*Spoilers abound for Seasons 1–3 of Yellowjackets.*
No return, no return, we’ve returned to the twisted and traumatized world of Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson’s Yellowjackets, with its wild third season no longer hinting at the fresh levels of brutality to come. When we last saw our intrepid sheroes as youngsters in 1996 at the end of the second season, they’d cannibalized their second fellow survivor and quickly after their cabin burned to the ground leaving them shelterless in the Canadian wilderness in the dead of winter.
Our last glimpses of the women in the modern day timeline had Lottie (Simone Kessell) being carted away on a psych hold after trying to murder Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), Natalie (Juliette Lewis) accidentally killed by Misty (Christina Ricci), and two cops who’d gotten scarily close to the group’s secrets added to the body count — a body count that grows exponentially in the third season as the bloody events ramp up from the get-go.
“We hear the Wilderness and it hears us,” goes the group prayer from 1996 heralded by their spiritual leader Lottie (Courtney Eaton), who is convinced that there are entities in the woods who are there to help or hinder, so long as the girls continue offering major human sacrifices in the Wilderness’ honor. For the first two seasons there was a line between the past and the present. But in Season 3, that line has blurred to terrifyingly indistinguishable. Is this because there actually is an entity from the woods that has followed them, lived and walked alongside the survivors this whole time? Or has post-traumatic stress taken on a new form as the adults’ lives fall apart around them, often rooted in their own trauma-based decisions and arrested development thanks to their 1996 ordeal?
These survivors are deeply unwell and their experience becomes an allegory for the poison created by keeping massive trauma a secret instead of talking about it. It’s weirdly refreshing to have a story about trauma that doesn’t necessarily stem from the personal nature of familial abuse and sexual assault/violence but is rather the result of a random inciting incident that was entirely not personal and simply bad luck for all involved. With a cast of unreliable narrators, the story is able to explore coping mechanisms in a number of ways, but all of them so far unhealthy and perpetuating cycles of violence.
One key example is the manner in which Taissa’s (Tawny Cypress) inner darkness has horrifically externalized when we learned she had butchered her son’s dog in Season 1. Off the bat in Season 3, Tai’s “harmless” dine-and-dash prank has led to the death of another innocent bystander. As she uncovers the secret of her childhood haunting the Man with No Eyes, who else will be sacrificed? Has good Tai been the mask all along?
Sometimes, our belief in monster is enough to keep their presence active in our life. Could that explain the horrific noises spewing from the woods in 1996 that haunt the women in the present day? Or is there actually someone or something out there watching the girls? Could that be who/what is stalking them as adults, leaving packages on their doorstops and mysterious cell phones in restaurant bathrooms letting them know their surveillance continues?
We’re only three episodes into Season 3, and these questions are prominent. But their answers are almost irrelevant as the plot unravels along with what remaining threads of sanity the survivors have mustered. In particular Misty, our friendly neighborhood Angel of Death whose poison needle took Natalie from the present-day timeline — and whose alcoholism and desperation are exploding in ways that are certain to increase the body count by at least double before the season’s end.
Yellowjackets fans have theorized since season one that Mari (Alexa Barajas) is the so-called Pit Girl, the one from the opening scene of the pilot episode who is chased into a deep hole filled with stakes, afterward butchered and eaten by her former comrades. In Season 3, Mari does end up in a pit, though not in this same context. Is this foreshadowing of Mari’s eventual death? Or a bait-and-switch?
I intend my puns with the same fervor of the team’s hunts, and my questions only mount with every new minute of screen time. It’s no wonder Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) lives in fear of the girls and hides from them. It’s also not surprising that Travis (Kevin Alves) obeys every one of their commands and bows to their whims — including allowing Lottie to dose him with mushrooms — after seeing how coldly they butchered and ate his little brother Javi (Luciano Leroux).
The third season has also begun exploring more deeply the contagion of generational trauma and how cycles of violence can be passed down to children as Shauna’s daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins) has been leaning into her feral side — one we see mirrored in a rageful 1996 Shauna (Sophie Nelisse) whose profound sadness at losing her best friend Jackie (Ella Purnell) and her baby has morphed into verbal and physical abuse of her teammates. Callie sardonically dumping a bag of animal guts onto three popular girls at school and her mom endorsing the act after seeing it on video is funny but also brutally painful as this mother-daughter duo seem to only relate to each other when an extreme act of harm against another is involved.
But where Yellowjackets is wholeheartedly and gloriously beautiful with no caveats is in its queerness, which gets more and more open as each episode goes by. We’ve always had Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown) and Van’s (Liv Hewson) romantic relationship since the start. But now we have their adult counterparts going all in as well. The third season also opens by answering a major question about Shauna’s sexuality, confirming she is bisexual as her relationship with Melissa (Jenna Burgess) begins with a most steamy of complicated kisses.
With this development, we can go back to Seasons 1 and 2 and recode Shauna and Jackie’s frenemyship with this new queer text, which recontextualizes Shauna’s homosocial fixation on Jackie’s boyfriend as well as the moment when Shauna eats her ear, literally consuming the girl she’s been in love with who got away. All we have left is to see Misty — either in the past or present — kiss a girl and the many queer theories of Yellowjackets will have become canon. After all, this is a show for women, about women.
Thanks to Akilah (Nia Sondaya), the girls have figured out ways to hunt and raise animals as a food source. But we also know for a fact from Seasons 1 and 2 that they return to cannibalism by the next winter — their last feeds before some of them are rescued. This third season looks to explore fresh contexts of their downfalls, both in the past and the present, and the terrible ripple effects outward of their acute PTSD that will continue to burn up their lives like the fire that took their cabin home.
“Of all the ways to lose a person, death is the kindest,” young Lottie writes during a shared fever dream. The Wilderness tells me Season 3 will offer us this particular kindness in droves.
Yellowjackets is currently streaming on Showtime and carried by Paramount+.
