Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 9
"How the Story Ends"
Writers: Sarah L. Thompson
Director: Ben Semanoff
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
A house divided against itself cannot stand. Since its inception, the existence ofYellowjackets' dual timelines has been its biggest weakness. Though the stunt casting of beloved actors who cut their teeth as troubled teens in the '90s covered it up for a time, the present-day material, following the lives of the castaways as adults back in civilization, has been dead weight since at least its first zany murder mix-up. As time has passed and we've seen the situation for the teenagers grow more dire, it's been increasingly difficult to square the grim-faced cannibal killers of the past with the whoopsie-daisy-we-killed-someone-again shenanigans of their adult selves. The teenage material remained strong, at least, but the adult stuff has been on the verge of collapsing under its own absurdity for some time.
This week on Yellowjackets, the collapse finally comes, and it tears the whole thing down with it. Having painted themselves into a corner with the adults — Shauna, our heroine, begins this episode in the process of forcing her long-lost ex-girlfriend to eat a part of her own arm at knifepoint — the writers seem to have, at long last, given up. Across the board, from the 2020s to the 1990s, they've come up with a single solution to their problems: Make everyone, adult or teen, a whacked-out murderer. But rather than create the much-needed sense of psychological continuity between kids and grown-ups that the show has lacked for so long, this only drags the messy, half-assed feeling of the present-day story to the previously strong flashbacks.
The result is an ugly thing to witness. It's a show falling apart before your eyes.
We'll start with Shauna, since the character is a disaster in both timeframes. In the present, she's become a cold-blooded attempted murderer, steering the whole gang into holding their estranged friend-in-hiding Melissa at knifepoint while they debate whether or not to kill her right in front of her. When they bring up the last person she killed, her lover Adam — are we ever gonna find out why he had no internet presence, by the way, or was that just a way to kill time? — in front of Melissa, Shauna growls "You just dug her grave. You know that, right?" A few episodes ago this woman was creating an embarrassing scene at her husband's client dinner, and now she's talking like a Game of Thrones character. It doesn't work.
Her behavior in the past is even more nonsensical and annoying. I can't tell whether the blame lies more with the paper-thin writing or Sophie Nélisse's one-note performance of it, but man oh man, gun-toting sadist Shauna does not work. She doesn't feel like the same teenager we've followed for two seasons. Nor does she feel like the goofball adult we've been following from the start. The sudden heel turn of her adult self only highlights how phony Evil Shauna feels as a screen presence, and it doesn't help that Nélisse's only trick for conveying Shauna's psychosis is to sneer at people and give the the stink-eye constantly. In pro wrestling terms, she has what's known as "go-away heat," dislikable not because she's an effective villain, but because she's so annoying the show would be better off focusing on literally anyone else.
But her Rapid Onset Serial-Killer Dysphoria is catching, unfortunately. In the past, Hannah, their mild-mannered frog-researcher captive, goes absolutely apeshit out of the blue and stabs her guide Kodi to death — right in the eye, for maximum cRaZiNeSs — rather than follow him and the castaways who'd like to leave back to civilization and safety. This is a character we met last week, who until this moment had show now signs of being, you know, completely out of her fucking mind. Maybe she's faking it in hopes of increasing her chances of survival, but we simply don't have enough of a baseline to go on in order to say "Well, sure, she buried a knife in an innocent man's brain on behalf of a pack of feral teenagers who murdered her husband 24 hours earlier, but she probably had a good reason."
The same applies to Melissa, who's ludicrously improbably intercepted by the rest of Shauna's Scooby Gang when her minivan runs out of gas on the side of the road they're driving down. (She could have driven it straight to a gas station when she noticed it was on E, but didn't, because then we wouldn't have the rest of the episode, would we?) Though she knocks her captors out by surreptitiously closing the flue on her fireplace and filling the house with fumes, she winds up held at knifepoint one last time by Van, who (again, ludicrously improbably) just so happened to have stepped out of the house to grab her breathing apparatus at exactly the time everybody else passed out. She talks Van out of stabbing her as a sacrifice to the wilderness — then grabs the knife and stabs Van, saying that's the sacrifice the wilderness wanted.
Once again, we don't know this person! I mean sure, Melissa has been a liminal presence on the show for some time, but the script hangs a lampshade on this by having teen Shauna actually come out and say no one gave a shit about the character until Shauna hooked up with her. Which is true! There wasn't anything to her! So we've got very little to go on based on the teen material, and less than a full episode to go on in the adult timeframe. She's just an attractive upper middle class lesbian living under an assumed name — after you've met her teammates, can you blame her for that? — played by Hilary Swank. Her turn to the Dark Side carries no weight, because we only just met her, like, 45 minutes of adult-storyline screen time ago. Her killing of Van has no impact.
If it's even a killing! In a scene scored with plodding obviousness by Radiohead's "Exit Music (for a Film)," Vanessa appears on an otherworldly airplane, watching her life end and Taissa mourn and scream on the projector screen with her teenage self saying various cryptic things by her side. "If this isn't the ending," adult Van says when teen Van implies there's something else going on, "then tell me what happens."
"Where would be the fun in that?" teen Van replies.
Glad you asked, teen Van! The fun in knowing what happens on a television show, as opposed to being needlessly cryptic and allusive and obfuscatory, is knowing what happens on the television show. It's in being able to take events more or less at face value and interpret them accordingly. It's in understanding why characters are doing the things they're doing, from both a psychological and a plot perspective, and reflecting on how their choices mirror or differ from what your own might have been. It's in portraying a simulacrum of life from which the viewer can actually derive meaning.
I don't know how you feel about it, but from where I'm sitting it beats the shit out of teasing something in the first five minutes of your first episode and just maybe getting to it at the end of Season 3, by which point the opening's sense of urgency, confusion, and primal fear has dissipated, due to the fact that fifty percent of the show has felt incompatible with the other fifty percent of the show since the start. We're at the point now where when Lottie pulls off some wilderness miracle, like effortlessly walking across the trap Travis sets in order to take out the burgeoning cult's prophet and facilitate the group's return home, I'm more annoyed that she doesn't fall in than impressed. At least dying when you get impaled by a bunch of wooden spikes is something I understand. That's more than I can say for Shauna mistaking being annoying for being terrifying, or Hannah stabbing Jeff from Community in the eye, or whatever the hell it is they're doing with adult Melissa now.
Until this week, the teen material had been largely (though not entirely) immune from the larger show's problems. That's all over now. Haphazard writing and phoned-in tough-guy acting has brought everything down to the same level — the level of a show that leans hard on Scott Weiland singing "I'm half the man I used to be" when it depicts a man (Jeff) feeling, you guessed it, like half the man I used to be, the level of a show that closes a momentous episode with a cover of Bush's "Glycerine." By the time you get to Sophie Thatcher ugly-crying her heart out because teen Natalie realizes they've lost their best and possibly only shot at escape as snow begins to fall, you just feel like her fine work is being wasted. In a sense, at least, I fear she's right to be afraid that there's no saving the Yellowjackets.
