Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 3
"Them's the Brakes"
Writer: Jonathan Lisco, Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson
Director: Jonathan Lisco
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
Yellowjackets wears its influences right there on its yellow sleeve. Shooting a semi-prophetic dream sequence involving a talking animal? Hire Vincent "Big Pussy" Pastore to provide the voice, just as he did during the famous fish dream sequence in The Sopranos' second season. Playing a classic pop song as someone trapped in a web of mystery goes about their business? Use "Make Your Own Kind of Music" by Mama Cass Elliott, just like Lost did in Desmond's bunker during that show's second season. It may seem big and obvious — okay, it may be big and obvious — but this material is 20 years old and as much a part of the fabric of TV as Sam and Diane or Mulder and Scully. Reusing and recycling is fair play.
A more interesting touchstone, at least from where I'm sitting, is Channel Zero, the anthology horror series based on web fiction (aka "creepypasta") from creator Nick Antosca. Earning my vote for the scariest television show of all time (other than Twin Peaks, of course), it featured a cursed old-fashioned TV broadcast in its first season and hidden doors to other worlds in its third and fourth. So when we learn the No-Eyed Man who's been haunting Taissa all this time was a creepy visual from a local ice cream commercial, or when Van hallucinates a wooden door in the middle of a cave wall, the show's using some time-tested approaches to generating fear.
Hell, if we're really gonna play spot-the-reference, was I the only person who caught a whiff of Lars Von Trier's bleak horror-of-nature masterpiece Antichrist? I was all but waiting for the fox who trots by the window of the abandoned ice cream parlor with a dead rabbit in his jaws, a symbol of the hungry spirit of the wilderness, to drop the bunny and growl "CHAOS REIGNS" at Van and Tai, like they're Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
The fox business gets at another interesting aspect of this episode: It actually provides some justification for the incredibly goofy "death by dine-and-dash" dead-waiter storyline. Taissa finally tells Van the terrible news, but only after first hearing Van's incredible news: Her cancer has stopped growing and may even be going into remission. It's a medical miracle ... one that Taissa attributes directly to the deaths of both the waiter and their friend Natalie. "It," whatever "it" is, is taking life to give it back to Van. The arrival of the fox tells Taissa, in the grips of near-mania upon discovering the origin of the No-Eyed Man, that "it wants more." At the rate this crew racks up bodies, it won't have to wait long.
Elsewhere in the present day, Shauna Shipman does some much-needed housecleaning with regards to her choice of friends. When an awkward lunch date with Misty nearly ends in disaster after persons unknown tamper with her brakes, Shauna lets Misty have it, blaming her for the sabotage and lambasting her whole deal. "Something must have warped you when you were little," she growls at perpetually wide-eyed Misty. "Your parents, someone must have done something to you, because you're a verified psycho, and you feed off this stuff. You're insane." Correct! Long overdue!
So too is her expulsion of Lottie from the family home, although the incident that precipitates this is a bit fuzzier. After taking Callie out shopping — or rather shoplifting — Lottie is making dinner with the girl when Shauna returns home from the disaster with Misty. (I guess the brakes are working now.) She's aghast to discover the friendship necklace once worn by her late friend Jackie (Ella Purnell, who has a creepy cameo in the big hallucinatory dream sequence). Lottie says something cryptic to the effect that wearing the necklace doesn't mean what Shauna thinks it means, but Shauna nevertheless tears it off Callie's neck and throws Lottie out of the house. Perhaps it becomes some sort of bad-luck charm after the next person to wear it — teen Shauna's new love interest Melissa, maybe? — suffers the same fate?
This leads us back into the past, where the story is simple. Mari is released by Coach Ben after a couple of failed escape attempts, one by seduction, the other by bear spray. Though she tries to cover up his existence at first, Shauna sees right through it. Mari leads the group back to Coach's cave, where they split up to search it upon encountering a wall of rocks that didn't used to be there.
We only see what befalls the group comprising Shauna, Van, and Akilah, who's under a ton of pressure from Lottie to commune with "it." As they make their way deep into the cave they find themselves separated and lost in the dark, which in each case morphs into a different dream. Van imagines herself back in the cabin as it catches fire, barely escaping the grasping dead arms that pin her to her chair Ghostbusters-style. Shauna finds herself floating in the lake, unable to swim back to shore to greet her now living son. Akilah wanders through a thicket of blackberries until she finds a petting zoo, where a talking llama tells her that all things with teeth can bite, that the trees are calling her, and that "it can be easy or it can be hard, but either way It's gonna get what It wants."
Eventually all three girls wind up in a classroom where Lottie is the teacher and Jackie is as alive as they are. But Jackie's very '90s snap bracelet wounds Van while Akilah goes unscathed. Finally Jackie snaps it around Shauna's throat, which gushes blood. Lottie tells Akilah she has to save Shauna or they'll all die ... and the next thing you know Shauna's coming out of it next to Akilah, while Coach Ben drags Van to safety from the poisonous fumes that made them all hallucinate and pass out.
Most of this is pretty entertaining from a character perspective. In the past, Coach Ben and Mari fumbling their way through a hostage situation even though he hasn't really taken her hostage feels a lot like how this kind of situation would actually unfold; at one point he just sits there and wonders how any of this could even be real for a guy who's seen the Dave Matthews Band live three times and doesn't even like them that much. During the search for Coach, Shauna subtly patches things up with Mari, her rival, offering no apologies but plenty of sincere encouragement. I also enjoyed how the seemingly standoffish Shauna is actually just kind of road-testing Melissa to see if she'll be "boring." That she wants someone exciting strikes me as a promising development for the show.
Even in the present, the show's historic weak spot, the material improves a great deal now that Shauna finally comes out and says the obvious truth: Misty and Lottie are a murderer and a cult leader respectively and have no business being around her and her teenage daughter. Van and Tai's goofy waiter storyline also gets a much-needed shot of adrenaline when it gets connected to the No-Eyed Man and the wilderness mythos instead of just dangling there as a story of yet another poor sap who winds up dead because he encountered the Yellowjackets. In both cases, it feels like writers Jonathan Lisco, Ashley Lyle, and Bart Nickerson stood behind their own show and gave it a good hard shove, forcing it out of the mud it had been stuck in.
But there's one last observation to make, and it's about what wasn't in this episode. It's easy to forget just how much crazy shit has happened on Yellowjackets, because Yellowjackets itself seems to forget from time to time. Remember how Shauna's murdered lover Adam Martin was all mysterious because he had no online presence whatsoever? What happened there? Remember how Walter framed that murder on Shauna's cop classmate Kevyn, whom he murdered in turn? Has anyone in the Shipman family mentioned how they owe their continued freedom to some lunatic friend of Misty's they'd never met before? This is the problem with mystery-box storytelling, where you open three doors for every one you close. It's easy to get, well, lost.
Next: Yellowjackets Season 3 Episode 4 Recap: Trials and Tribulations
