A Prayer to Yellowjackets’ Forest Spirit: Please Let This Be the Girls’ Last Season in the Woods
Oh Screaming Tree Spirit of the Forest, whose ways are mysterious and whose Man is No-Eyed, we beseech thee: Release those high school girls from your messed-up wilderness ASAP, amen.
Yellowjackets is back for Season 3 on Paramount+ with Showtime today (and will air on the linear channel Sunday at 8/7c). While it’s nice to see the stranded soccer team and their adult counterparts again after so long — the Season 2 finale aired in May 2023 — I had one, overarching feeling while watching the two-episode premiere: Let’s move this along, already.
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As you’ll see in the recap below, we immediately find out what happened to the crash survivors after their cabin burned down. The short version? They made it through the winter, but they’re certainly not OK… and getting less stable by the moment. Case in point: A really angry, grief-stricken, increasingly violent young Shauna, who thinks nothing of sinking her teeth into Mari’s hand in order to win [checks notes] a capture-the-flag-esque game and who digs up her infant’s corpse only to bury it again in a different location.
I’m ready for the past storyline to quickly get the teens to the point it teased in the series premiere: masked anarchy, punji sticks, bedlam, and then on to the equally intriguing aftermath of trying to assimilate back into their suburban Jerseycore lives. But in the meantime, let’s review the highlights of the two-episode premiere: “It Girl” and “Dislocation.”
HOW I SPENT MY WINTER VACATION | All things considered, the girls seem to be doing OK in the wilderness in the wake of the cabin fire. It’s summer. They’ve built huts. They’re hunting and catching food. They even have enough energy to play run-and-chase games in the woods, though when Shauna is about to lose, she bites Mari on the hand, hard. In fact, Shauna seems to be in a permanent bad mood stemming from when Natalie (and not Shauna) was named Antler Queen last season. She’s also, y’know, traumatized from the twin hits of Jackie’s death and her own stillbirth.
As Van regales the girls with a bit of storytelling that also catches up the audience, we learn that the team (well, most of them) regard the fire as “an unthinkable attack by a raging psychopath” — aka Coach Ben. They kept it burning for 12 days and nights, after which “the wilderness” rewarded them with survival.
Nat swears to the others that Coach Ben Scott either starved or froze to death, but they think she’s being na?ve, and I think she’s covering for him. Indeed, Ben is very much alive, hobbling around the woods on his crutches and setting snares to catch food. Along the way, he finds some boards covering an opening in the ground; when he pulls them away and climbs down into the whole, he finds a metal case marked “KUH” that contains flashlights, military-style meals-ready-to-eat and other survival gear. He’s elated, and shoves an entire peanut bar in his mouth in celebration.
Back at camp, Travis drinks some hallucinogenic tea and sits with Lottie as he trips. She tells him about her history with mental health professionals and drugs; her medications stopped her from “seeing things,” a state that began again when they crashed, but she’s no longer having visions. Travis is, though – he tells her the trees are “screaming” all around them. When she replies she can’t hear it, he ominously replies, “You will.”
Yellowjackets Mysteries: An Up-to-Date List of the Showtime Series’ Biggest Questions (and Answers?)
BEN’S BIG CATCH | Throughout the hour, tension is building between Mari and Shauna, though Natalie doesn’t want to interfere even though Tai thinks she should. Everything explodes during a solstice dinner, when Shauna spits in Mari’s venison stew, which leads to the two girls brawling right there at the dinner table. A fed-up Nat sentences them both to a week inside their respective huts, and Mari takes off in anger. Later, everyone wears robes and greenery as they light sky lanterns to mark the solstice and to pay homage to those who’ve died in the wild: Jackie, Javi and Shauna’s baby. When Lottie mentions “the child,” Shauna storms off. Just then, a horrible noise, like a hungry pterodactyl circling the gathering, comes from all sides; everyone looks scared. “Travis,” Lottie asks, “is that what you heard?”
The next thing we know, Coach Ben approaches his pit to see that someone fell for the trap he laid (aka some food in the middle of the tarp covering the hole). It’s Mari, and it looks like her leg is broken.
When Mari sees Ben, she starts screaming, thinking that he’s going to kill her. That doesn’t seem to be his plan. Instead, he walks her through fixing her dislocated knee.
Ben didn’t know the cabin burned down. He helps Mari out of the hole but then immediately knocks her to the ground and ties her up, claiming he can’t let her go back to her friends now that she knows his whereabouts. She wonders why he feels the need to hide, given his proclaimed innocence regarding the fire. “Like the truth would even matter to that mob,” he says. “I know you guys killed and ate Javi; are you really telling me I wouldn’t be next?” Her silence concedes that he’s got a point. Then he blindfolds her and leads her on a walk, saying he doesn’t want to hurt her but needs time to think.
He brings her to his cave and makes her hot chocolate, which she slurps down. But she’s not even halfway through the mug when she realizes he’s stepped away to have a conversation with someone who’s not there, which is worrying (though kinda par for the course with this group, no?).
WHO DOES THE WILDERNESS REALLY WANT? | The morning after the solstice dinner, the girls go looking for Mari. But Lottie has Travis hang back, saying she wants him to drink an even stronger hallucinogenic tea. After he does, he freaks out, saying “They’re coming” and rocking in place like a frightened child… until he jumps on top of Lottie and puts his hands around her throat. Van and Tai hear his yelling and run over in time to pull him off her. “Hasn’t he been through enough?” Tai asks her.
Afterward, Travis is so freaked out by how he tried to hurt Lottie that he has to hug Mortimer, ane of the ducks Akilah has been raising. In tears, he tells Lottie that “it” told him that it didn’t want him, that another member of the survivor group was closer to it. “That’s why the animals trust her,” he adds, nodding to Akilah.
After Misty and Natalie return from looking for Mari, Misty creeps over to Shauna with a secret: She thinks Nat knows where Ben is. Shauna swears her to secrecy.
A DEADLY DINE-AND-DASH? | In the present, it’s the day of Natalie’s funeral. The service turns out to be the shortest ever after Nat’s mother gives a brief, unfussy eulogy; afterward, Shauna, Tai and Van hit the bar. Misty’s not there, because Tai forgot to tell her; Lottie also isn’t there, because she’s at a “facility for the differently sane,” as Van puts it.
What the other ladies don’t know is that Walter sussed out that Nat had a storage unit, and he’s procured the key and given it to Misty, who makes a beeline for the locker. She grabs a leather jacket and does a little bit of Nat cosplay at a nearby bar, pounding whiskey until the bartender cuts her off. She then sees teen Natalie’s face in the mirror, telling her not to take s—t from anyone, which is all the push Misty needs to start a fight with a fellow bargoer who’d complimented her jacket earlier. Walter eventually finds her drunkenly walking home from the bar; she winds up sobbing in his arms that everything is her fault.
How about an update on Tai and Van? Simone won’t let Tai see their son, and Van is angry that Tai wants to play house with her, given how she ghosted her years before. But Tai assuages her anger with a date night in which they dine-and-dash at a fancy restaurant; when their waiter chases them and nearly gets hit by a bus, he has a fatal heart attack right there on the sidewalk after the ladies have run away.
They hide out in an alley, where they kiss, and not even seeing the No-Eyed Man over Van’s shoulder quells Tai’s ardor. Tai returns to the restaurant the next day, a little embarrassed, to pay the bill they hopped out on the night before. She sees a vigil for the waiter who dropped, finds out that he died during his shift as a direct result of her idiocy, and runs. She winds up at a storefront church with an altar in the patio out back; she drops a book of matches into one of the lit candles.
When she gets home, she doesn’t tell Van about the waiter. And Van, who claims to have spent the day at urgent care dealing with an injury from stepping on a piece of glass, also seems like she’s hiding something.
THE SURVIVORS’ STALKER RETURNS | Callie overhears some classmates trash-talking her mom and the other crash survivors, so she orders a container of animal intestines delivered to school, and she throws the entrails at the girls. She is promptly suspended. While Jeff thinks his daughter is messed up and acting out after her night in the woods with the crash survivors — aka the night Natalie died — Shauna is relieved to learn that the bloody prank was just a big ol’ eff-you to some mean girls at her school.
That night, though, Callie hears a noise at the door and finds an envelope waiting there addressed to Shauna. It’s got one of those creepy stick figure drawings on it, and it contains a mini cassette. Callie pockets the recording before anyone sees her.
LOTTIE’S OUTTA LOCKUP | Lottie shows up on Shauna and Jeff’s doorstep, saying she has nowhere to go after being released from the psychiatric hold the others put on her. Though they’re both ready to toss her out, Callie argues that they should let her stay. After all, “Is our family scorecard not ‘murder,’ ‘accomplice to murder’ and ‘attempted murder’?” the teen wonders. Shauna softens; against Jeff’s wishes, she says Lottie can stay the night.
Shauna lures Misty over without telling her about Lottie’s arrival, essentially tricking her into staying to babysit Lottie and Callie while she and Jeff attend his work dinner. During the evening, we learn Lottie has a new hypothesis: Natalie’s death was exactly as “it” intended, and therefore no one’s at fault. Convenient! That conversation gets curtailed when Callie pretends to want to hang out with her mom’s friends (but it’s really just a ploy to get them to tell her what happened years ago in the wilderness). Misty is a bit of a wet blanket, so Callie drugs her with some cold medicine in her drink; soon, she’s passed out on the sofa.
THE JOKER AIN’T THE ONLY FOOL | Meanwhile, while Shauna is in a stall in the bathroom at the restaurant, someone comes in and stands in front of her door. She can’t see who it is, but the vibes are creepy. When the person leaves, the lights go off. A spooked Shauna comes out, keys between her fist like a makeshift brass knuckles, and finds a phone playing Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts” left behind for her. She leaves it with the bartender, unsettled. And when the two incredibly douchey guys whose business Jeff is trying to court are weird to her, she embarrasses one of them badly and then departs. Jeff, knowing he’s not getting the gig, follows her.
They return home to find Callie braiding Lottie’s hair. Shauna is irked that Misty let the two get close. Misty, in turn, projectile vomits on Shauna’s butcher block. She drives home drunk, which worries Walter. He points out that a real friend wouldn’t have let her get behind the wheel, and they argue.
Meanwhile, Shauna calls the restaurant to “follow up” about the phone she found earlier. She eventually learns that a woman picked up the device. As we watch a flashback of teen Shauna angrily kissing Melissa, another survivor, adult Shauna asks the restaurant manager: “What did she look like?”
Now it’s your turn. Grade the two-episode Yellowjackets premiere via the poll below, then hit the comments with all of your thoughts!
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