Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 2
"Dislocation"
Writer: Rich Monahan & Ameni Rozsa
Director: Bille Woodruff
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
Two of Yellowjackets' greatest strengths are on display in this week's episode before five minutes have elapsed. The first: This show has long offered viewers some of the gnarliest self-applied field surgery the small screen has ever aired. Here we have Mari, her knee dislocated after a fall into Coach Ben's trap, following his advice and shoving her grotesquely out-of-whack kneecap back into place. It's the kind of scene that makes you say to yourself "It's only make-believe," for all the good it does you. Like all of the show's makeshift amputations and childbirths and facial reconstruction surgeries before it, you know it's not really happening, it's just very good practical effects, but that doesn't stop you from feeling it in your own bones. It's great stuff.
So too is the opening credit sequence. With its eerie and aggressive theme song by Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker (of '90s alt-rock bands Shudder to Think and that dog. respectively) and its distressed VHS aesthetic courtesy of Digital Kitchen art directors Rachel Brickel and Peter Pak, it towers above an opening-title landscape that's been dominated by "shapes of familiar things morph into shapes of other familiar things" for what feels like a decade. Honestly, it may be almost too good, as it promises a level of anxiety and terror that the show only occasionally aims for or achieves.
Actually, we can throw in a third strength of the show: At no point is it ever digitally color-graded into a bluish haze or a gray-purple murk or a ghastly teal-and-orange mailman-with-a-fake-tan color palette. When you see these kids out in the woods, it looks like they're in the woods. When you see these grownups out and about in the 'burbs, it looks like they're in the 'burbs. There's light and shadow and contrast. I'm not saying the cinematography is spectacular, but it's not meant to be: It's meant to be legible, to be a reliable delivery mechanism for the story being told by Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, Jonathan Lisco et al are telling. It never distracts, and that really is an achievement. (This is admittedly a bugbear of mine, but the aquamarine nighttime of True Detective Season 4 and the bright orange nighttime of The Penguin broke something in me.)
In terms of the story itself, it's as easy to separate the good from the bad as ever, because the structure of the series does it for you. In the tedious present day, Taissa and Van remain bogged down in the saga of the waiter whom they accidentally killed via heart attack by dining and dashing, the most "third season of a show that isn't quite sure what to do with these characters now" plotline I've seen in a long time.
They're also both obviously lying to each other a lot. Taissa doesn't tell Van the waiter died and that she ran from being caught. Van, who earlier cut her foot by stepping on a glass (another delightfully excruciating visual) while they were making out, is pretty clearly lying about what she was doing when she was theoretically in urgent care to get the cut looked at. After everything they've been through, not even in their teenage years but as recently as the debacle at Lottie's compound last season, it feels as though the only reason they're not being honest is to involve the viewer in the eventual revelation of the truth, when just spitting it out is much more involving.
Shauna, meanwhile, has to attend a work dinner with her husband Jeff, who's desperately trying to land his furniture store a gig supplying a boutique hotel. Her entire decision-making process from that moment forward is baffling. First of all, at Callie's insistence, she allows a now-homeless Lottie to stay with them for a night. But since she doesn't want Lottie influencing Callie, she calls up a babysitter: Misty, who for some reason she believes capable of defending Callie from Lottie's influence. Callie doses Misty's booze with a nighttime cough suppressant and knocks her out; when Shauna and Jeff return, they find Callie literally braiding Lottie's hair. (They are not, to my knowledge, talking about boys.) It's hard to believe Shauna thought this would end any other way.
Her behavior at the dinner itself helps turn Jeff's deal from a "maybe" into an "absolutely not." She spends most of the time on the phone trying to get updates from the now-unconscious Misty; again, if this was such a concern, why ask Misty, of literally all the people she knows, to babysit? And why let Lottie into your home at all?
Eventually, Shauna turns on the hoteliers entirely, ridiculing them to their faces for being egotistical nepo babies who don't matter at all. "You walk around like you're the only person here," a justifiably saddened Jeff tells her at the end of the evening. (He's always a more interesting character when showing genuine emotion instead of just playing the comical cucked husband role.)
Shauna moreover allows Misty to drive home blind stinking drunk, which feels out of character even for someone as self-absorbed as present-day Shauna. When Walter (Elijah Wood) once again tries to come between Misty and her "friends" from the plane crash, she finally gets sick of his clingy bullshit and kicks him out. I don't see this ending well for Misty. I also don't see it contributing much to the main storyline: Much as I've enjoyed Elijah Wood in this role, it sure feels awfully tangential to the emotional and narrative heart of the show, the events in the woods.
That, of course, is where things get interesting. Mari and Coach Ben's reunion doesn't go as expected: In addition to denying that he burned down the cabin — which is apparently a much more open question than it looked in the finale — he helps Mari fix her knee and escape the pit.
After several scenes of this, though, he turns on her, knocking her down and tying her up with a noose around her neck. He has no interest in killing her, but nor can he let her go back to the others, because he knows they've gone Lord of the Flies about him and would absolutely kill him if they could. For her part, Mari is ... a little less than honest about whether they killed poor young Javi in order to eat him. (They didn't kill him per se, but they didn't save him either.)
Meanwhile, several of the girls go off in search for Mari. Van and Taissa's search leads them instead to Travis and Lottie, who's coaching the only surviving boy through yet another hallucinogenic trip to commune with the spirit of the woods. When he comes out of it, he claims to Lottie that "it," whatever "it" is, doesn't want him at all. It wants Akilah (Nia Sondaya), who maintains the group's supply of domesticated ducks. Since the animals trust her, it shows she's already closer to the wilderness's anima than anyone else. (Or so Travis claims; like everyone on this show, he could be lying.)
Elsewhere, Natalie, who is now even more obviously covering up her knowledge of Coach Ben's continued survival and location than ever, tries to steer Misty away from seeing one of his snare traps. But when she spills the tea to Shauna, Shauna tells her to keep it to herself. Why? I'm gonna take a wild guess and say the increasingly angry and violent Shauna is the one who burned the cabin down, and she'd prefer not to have Coach Ben resurface and confirm this.
As for Shauna herself, she digs up the corpse of her stillborn son and reburies him in a grave known only to her: He's her baby, and the others, whom she now despises, have no right to him. This leads to, frankly, the most bitchin' thing to happen on this show in a while, at least in terms of stuff that doesn't leave anyone dead or devoured. Shauna discovers that Melissa (Jenna Burgess), one of the crash's quieter survivors, has followed her to the new gravesite and left flowers on the gravestone. Shauna pulls out a huge knife and holds it to Melissa's throat, promising to kill her if she divulges what she's seen. Instead, Melissa kisses Shauna — and Shauna, her blade still to Melissa's neck, kisses her back.
Oooooh-whee, brother, that's hot stuff! That's 1970s European art-film erotica hot is what that is. It's worth noting that it's not like Shauna has been radiating queer vibes this whole time, whether in the past or the present: She's just a teenager who's been going through hell and needs to feel wanted and good. I get it, and it's great that writers Rich Monahan and Ameni Rozsa get it too.
This also leads us back around to one of the present-day mysteries. Melissa is apparently the blonde woman the back of whose head we've seen popping up, who dropped off the videotape (which Callie still hasn't watched) at the Shipmans' and who stalks her into the ladies' room at the restaurant in one of the episode's creepiest scenes. I would advise Melissa to proceed with caution, however: The last person who took Shauna on a ride to the cheatin' side of town was dismembered. That has a way of happening around these women.
Next: Yellowjackets Season 3 Episode 3 Recap: There's No Eyes in T-E-A-M
