Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 1
"It Girl"
Writer: Jonathan Lisco, Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson
Director: Bart Nickerson
Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Tawny Cypress, Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Thatcher, Samantha Hanratty, Steven Krueger, Warren Kole, Courtney Eaton, Liv Hewson, Kevin Alves, Sarah Desjardins, Lauren Ambrose, Simone Kessell, Christina Ricci
"Previously on The Yellowjackets…" …so much has gone on that even the characters need a recap. Stranded in an honestly rather charming makeshift village of huts constructed by her and her fellow crash survivors, Van (Liv Hewson), red-headed and sporting some of the goofiest looking facial scars in recent TV makeup memory, actually begins telling the soccer-team castaways their own story in those exact words. She turns their desperate struggle for survival into a Heroic Story of Survival that ends with the coming of spring, the kind of story you might turn into a television show. (Okay, maybe a miniseries.) It helps them forget the horrors they've experienced, and committed against one another.
For the most part, anyway. Shauna Shipman (Sophie Nélisse), who by this point has lost her best friend and her baby, beaten the living shit out of her would-be shaman teammate Lottie (Courtney Eaton), nearly sacrificed her other teammate Natalie (Sophie Thatcher), and dressed a human corpse for butchering and consumption, is not trying to hear it. In her diary, she angrily scrawls an alternate narrative of the winter's events:
"How's this story for you: Once upon a time a bunch of teenage girls got stranded in the wilderness and they went completely fucking nuts. They worshipped evil spirits and they hunted their friends and they feasted on their flesh and they fucking liked it, so they told themselves stupid fairy tales and pretend they were brave and strong ... because the reality was that even if rescue came, they could never go home again. Because of what they'd done. Because of what they'd become. That's the truth, and hearing anything else makes me want to just fucking…"
Swap out "a bunch of teenage girls" for "a plurality of American voters" and you've pretty much described our current predicament! Ain't that a pip.
But then Yellowjackets has always thrived when it tears out its own heart of darkness and holds it beating in front of the audience's face. This is what's always made the material about the teenage soccer team stranded and starving and going insane in the woods more compelling than the material about the messed-up middle-aged women having zany murder hijinks played largely for laughs. The strength of the adult cast, cleverly (though not entirely, which has always been weird to me) made up of former teen actors Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis (RIP Natalie, we miss you girl, they really should have dyed your hair blonde so you'd look more like Sophie Thatcher), Christina Ricci, Lauren Ambrose, and Elijah Wood, disguises the lopsided nature of the drama somewhat, but only somewhat. As fun as, say, Ricci's performance as adult Misty, the world's perkiest sociopath, can be, I'd much rather watch her teenage self react with shock and grief to her first kill than her adult self react with quirky neurotic cheer to her third or fourth.
More on the grown-ups later. Season 3's premiere ("It Girl") begins with a chase through the now lush, green forest reminiscent of the life-and-death hunt from the pilot's cold open. (The show has burned that sequence as inexhaustible fuel for two seasons and counting.) It turns out it's just a game, but it's clear that the participants, Shauna and her rival Mari (Alexa Barajas), have real bad blood between them. It takes Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown), Van's girlfriend and no stranger to violent thoughts herself, to warn the group's recently crowned leader Natalie that in circumstances where everything is a matter of life and death, fights can turn real ugly real fast.
A brief aside: It probably goes without saying, but the teenager/forest material is much scarier than the "grownups in New Jersey" stuff, which makes a big difference when you're making at least half a horror show. The killings are more brutal and taken more seriously, the stakes higher, the drama tenser. Personally I'd like to have seen more actual information revealed about the sinister presence surrounding them in the trees by now — two-plus seasons of "I dunno man, but there's SYMBOLS, it's really spooky" are plenty — but that supernatural element, too, often pops up in unexpected and unnerving ways.
Now you can throw Coach Ben (Steven Krueger), the sole adult survivor of the crash, into the nightmare mix. Down to one leg due to his injuries and marginalized by the increasingly independent teens in his nominal charge, he grew so horrified by their cult-like conduct by the end of Season 2 that he burned their cabin down. It's clear now this isn't just some act of protest, or a one-and-done attempt to burn them up or freeze them out. He's spent the rest of the winter and spring seasons laying low and avoiding Natalie's hunt for him. (At least if we're to believe her, but she's long been a Coach Ben sympathizer, and vice versa.) Now he's on the hunt.
His prey comes right to him. Mari and Shauna really have it out during the group's big pagan summer solstice dinner after Shauna spits in Mari's soup. When Natalie punishes them both for the scuffle that follows, Mari angrily storms off. What she doesn't realize is that Coach Ben is not only not dead, he's stumbled across a cache of rations and supplies buried underground. He eats the protein bars, yes, but he uses the pit and its cargo as a trap, luring Mari in only to send her plummeting downward, breaking her leg. Is his goal to get her alone and deprogram her, or is he really on a mission of murder? He did refer to her as Bambi, after all! Either way, he's quickly become one of the more interesting members of the group.
Back among the teens, the summer solstice celebration culminates in a memorial service at the grave of the three castaways they've lost: Jackie (Ella Purnell, still visible in the excellent distressed-VHS-style opening titles), frozen to death after falling out with Shauna; Javi (Luciano Leroux), son of the team's dead head coach and brother of the only remaining male in the main group, Travis, who was allowed to freeze to death in icy water so that the rest could eat him; and Shauna's baby, dubbed "the Child," stillborn likely due to Shauna's horrendous deprivation.
But whatever wilderness spirit they're attempting to honor is, like Shauna, not trying to hear it. The trees themselves begin screaming, as Travis put it when he had an auditory hallucination while tripping with Lottie earlier that day. A worrisome sign, at least according to my old Cub Scout manual.
And now, with a sigh, we turn to the present day (the happy bygone year of 2021), which with a few exceptions you could air under the title Oops! We Did a Murder. Shauna (Lynskey) is struggling with her daughter Callie (Sarah Desjardins)…sort of? It's true that, as her husband Jeff (Warren Cole) puts it to her, Callie saw her mom get chased around by her knife-wielding friends in animal masks, one of whom Callie herself shot; that woman, Lottie (Simone Kessell) has since been institutionalized. She then saw Natalie (Lewis) take a lethal syringe to the chest at the hands of Misty, who was aiming for someone else entirely. She also learned that her mother murdered the man she was having an affair with, and that her father was blackmailing the teammates. It felt like a lot as a viewer; I can only imagine how it feels as a character.
But I kinda feel like the answer is maybe "not that bad"? Sure, Callie is smoking weed at 7:30 in the morning (let he who is without sin, am I right?) and dumping entrails politely on the lunch trays of her bullies, but if that's the only PTSD she has after all that T she experienced, she's doing alright.
So is almost everyone, really, which is part of the problem with the adult storyline: In the parlance of pro wrestling, the writing doesn't sell the viewer on the damage that's been done to the characters. Van and Taissa are more focused on their relationship than they are on the friend whose manslaughter they've helped cover up — understandable perhaps given the ticking clock of Van's terminal illness, but still weird.
And as happy as I am to see the No Eyed Man (Brody Romhanyi) whom she hallucinates from time to time rear up his ugly head, I could do without a storyline in which they cause a waiter to have a fatal heart attack from chasing them too hard after they dine and dash from an expensive restaurant. Focus, Yellowjackets writers, focus! They've killed plenty of people already without having to do it again in a plotline that feels more at home in Curb Your Enthusiasm!
Yet Misty, of all characters, provides an exception to the rule. Most of her screentime is spent stealing stuff from Natalie's storage space, getting drunk at a bar while wearing her cool leather jacket, and unsuccessfully picking a fight with two guys who didn't do anything. But when her weird friend Walter finally catches up with her, she literally collapses in his arms, sobbing with real pain about what she did to a person she loved. It's a surprise, and it works.
I wish the same could be said for the show's needle drops, which remain among the most literal and obvious on television. Using Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now" and its line "running just as fast as we can, holding on to one another's hand" as Van and Taissa, you guessed it, run just as fast as they can holding on to one another's hand? And Bush's "Glycerine" to soundtrack their makeout session ... these feel like placeholder choices stuck in before the real song can be selected and inserted. Irony can help, though: playing the Runaways' "Cherry Bomb" in the bar while Misty tries to act tough, for example, or using Cake's tongue-in-cheek cover of "I Will Survive" to soundtrack Mari's screams for help when Coach Ben traps her. As with so many things on this show, there's a tonal balance they're looking for that they haven't been able to achieve.
Before we sign off, there's one last mystery to throw onto the pile: a blonde woman, shown only in glimpses from behind, who's watching the survivors and who drops off a videotape at Shauna's house which Callie gets ahold of instead. Is this a show that needs another mystery, when we're no closer to the resolution of any of the previous ones than we were when they started?
Next: 'Yellowjackets' Season 3 Episode 2 Recap: Kiss of Death
