Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 7
"Croak"
Writers: Alisha Brophy, Ameni Rozsa
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
Hmmmm. Not sure this is working.
At the end of last week's solid Yellowjackets — the teenage material was typically excellent and unusually upsetting, the adult material wasn't good but nor was it distractingly bad for once — it seemed like we were about to take a great leap forward. Civilization had reached the Yellowjackets in the form of researchers Edwin (Nelson Franklin) and Hannah (Ashley Sutton), who stumble across the girls as they hoot and holler like maniacs after their latest cannibal feast. This can't be good, you think to yourself.
And indeed, it isn't, at least not for Edwin. An opening flashback segment shows us Hannah and Edwin's last three days hiking through the Canadian wilderness in an attempt to make a recording of the elusive Arctic Banshee frog, which hibernates for seven years before emerging to mate; the frogs' harsh mating calls are the source of the screaming sound the girls have been hearing. (Between this and the poison-fume cave, we're starting to get a lot of non-supernatural explanations for the apparently supernatural goings-on out there.) Their journey ends abruptly when Lottie stabs Edwin in the back of the head from outta nowhere, proclaiming that the wilderness doesn't want these interlopers here. Hannah and her rugged, seen-it-all, crossbow-wielding, mountain-man guide, Kodiak (played by Joel McHale for some reason??), make a run for it, and the girls give chase. (For the most part — a few stay behind to tend to Melissa, who gets shot with a crossbow quarrel, while Lottie communes with Edwin's corpse.)
Naturally, Shauna, who has revealed herself to be a cold-blooded and sociopathic piece of shit this season (this might have been useful information for Melanie Lynskey to have when creating the adult version of the character, but oh well!), is the leader of the "leave no witnesses" faction. She nearly executes Hannah when the woman gives herself up to her pursuers. Meanwhile, Travis and Akilah nearly kill Kodi by forcing him off the cliff before they decide to rescue him instead, in hopes that he can lead them back to civilization. Hannah, meanwhile, is brought back to camp, where she tries to make nice with the girls despite the corpse of her husband lying a few feet away, with Coach Ben's severed head rolling around there somewhere too.
Seems like forward momentum, right? I thought so too, except for something worrying said by the adults in the present-day storyline. Gathered together for their latest batch of murder hijinks, the gang listen to the DAT tape Hannah recorded when she was being chased, and thereby learn she had a daughter she gave up for adoption when she was a teenager. Well, they learn she had a child, a child named Alex, but unless I'm mistaken the "daughter" bit is just Shauna making an assumption. (My first thought was that the child was Adam, the mysterious artist Shauna murdered in the first season, which keep in mind is like a few weeks ago to the characters, not that you'd know it.) And they're all quite broken up about it, blah blah blah.
But then they mention that "Gen and Melissa [two of the other castaways] got pretty close to Hannah" when they're trying to figure out who delivered the tape. Both Gen and Melissa are dead, at least allegedly, which is new news, but I don't like the whole "got pretty close to Hannah" bit. This is a show that has spent the bulk of the season so far dispatching with Coach Ben, the castaways' only surviving adult. Now it's going to bring in a new adult to serve the same function? Feels like a lot of work just to restore the status quo ante.
More importantly, however, there is simply zero continuity between the Shauna Shipman who's running around with a knife and out for blood like Lawrence of Arabia screaming "NO PRISONERS!!!" and the Shauna Shipman whom Lynskey has been playing as a desperate housewife, bumbling investigator, and all around doofus since the show started. In terms of the adult version of the characters she's only one notch above Christina Ricci's Misty on the comic-relief chart.
In other words, we've just established yet another axis along which the adult material is mediocre at best. Yellowjackets has spent a lot of time presenting the grown-ups' antics as, at worst, black comedy — a gang who couldn't shoot straight, even if a bunch of people have ended up dead regardless. But back in the day they were summarily executing people and acting like the subterranean humanoids in The Descent when confronted with interlopers. It's like no one told the writers of this show what the writers of this show were doing.
This goes double where Lottie is concerned. You remember Lottie — the surviving castaway whose adult version was not played by a famous ex-child actor, and who was killed off off-screen a few episodes ago? Yellowjackets waits until after that to reveal just how fucked up Lottie got out there, stabbing Edwin from behind and wallowing in his blood. Why would you kill off the adult version of the character before showing us the most fucked-up thing the teenage version of the character has done to date? There's no way for this to have any ramifications on fully half of your show anymore. It's a wild miscalculation and misallocation of resources.
About the only person in the present-day storyline who seems to have any brains at all is Callie, Shauna's daughter. Her mother is driving down to Richmond, Virginia to stalk Hannah's now-grown child, whom she suspects is behind the attempts to kill her over the past few days. (Make that make sense.) In the process she abandons Tai and Misty at a hospital where they've taken Van after she throws up blood. Van has a vision that Tai has secretly been her evil self all this time, and is planning to kill in order to give the wilderness what it wants or whatever so that Van might continue to live.
Stranded in a shitty motel room with her dad, Callie finally comes out and says what I wish the show itself had made up its mind about two seasons ago: Her mother, Shauna, is a bad person, capable of horrible crimes, including the disappearance of the two researchers and their guide during her time in the wilderness. Her dad, Jeff, would rather unconsciously scratch his skin raw than face facts. But in the meantime, Shauna's parked outside a stranger's house with a recently purchased Rambo knife. Callie has the right idea, I suspect.
I wish the show did. I wish Yellowjackets had the kind of faith in itself and its audience displayed by, well, any number of other shows about murderers, which didn't feel the need to obscure its' protagonists' awfulness with zany mix-ups and Scooby Gang shenanigans. If adult Shauna had shown any signs of being a lastingly bad person, instead of an adorable housewife having a fling, back in Season 1, Seasons 2 and 3 would have been a lot more interesting. Instead you get what we've got, which is a show in which half of the airtime feels like it's being spent actively combatting the other half. Even the Yellowjackets know that a house divided against itself cannot stand.
