Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 8
"A Normal, Boring Life"
Writers: Julia Bicknell
Director: Anya Adams
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
In professional wrestling, there's an art to the infamous "heel turn." The act of turning a good guy wrestler bad needs to be precisely timed and set up by previous incidents to achieve maximum effect. Take John Cena, for instance. One of the most famous and successful wrestlers ever, Cena was nevertheless booed for years by fans who felt WWE and its owner, fascist sex criminal Vince McMahon, were forcing "Super-Cena" down their throats. By this point McMahon's brains had leaked out of his ears, creatively speaking and in many other was as well, so it's as if he never heard the crowds jeering at all. He kept Cena as a "babyface," and the fans never came back around to him until he achieved Hollywood success and came back as a part-timer. He's currently embarked on a farewell tour that has, at least, seen him turn heel. This time, he wants to be booed, and the grateful fans are responding accordingly.
So there's a temptation to say "better late than never" when it comes to the Yellowjackets team finally depicting the adult Shauna breaking bad. I don't mean accidentally murdering her lover while bumbling around as per usual. I mean stalking her ex-girlfriend Melissa, breaking into her house, holding her at knifepoint, biting a chunk of skin off her arm, and trying to force her to eat it. For the first time, well, ever, we're seeing an adult Shauna who matches the black-eyed sadist who has emerged in the forest in the show's teen segments this season. We've also gotten our first glimpse of something as disgusting and fucked up in the present as what happened in the past.
Psychological and tonal continuity — two birds, one stone, right? After all, among its many other deficits, the adult material has long suffered from a lack of the moral seriousness and urgency that suffuses the teenage material, as well as any sense that the howling psychopaths running around the woods maiming and eating people are connected in any palpable way to the dingbat Scooby Gang that's constantly taking pointless car trips around the Eastern seaboard to have murder hijinks. Shauna's attack on Melissa, played as an adult by a surprise-cameo Hilary Swank, would seem to right the ship.
But right away, things seem off, starting with the casting. It's not that Hilary Swank is a bad choice for the role of Mel at all. Far from it! She's a terrific actor, and you can see how her Melissa — living under an assumed name while married to the daughter of the researchers the girls murdered — emerged from the person she was in the woods, because, for once, the writing leans way way hard on explaining it.
Rather, it's that the deft casting reveals sloppiness elsewhere. Swank now joins Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis, Christina Ricci, Lauren Ambrose, and Elijah Wood in the ranks of Yellowjackets cast members who first made their names playing troubled young people around the turn of the millennium. But all this does is once again cast a harsh spotlight on the lazy casting of the adult Taissa and Lottie, who don't fit the pattern. And before you make the argument that this is because there aren't enough female actors of color to choose from during that time period, I invite you to try a little fucking harder. (As I've said before, Tia Mowry and Shannyn Sossamon, pay them whatever they want, boom, done.)
Adult Melissa's arrival also marks the debut of one of the show's most ludicrous story conceits to date: She is married to the daughter of the researchers they murdered under an assumed name. Mel makes it sound like something that just kinda happened. And it turns out she did send the DAT tape to Shauna as some kind of means of therapeutic catharsis, which makes no sense in any respect, much less for a character who keeps saying all she wants is to be left alone in the life she created after faking her own death. (Oh yeah, she pretended to commit suicide and then disappeared.) Shauna even points out how ridiculous this is, another case of Yellowjackets trying to cover up one of its writing deficiencies by hanging a lampshade on it. If you guys think it doesn't make any sense, I promise you, neither do we!
Then there's Shauna's heel turn itself, which fails on basically every level. Melanie Lynskey, a prodigiously talented actor, simply cannot build a bridge between the Curly-from-the-Three-Stooges doofus she's been playing for two and a half seasons and the knife-wielding maniac who tries to force a woman she had sex with a bunch as a teenager to eat her own flesh based on a bunch of imaginary crimes against Shauna that Melissa very, very obviously did not commit. It can't be done, by her or by anyone else. Neither can even an actor of Swank's caliber square the circle of playing a character who a) only wants to be forgotten and left alone, but b) sends incriminating evidence to an estranged friend she knows full well is dangerously unhinged. There's no option c) both a and b!
It doesn't help that the behavior of the teenage Shauna is, at this point, equally preposterous. The Sophies, Nélisse and Thatcher, have both become masters of emulating their adult counterparts' speech patterns, and in this episode it's especially noticeable how good they've gotten. Perhaps for the first time since the very first episodes, young Shauna and Natalie feel, or at least sound, of a piece with their adult selves.
But only sonically. Truth be told, young Shauna's turn to the dark side, which in practical terms means behaving like an irrational paranoiac who makes life impossible for everyone around her, feels carelessly sketched out rather than built up. Other than that initial scene where she angrily writes in her diary, we've gotten nothing out of teen Shauna this season that justifies her new killcrazy ethos and her determination to stay in the woods even when rescue is at hand. That leaves Nélisse in the difficult position of glowering and barking orders and being obnoxious, because the writers think this makes her intimidating.
What it actually makes her is annoying. At least Lottie and Taissa, the other girls who try to stay behind when everyone gets ready to follow their captives Kodi and Hannah to safety, have been established as being deeply mentally ill. What's Shauna's excuse for not only staying behind, but ordering the rest of the group to ditch the escape attempt entirely? Get out of everyone's way, you underwritten asshole! If I were Natalie or Travis I'd have shot her a long time ago.
Elsewhere in the present, Taissa kinda sorta kills a man with terminal heart failure as an offering to the wilderness, a weird half-assed mercy killing via yelling really loud that doesn't do the character or the story any favors. Evil Taissa is apparently fully in charge by the end of the episode, blocking Good Taissa out of Van's hospital room and everything, but Evil Taissa was a lot more fun when she was a freakish image of horror crouched in the tree outside her son's bedroom than she is now as basically just a grumpier, meaner, less intelligent version of Good Taissa. And now the no-eyeball man from her nightmares is hanging around with her evil self, which really feels like writer Julia Bicknell throwing her hands up and saying "Look, I dunno what the point of this guy is either."
Meanwhile, Jeff and Callie have checked into a nicer hotel, where they bump into the sleazeballs Jeff was trying to land as a client a few episodes ago. Callie has been trying to impress upon Jeff the possibility that Shauna is, in fact, a bad person, irrevocably fucked up by her experience in the wilderness, much more than they'd ever dreamed. (Much more than the writers of the show dreamed during Seasons 1 and 2, that's for sure!)
Jeff files this information away and uses it to take one last grab at these potential clients, fully throwing Shauna under the bus as a crazy person, but then trying to make his marriage to her sound sexy and badass rather than pathetic and one-sided. "Don't give up on me, guys," he says. "Haven't you ever fallen in love with an unhinged woman? Or has every woman you've ever been with been fucking boring?" I feel like it's gauche, in some way, to say "I get it, Jeff" here, but I mean … I get it, Jeff. I get it.
But there is one scene in this episode I think is pretty much perfect: Teenage Misty looking for her lost glasses. It's very difficult to get a person with good eyesight to understand just how impossible it is for a person with bad eyesight to navigate the world in any meaningful or effective way without glasses on. Folks think hey, if you're not legally blind, how bad could it be? The answer is "I can't read a single word on my laptop monitor even though it's a foot away from my face" bad. It's "I can't read past the second line on the eye doctor's chart" bad. It's "I can't have sex without my glasses on because otherwise I can't make out my partner's face" bad. (Sorry, but it's true!)
So kudos to writer Bicknell and director Anya Adams for depicting the (no pun intended) blind panic of a person on their knees, hands crawling across the ground around them, hoping against hope to find the one device that enables them to be a part of the seeing world. I don't care that Misty is a reprehensible weirdo. I don't care that in the future she becomes a cold-blooded murderer. I don't care that in the past she wrecked the radio and thus is the sole reason the Yellowjackets are still stranded. (Will the show itself ever care about this? I'm not holding my breath!) All I cared about in that moment is that Misty find her glasses and see again. When she finally grabbed them from the grass and put them back on, I literally applauded.
See? Yellowjackets is perfectly capable of capturing relatable human emotions and experiences when it needs to. But it still feels like the writers are playing some sort of weird 3-on-3 half-court basketball game where the teen team is on one side, the adult team is on the other, neither side ever tells the other what they're doing, and the teen team dunks on the adult team like the Harlem Globetrotters whip the asses of the Washington Generals. This arrangement has stood strong for three seasons, and I see little evidence it will change.
PS: It was inevitable, I'm sure, but the arrival of Oasis's "Wonderwall" on the soundtrack is one of the most egregious grabs of low-hanging fruit I've ever seen a music supervisor go for. Have they already done 4 Non Blonde's "What's Up," or do we still have that to quote-unquote look forward to?
