How Are the Yellowjackets Rescued?

Who—or what—saves them from the wilderness?

Yellowjackets fans have known since Season 1 that at least some of the team was rescued after their plane crashed in the Canadian Rockies on the way to nationals. Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), Taissa (Tawny Cypress), Misty (Christina Ricci), and Natalie (Juliette Lewis) are alive in the present day, and Travis (Andres Soto) was too until his suicide (or murder). Season 2 also introduces adult Lottie (Simone Kessell) with adult Van (Lauren Ambrose) still to come. But how did it happen?

How are the Yellowjackets rescued?

Until the Season 2 premiere, the adult Yellowjackets had only vaguely mentioned their rescue without offering any details. “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” finally offers a glimpse of the girls’ first moments back in civilization. During a press conference in 1998, an official tells a crowd of reporters that the crash site was over 600 miles north of the plane’s designated flight path. She’s soon interrupted by the arrival of the survivors, which include Misty (Samantha Hanratty), Lottie (Courtney Eaton), Taissa (Jasmine Savoy Brown), Nat (Sophie Thatcher), and Shauna (Sophie Nélisse). In true Yellowjackets fashion, though, not everyone’s faces are shown, as most of them are hiding under hoodies amid a terrifying wave of media attention.

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The girls board another airplane, presumably to take them home to New Jersey, but it’s not clear where they’re coming from or who found them. The premiere does hint that they may have had something to do with their own rescue, though. In Season 1, the team had some memorable failures while trying to seek help. Laura Lee (Jane Waddop) died trying to fly an old plane out of the woods, and Taissa abandoned her search for civilization after Liv got mauled by a wolf.

Two months later, however, Nat and Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) are working on a new plan: mapping the surrounding area. Each day Nat joins Travis (Kevin Alves) on the search for game and the still-missing Javi (Luciano Leroux), but she also returns with drawings showing elevation, tree locations, and other details. “Wow, these are getting pretty good,” Ben marvels as Nat hands him her latest work. Thus far, she’s mapped seven miles in each direction from the cabin. It’s not much, but it’s a start.

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We don’t know yet that Nat and Ben’s secret cartography work led to the team’s rescue, but adult Nat’s trajectory could be a hint that it does. Before the plane crashed, Nat was known as the team burnout, but after she was forced to sober up in the wilderness, she became one of the group’s strongest assets, hunting for food and now systematically searching for life outside the cabin. “After they rescued us, I lost my purpose,” adult Nat told her rehab group in the season 1 premiere. Not long after her exit, she’s drinking again and ordering cocaine via text message. Was she the person who found the Yellowjackets a way out of the woods? It seems likely that Season 2 might provide some answers.