base. “If you haven’t pissed off a significant amount of your viewers you’re not doing your job right,” Lynch would no doubt have told them. Mission accomplished. And I can’t wait for the next season.
My Score: 5 stars.
