Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 4
"12 Angry Girls and 1 Drunk Travis"
Writer: Julia Bicknell, Terry Wesley
Director: Jennifer Morrison
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
I don't watch The Simpsons. Sorry, just wanted to get that out there right up front. But I do live part of my life online, and I have friends, and I exist in society, so I've picked up an awful lot of Simpsons by osmosis. One such bit is an oft-circulated meme of a scientist showing off a bunch of colorful little germ guys trying and failing to squeeze through a doorframe all at once. Again, I don't watch the show, so the gag could be about anything from virology to congestion pricing for all I know.
But sometimes, as a critic, you watch an episode of television so misbegotten — not even awful or offensive, just baffling — that your thoughts are a lot like those colorful little germ guys. I've got a lot of thoughts about this week's episode of Yellowjackets, one of the most puzzling narrative cul de sacs yet in a show that's been full of them since the start. Even figuring out where to begin talking about this thing requires great deliberation.
Which is more than one can say for the trial of Coach Ben, which occupies nearly the entirety of the 1990s material this week. Captured by Natalie and company after he rescued Akilah, Van, and Shauna from poison gas in a remote branch of his cave hideaway, Coach is frog-marched back to camp and tied up in the pen where they keep their food supply — a placement the import of which he definitely picks up on — to await …
… a mock trial. A whole-ass mock trial there in the woods, with Natalie as judge, Taissa (presaging her future occupation as a lawyer-turned-politician) as prosecutor, and Misty as defense attorney. There's a gavel, there's a jury, there's "objection / sustained / overruled" — there's a lot of stuff that indicates that these kids aren't children from the 1990s, but grown-ass Xillennials who've watched way, way more re-runs of Law & Order and SVU than is medically advisable. True of the filmmakers? Probably. (Hell, it's true of me!) True of a girls' soccer team during the first Clinton Administration? Doubtful!
The episode-length sequence is a flop for a variety of reasons. For starters, key members of the cast don't seem to know how to act after such a radical tonal shift, though a few rise to the challenge. Sophie Thatcher maintains Natalie's uneasy balance of responsibility and fear easily enough, and Sammi Hanratty really demonstrates her range as a righteously indignant and legalistically canny Misty; it makes you excited to see what the actor will do when given actual adult roles, and it's my favorite work of Hanratty's in the series so far.
As Coach Ben, Stephen Krueger is similarly compelling. Fully believing the girls will convict (and likely kill and eat) him no matter what he says or does, he therefore has no reason to lie, and is bracingly honest both about what he dislikes about his job, which he has never seen as a career, and what he loves about the girls, even though they're a threat to his life. Emoting all of this through a layer of grime and beard is an impressive feat in and of itself, and it shows how crucial Krueger is to the flashback material.
But Jasmin Savoy Brown as the faux-D.A. and Sophie Nélisse as the chief hang-'im-high juror flounder — speechifying and smirking and acting more or less like people reading the script of a courtroom drama out loud. Liv Hewson as the bailiff fares little better with the corny shit she's forced to say to open the trial, but as her part is relatively minor it's nowhere near as grating as Tai and Shauna's flared-nostril rage against their assistant coach, who quite obviously did not burn their cabin down. They're straight-up trying to kill him, just as he's accused of trying to do to all of them. Misty does such a bang-up job of unpacking this, in fact, that it makes the eventual guilty verdict feel not so much as unjust as merely stupid.
Which takes us to the episode's title, "12 Angry Girls and 1 Drunk Travis." Putting aside that Travis is at no point depicted as drunk in any way I can ascertain, the "12 Angry Girls" is (duh) a reference to 12 Angry Men, Sidney Lumet's stone-cold masterpiece of tension, suspense, and emotion staged almost exclusively in a single room containing a dozen character actors. If you're gonna model your courtroom episode after a courtroom drama, that's a tough one to top.
But they don't model it after 12 Angry Men, that's the problem. The bulk of the episode is focused on the trial, not on the deliberations, which aren't deliberations at all but merely a series of votes called in rapid succession to see if anyone changes their minds. No discussion of the case, no attempts at persuasion or dissuasion, no examination of the evidence and the testimony, none of the things that make 12 Angry Men so indelible and memorable and moving — just Shauna getting sick of it at the end and somehow managing to get so angry she immediately convinces most of the holdouts to vote to convict without advancing a single reason why beyond "He did it." It's such weak writing I'm honestly a little shocked it got through as-is.
When it comes to the present-day material, however, I'm way beyond shocked to discover weak writing there. It's an across-the-board cavalcade of peculiar decisions. Jeff and Shauna spend the episode volunteering — at Misty's nursing home, in a howler of a coincidence so obviously engineered to generate conflict that you may as well have physically seen the pencils of the writers forcing things into shape, like in "Duck Amuck." While Jeff has a grand old time entertaining the old folks, Shauna gets locked in the walk-in freezer in the kitchen by persons or forces unknown. It's an exercise in faux-suspense, a life-or-death situation in which it's abundantly clear from the start that "life" will be the situation in the end. I don't care if you managed to get Ella Purnell to make a cameo here — what was the point of this?
Worse still is the increasingly baleful Tai and Van storyline, which has now devolved into them leaving queen-of-hearts playing cards on the street to see who picks them up, so that they can follow them to their homes, open their front doors, and murder them as a sacrifice to the Wilderness. The scheme seems so cockamamie, and so counter to anything we know about these people, that it was like my brain was on a 30-second delay, simply unable to process that yes, this is what the episode is about for these characters.
In the end — and I mean the end, like they've already got the poor sap's apartment door open before Van suddenly decides that maybe they shouldn't murder a stranger in cold blood to appease the Wendigo — Taissa pulls the plug on the plan. But it's strongly implied that they murder Lottie instead — unless it was Shauna who did it, since otherwise her statement that she traveled into Manhattan to find a stray cat is goofy as fuck.
Oh, right: Lottie's dead now! She's shown at the foot of a candle-lined staircase at the end of the episode, eyes open and unseeing, head in a pool of blood, as flashbulbs burst from behind police tape. So much for adult Lottie, a character who existed for some reason!
And don't worry, there are still big obvious needle drops galore if that's what you're looking for. Romance? Cue up "Linger" by the Cranberries. Murder in the air? Play "Fresh Blood" by the Eels, which you may remember as the theme music for a little show you might have heard of called The fucking Jinx. What are we even doing here? Must we always coast on the slipstream of other, better works of art? And if we must, can we at least get it right?
