Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 10
"Full Circle"
Writers: Ameni Rozsa
Director: Bart Nickerson
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
It's not a total disaster. It's not even mostly a disaster. While it doesn't redeem the three seasons that led up to it, Yellowjackets' third season finale was not the catastrophe I feared. And that's something, isn't it? Titled "Full Circle" because it finally brings the 1990s storyline up to the point at which the pilot's cold open and cannibalistic finale take place, this episode displays many of the subtle strengths that, I think, keep Yellowjackets together when the plot — and, there's no way around it now, some of the acting — threatens to tear it apart.
For one thing, it looks real. The nature photography has always been crisp and colorful, never using digital murk to obscure the rich greens and browns of the summertime forest, or the overwhelming white of the snowy winter months. Nighttime looks like nighttime on this show: The night air is black, not blue, and orange torches light up the darkness rather than create a complementary color scheme through digital trickery.
This carries over to the present-day material too, by the way. It may sound like I'm damning the show with faint praise by saying it makes the places it goes in the 2020s — houses, hotels, restaurants, apartments, schools, stores, whatever — actually look and feel like those places look and feel. There's no effort to conform everything to an artificial teal-and-apricot color scheme, which I promise you get real fucking tired of when you watch as much television as a professional critic does. I don't know why shows choose to do this, if it's just trend-chasing or if it maximizes legibility on phone screens or what, but I'm grateful for shows that don't, just because it's boring to look at. Yellowjackets never takes these pointless shortcuts.
Visually, anyway.
But now that we're finally here, now that we finally have the context for that fatal chase through the woods, that ritualistic cannibalization, the true identity of the Antler Queen, why exactly Misty was smiling after gobbling down one of her teammates — now that we know it all, it still feels like a bellyflop. And I'm embarrassed to say it took someone on Bluesky to help me figure out why.
It's like this. You've had three seasons of two parallel stories: the teenage material, which aside from that initial flash-forward has proceeded chronologically from the point of the plane crash, and the adult material, all of which obviously takes place after literally every single thing we've seen the teenagers do. The adults therefore know everything they did as teenagers.
But we in the audience do not. Nor should we! It's crucial to keep us strategically ignorant in order to do the very fundamental things that stories do with their audiences. If one of the adults had said "Shauna was the Antler Queen" in episode 2 of Season 1, or if they'd rattled off the names of everyone who died, or if they had any kind of conversation that honestly addressed everything they'd done out there, well, there goes the whole show. In other words, as my Bluesky interlocutor put it, "So for plot reasons the Adult timeline cant reference anything that happens in the past until it's happened in the Teen timeline."
And there's your problem. Even though it would make sense, knowing what we know now, for everyone in the adult timeline to react to Shauna like she's a complete fucking monster, the show couldn't do that without blowing the future of the teenage storyline. Even though it would make sense for someone to bring up the fact that Misty hid the transponder that could have gotten them home for a full year — Natalie knows, and one assumes she told the others — the show couldn't do that either. It couldn't give you all the reasons the rest of the characters would hate and mistrust Shauna and Misty. It couldn't have the adults' behavior reflect their past experiences. Again, as my Bluesky pal put it, "That seems like it would result in some very weird plotting and character work."
Indeed it does! In this episode, for example, we see young Shauna assume control of the survivors — barking out orders, donning the Antler Queen outfit. Most importantly, Shauna susses out that Tai and Van rigged the deck of cards they use for sacrifice selection in order to make Hannah, the scientific researcher and an outsider, the victim instead of one of their own. So she changes her place in line, knowing this will force the lethal Queen of Hearts card onto Mari, Shauna's hated rival. This isn't obeying the will of the Wilderness or whatever — it's premeditated murder.
Now that we've seen this side of teenage Shauna, it's therefore okay for adult Shauna to give voice to these same feelings, in a note she scrawls after being abandoned by her husband Jeff and daughter Callie. (More on Callie in a moment, unfortunately.) Now she can talk about how much fun it was to live like Lord of the Flies, instead of bumbling around doing comic relief. Imagine if we'd gotten this version of Melanie Lynskey all along! But the show was prevented from giving her to us by its own bifurcated structure.
So we've been left flailing, trying to connect what Lynskey has been doing for three seasons as adult Shauna with what Sophie Nélisse has been doing with her since her heel turn at the start of Season 3, and it simply can't be done. Adult Shauna's sudden swing towards psychopathy led only to the ridiculous business with Melissa, an entirely underdeveloped character that not even Hilary Swank could save. Teenage Shauna's reign of terror is botched by Nélisse, who for whatever reason decides on a single sneering affect for Evil Teen Shauna and never drops it. It's not intimidating, it's not impressive, it's certainly not frightening — it's just annoying.
It makes you wonder why only her ex-girlfriend Melissa tries to do something about this asshole, not that she has it within her to finish Shauna off when she has her by the throat during the hunt. But you've got a group of girls who are now experienced killers, and you've got one of them making herself the enemy of half of that group on purpose. It strains credulity that if they're gonna be out there murdering people, Shauna's not at the top of the list.
Which feeds right back into the present-day material. Misty deduces that Callie, not Shauna, was Lottie's killer. Yeah, turns out that Callie went to Lottie's to retrieve Melissa's incriminating DAT tape, Lottie brought her down to a little candlelit shrine she'd built on the basement steps and tells her she's the heir to her mother's murderous Wilderness persona, Callie snaps and shoves her, Lottie falls down the stairs and accidentally dies. It's the stupidest possible solution to a pointless mystery that feels like the writers giving up on Adult Lottie as a character and throwing up their hands, which they could ill afford to do after losing Adult Natalie last season. This season would be much stronger with both adult characters alive and well all along, by the way.
Anyway, here's my point: If you know what Misty knows about Shauna, would you ever risk delivering this information to her personally? She has killed before and will likely kill again, and you're telling her you could have her only child thrown in prison. You might as well be painting a target on your back, and a true-crime buff like Misty would be more paranoid about this than most normal people. But Misty can't act terrified of Shauna now, even though it would make sense based on what we've seen in the teen timeline, because Misty hasn't acted terrified of Shauna at all up until now. The show's structure has worked to the show's detriment.
The episode's happy ending fails for similar reasons. While everyone keeps Shauna distracted by eating Mari and kissing her ass, Natalie sneaks off with the radio transmitter while Hannah uses a mask and eye make-up to pose as Natalie and keep Shauna from suspecting anything. By the time Shauna uncovers the ruse, it's too late: Natalie is up on a cliffside, radioing for help. (This plan is what Misty was smiling about, apparently.) But again, when Adult Natalie was still alive and she and Adult Misty were running around doing this and that, or even since she died, at no point did their shared role in the team's rescue come up, as far as I can remember — certainly not with the frequency with which I'd bring it up if I were in the survivors' shoes.
So now, here, in the the tenth episode of the third season, Yellowjackets finally explains why none of this shit ever came up before now: the magic of memory suppression! All of a sudden, we start hearing about how hard it's been for the adults to remember what happened to them out there — not because it was so bad, according to Shauna, but because it was so good! The experience of hunting and eating people to honor a Wilderness demon made them "so alive in that place that we lost our capacity for self-reflection," according to Shauna. "We can't or won't remember it clearly because we recognize, deep down, that we were having so much fun." That's why Shauna acted like a nincompoop instead of a sociopath all this time, you see. "I let it all slip away from me," she writes. "It's time to start taking it back."
Long past time, if you ask me! It's now apparent that Yellowjackets' own structure prevents it from working. It creates a scenario in which the filmmakers cannot be honest with or about the adult characters, because doing so would spoil the teenage material. This creates an obvious qualitative discrepancy between the two storylines. If this had been a show just about the kids, that would be something. If the adult material had been presented seriously, without holding back just what they did out there and why, and with the adult characters' personalities existing in continuity with what happened back then, that would be something. What we got is neither.
But maybe there's a silver lining here. Okay, so the separate-timeline thing was a mess, and keeping the events of the past buried even when it would be better for the story for the adults to acknowledge them didn't work. But that's all over now. Shauna is born-again hard. Tai is out there tearing organs out of Van's corpse and eating them. Melissa is on the loose, willing to sacrifice her old teammates to the Wilderness spirit. And in the past, we're fully caught up with the flash-forward from the pilot. We can finally align both versions of all the characters. Theoretically, anyway: I do not like what they've given Nélisse to do, and I do not like the way she's doing it, especially compared to how, say, Sophie Thatcher has risen to this season's demands. But a thwarted Teen Shauna is like a more interesting character than Teen Shauna in Charge, so there's even reason for optimism there. It's just a shame, really, that this once-promising show took three seasons to get to square one.
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