Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 6
"Thanksgiving (Canada)"
Writers: Libby Hill, Emily St. James
Director: Pete Chatmon
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
Cannibalism is a key ingredient in the Yellowjackets stew. It's how the girls have survived as long as they have. Its employment marks major turning points in their lives. It's a memorable way to send off important characters too. And it's the stuff that survival horror and folk horror are made of. So it was inevitable that at some point, someone else was gonna end up on the menu.
I'm honestly a bit surprised it's Coach Ben. The show had me fooled for a minute there, with Akilah's vision of him as the bridge back to civilization sparing him from execution, and his tendon-severing hobbling by Melissa and Shauna keeping him from presenting any further threat that might prompt lethal payback. I figured he'd live, to be honest, at least until the end of the season.
Instead, Ben loses the will to live almost immediately. Why wouldn't he? Encrusted in filth, one leg gone and one foot barely attached, locked in a pen with the rest of the girls' food supply, and still having been found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to death, he suspects it wasn't a pardon but a temporary stay. He'll be food soon enough, and knowing that is no way to live.
After begging his handler, Natalie, to kill him for god knows how long, he finally goes on hunger strike. The kids force-feed him with the kind of brutality normally reserved for Irish political prisoners in British gaols. This, in the end, is too much for Natalie to take. She finally takes pity on him and kills him. That's how far things have gone: Murder is the kind option for these people at this point.
In the uproar that follows, Lottie crowns Shauna the new leader. Her first order: Natalie must prepare Coach's body for cooking and consumption to "honor" him later that night. During the grim feast, Lottie senses that something is off and begins screaming into the wilderness, which screams back. Soon all the kids are yelling their heads off and dancing in a wild maypole-like circle — it's all very Midsommar tbh — when something genuinely unexpected happens: Two totally normal adults show up, say hello, see Coach Ben's severed head, and say "What the FUCK!"
Fantastic stuff from top to bottom, really. Ben's fate is bleaker and more brutal than anything I'd anticipated. His death gives several characters — Natalie, Misty, Shauna, Lottie, and Akilah, who's now having stop-motion animation visions of three-eyed bear-wolf hybrids — their strongest material of the season. Sophie Thatcher in particular stands out as Natalie, whose very soul you can see buckling under the weight of all its been asked to endure. She makes the character as we come to know her later make sense, which hasn't quite been possible in many other cases.
Meanwhile the short-circuiting of the girls' "we do what we have to do to survive" narrative by the sight of a perfectly average couple strolling up to them like their campsite's just a couple hours walk in the other direction is a massively successful curveball. I can guess what's going to happen to the couple, of course, but that anticipation is as delightful as it is dreadful. And given the typical strength of the flashbacks, I suspect we're in for some strong writing about the guilt, shame, even just embarrassment the girls will feel for acting the way they did when rescue was so much more possible than they thought.
And for once, the present-day material doesn't weigh this thing down like a millstone. When Shauna's daughter Callie hears that Lottie was (possibly) murdered, she finally reveals the secret tape she found left for her mom earlier in the season. It's a DAT tape, audio only, so Shauna will need A/V expert Van's help to play it; in the meantime she relocates her family to a hotel so whoever left the tape and is presumably stalking her can't get to them. Shauna plays the tape for Van and Taissa, it sure sounds a lot like the girls out in the woods hooting and hollering.
Shauna discovers Callie was using her phone to record the meeting and cuts the discussion off quickly, but it's not tough to put two and two together. The recording was made by that couple who found the girls while out hiking, most likely because they were avid birders listening for particular birdcalls. Instead they found … what they found. Judging from the way Taissa snapped into action when she realized the tape might have belonged to a birder, I'm guessing things end poorly for our naturalist newcomers.
But why did things end poorly for Lottie? Misty's still trying to get to the bottom of it, sending DNA from her fingernails out to be analyzed and rifling through her trash (obtained and donated by the ever-persistent Walter) to find takeout receipts. She discovers that Lottie's one-time acolyte Lisa (Natalie Maines) works at one of the places as a delivery girl, and suspects her of committing the murder. Lisa insists she'd have no reason to do so, given that Lottie left her a $50K tip as a make-good for messing up her life in her cult. She points the finger instead at Taissa, who had a meeting with Lottie earlier that day but has been lying about it.
Or has she? Keep in mind there are very much two Taissas, the normal one and the one from the Black Lodge or whatever. It's that Taissa who seems to stop the real Taissa from crying out for help in her sleep, smiling with dark eyes at Van before falling back asleep as though nothing had happened. This is creepy. The DAT tape is creepy too. The phone that rings and plays the disembodied voice of Dark Taissa to Van while she's going through old electronic junk? You guessed it — creepy! The closer the present day and flashback material get to one another, the better everything gets. I hate to say it, but they kind of ate this week.
Next: Yellowjackets Season 3 Episode 7 Recap: The Most Dangerous Game
