Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 5
"Did Tai Do That?"
Writers: Sarah L. Thompson & Elise Brown
Director: Jeffrey W. Byrd
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 had trouble watching this week's Yellowjackets at times. This is a compliment. Visceral, brutal, cruel even, thrumming with an undercurrent of gnarly sexuality and boasting at least two of the series' most striking images since the pilot's cold open, it's a show playing to its real strengths. For the most part.
In the main, of course, I'm talking about the teenage material, which amounts to a lengthy meditation on premeditated killing. Tied up in the animal pen, Coach Ben awaits his execution, ignored (as much as possible) by Akilah and tended to only by his doting "girlfriend," Misty. Shauna — who's done a fairly unconvincing pro-wrestling heel turn this season and now acts like a movie villain for some reason, but whatever — advocates burning him alive before a firing squad is settled upon by the group as the method of execution. Since there's only one gun, they draw cards to see who the executioner will be, and Tai's the "winner."
The problem is that she can't go through with it, even while doing target practice by aiming at a frowny face on a tree. Van, who's helping her practice, suggests they try to summon Tai's dark side, which we haven't seen anything of yet this season. First, they try summoning it with sexual energy: Van pins Tai against a tree face first and fingers her. (The sex scenes have gotten a lot more fucked up and hot this season for sure.)
When that fails, they kill a rabbit caught in one of the girls' traps, since the sinister spirit of the wilderness seems to frequently call for blood. In keeping with the show's storied tradition of extremely nasty up-close survival violence, Tai slits the poor rabbit's throat in full view of the camera, which lingers as the animal's legs and paws frantically flail at the air in pain and terror. With Van's encouragement, Tai narrates the entire process of the rabbit's death. "I see its fear. I feel its breath … I smell its blood. I feel its heartbeat slowing. It's calmer now." To really be present with the fear and pain you're inflicting on another living thing — more importantly, to force the audience to be present with it — makes for harrowing television.
It gets worse as things go. Zoned out, staring into space, cradling a doe in his arms, hearing the voice of his boyfriend back home, Coach Ben has a bag thrown over his head and is dragged to the tree to be killed. Natalie places that unlucky heart necklace around his neck, refusing to help him even as he tells her, correctly, "You don't have to do this." He tries to talk them out of it, shame them out of it, cuss them out of it, and finally beg them out of it, repeating the words "okay, please" over and over with gut-wrenching abjection. But when the time comes, the evil side of Tai emerges at last, and Ben's days are numbered.
Until he's miraculously saved at the last moment by Lottie's Psychic Hallucination Squad. At least that's my informal name for her, Travis, and Akilah, who traveled back to the coach's cave system in order to induce another vision for Akilah to transmit to them. She nearly succumbs to the fumes that generate the visions, but what she brings back from their depths is, frankly, stunning. She sees herself on a cliff at the edge of a chasm, with the night lights of their hometown on the other side. Her bridge between these two sides: a colossal Coach Ben, bound to the cliffs but very much alive. "He's the bridge," she repeats, "he's the bridge."
But that doesn't mean they'll let him out of captivity, not exactly anyway. (Here's the part where Coach Ben probably wishes Akilah's vision was a little less poetic and a little more like a presidential pardon.) Shauna and her lover Melissa, who's attracted to Shauna specifically because she stopped being a doormat for Jackie and their mutual boyfriend Jeff and embraced "the bad parts" of herself, approach Ben with Shauna's knife. Melissa uses it neither to cut him free nor to kill him, but to slit the achilles tendon on his remaining leg so that he can't get away.
Everyone is aghast, both at Ben's agonized screams of pain and misery and at Shauna's obvious enjoyment of it all. Everyone, that is, except Melissa, whose bloody hand Shauna pointedly takes and walks into her hut for some good old-fashioned post-hobbling situationship lesbianism. The closing shot is taken from overhead as everyone — even Natalie, Misty, Lottie, Travis, and Akilah, all of whom ultimately opposed his execution — retreats into their living quarters. They all made the decision, but they don't want to look at it, don't want to hear it, don't really want to live with it. They want to live parallel to it, taking advantage but not responsibility — the dream of every murderous cult from The Zone of Interest to the 2024 presidential election. It's some of the strongest stuff the show has served up yet.
Even the present-day material is … well, it's decent, on average. The lows — more zany murder hijinks as Walter and Shauna team up against Misty to identify Lottie's supposed killer — are pretty low, for sure. Obviously it's a funny visual to dress up Melanie Lynskey and Elijah Wood in Geek Squad gear, but for crying out loud, did we need a funny visual here, when we're absolutely soaking in tension and misery elsewhere? Maybe your answer is yes, but for me, when you've got your foot jammed down that far on the gas, you don't let up. The decision to do this in the same episode where Shauna suggests burning a man alive before slitting his achilles tendon is especially baffling, since it's all but impossible to draw a line from her then to her now.
But the highs are pretty high as well. While rummaging around in the penthouse apartment of Lottie's father (Michael St. John Smith), an Alzheimer's sufferer whose lucidity flashes on and off, Shauna finds he's mistaken her for Lottie. She lets this play out, pretending to be his teenaged daughter as he apologizes for how hard he's found it to understand her mental illness. At first it appears she's taking advantage of his mental condition to gather information; since he just kind of blurted out to Misty that he's bribing the cops into labeling his daughter's death an accident, it's a reasonable assumption at this point that he had something to do with it.
But instead of a fishing expedition, Shauna offers forgiveness and comfort to an old man who, clearly, dearly loved the daughter he'd lost, even if, as Shauna says, it can be difficult to express that love the way we want. She accepts his charming peace offering of Chinese food and "the new Scorsese." Then, with tears in her eyes, she reaches out and hugs him. She cuts it off a bit awkwardly, but no more so than Lottie herself would have done as a kid. He leaves the room smiling.
This is an absolutely marvelous emotional register for the adult material to explore, to the point where you wonder why the show's creative team hadn't been exploring it all along. I mean, I guess it's obvious that they sincerely feel the goofball antics of the adults is contributing something of value to the overall project. They just happen to be wrong, and this segment's superiority to its comedic surroundings proves it.
So too does a welcome return for Tai from dine-and-dash manslaughter to her broken family and the mental and/or supernatural condition that caused it to shatter. To her surprise, her estranged wife Simone (Rukiya Bernard) calls her up to arrange a playground visit with their son, Sammy (Aiden Stoxx). For Tai, it's a saved-by-the-phone situation, since Van was more or less in the midst of accusing her of killing Lottie during her unexplained hour or so on her own in Manhattan the night of the murder. (Shauna also dipped into the city for no real reason, and Misty left work early, whereabouts unknown, and Walter might have done it as a means of getting close to Misty again, so suspects abound.)
But the visit is cut short by Sammy. "Are you not my Mommy anymore?" he asks Tai before scampering back to Simone to escape her. It recalls those terrifying moments early on when he'd report seeing her doppelgänger outside, and we're given a nightmarish glimpse of her perched uncannily in a tree outside his window. And in the final seconds of her last scene, her demeanor rapidly shifts, indicating that perhaps her evil self is back in control when she tells Van she needs "a change of scenery." Could be something, could be nothing, but the possibility is open and intriguing.
A couple more complimentary notes to end on, "notes" meant somewhat literally in one case. First, Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker's score remains excellent; I particularly enjoyed the sly incorporation of the recognizable morse-code clang clang clang - clang-clang beat from the Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers" at one point. (Intentional or no, I've never heard that beat anywhere else.)
Finally, and perhaps you've noticed this too: By now the two sets of actors have done a remarkable job of blending their performances together. Granted, it's a bit hard to see at the moment with Lynskey and Sophie Nélisse, who are at diametrically opposed emotional poles. But Sophie Thatcher sounds much more like Juliette Lewis than she ever used to. Sammi Hanratty and Christina Ricci really do feel like the same Misty at different ages at this point, too — remember when it was kind of an open question whether Ricci was playing Hanratty or Ella Purnell as adult? Tough to see it any other way now. Courtney Eaton's vocal performance as young Lottie has elements of Simone Kessell's adult voice in it too, to my ears. Since the adult and teenage storylines are still such an odd fit tonally, through-lines like the ones created by the show's fine cast really tie the thing together.
