In the Face of Greatness, Yellowjackets Flinches
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In the Face of Greatness, Yellowjackets Flinches
Sometimes artists feel in over their head and run, headlong, away from their own potential.
YELLOWJACKETS is a very, very well made show that consistently flirts with greatness, but always blinks—seemingly unwilling to decide whether it wants to be a grave, realistic, earnest survival thriller that walks the line of uncertainty as to whether its events are supernatural; or a campy, over-the-top occult-horror homage.
If you don’t already know the basic premise, the Yellowjackets are a highly competitive girls’ high school soccer team from New Jersey who got stranded in the wilderness in 1996, when the chartered plane taking them to Nationals crash landed. We jump back and forth in time between the girls in 1996 trying to survive in the wild, and a few key survivors who are all grown up in 2021 and still grappling with the legacy and mysteries of their shared trauma.
The cast is the undeniable part. The biggest names are Christina Ricci and Juliette Lewis in the adult era, but it’s incredibly impressive that in an ensemble cast this huge—they had to cast an entire soccer team’s worth of women twice, plus many other supporting roles—pretty much every single recurring actor is bringing their A-game. The camera and lighting is also very tight: it has a a crisp, clear, clean style that works equally well for sweeping shots of wilderness, intimate moments of dramatic tension, and chilling pivots into the grisly and nightmarish.
It’s just that, unfortunately, that isn’t enough.
SEASON 1 SPOILERS BEGIN HERE:
A Season of Promises
Nowhere is the show’s crystalline finish more evident than in the pilot episode (which may or may not be giving us a wink and a smile about the plane crash by being titled simply “Pilot”). The whole time that I’m watching the first episode, I’m asking myself:
“Why is this so gorgeous? Why is this TV pilot operating at the highest caliber of feature film craftswomanship? Why is every shot so perfectly lit and composed, every shift of mood so seamlessly tempered, every earnest teenage gaze so hauntingly calibrated?”
When the episode ends, the answer comes clear: “DIRECTED BY KARYN KUSAMA.”
The brilliant, underappreciated director of the brilliant, underappreciated Jennifer’s Body, Kusama—an executive producer on the series—is a master of exactly this style: clean, precise, immersive realism that enables heightened or ~magical elements to soar in a grounded, believable way. Jennifer’s Body in many ways offers a template for the tricky line of genre Yellowjackets aspires to walk: how do we sustain a completely earnest commitment to high teenage melodrama and a complex web of tense relationships, at the same time that we thrust these poor kids into impossible, larger than life, mysterious scenarios with a high demand on suspension of disbelief?
Kusama answers: “By executing every element of craft perfectly and introducing the shocking parts with total nonchalance.” The confident, bold pilot seamlessly treats intimations of murder and cannibalism as no different, in terms of dramatics and plausibility, from the reveal of a guilt-ridden young girl secretly sleeping with her best friend’s boyfriend.
(As a quick aside from a New Jersey-raised 90s kid, the pilot also captures the spirit of central and north Jersey culture in that era beautifully, which no other episode since then has been tasked with representing.)
Tragically, while the rest of the season is overall still high-tier television, it never again fully lives up to this perhaps unattainably high bar set by a master craftswoman. This highlights a danger of asking a top-shelf auteur to set the template for your show by directing the pilot: there aren’t many Karyn Kusamas in the world, and I’d much rather watch the version of Yellowjackets where she directed every episode.
The biggest problem with the show overall, in stark contrast to the pilot’s flawless gymnast’s finish, is that it has serious believability issues. Character motivations are several degrees too inconsistent in service of plot convenience, ranging from small choices that feel out of character individually, to very sudden shifts in the entire group’s dynamic—especially, but not exclusively, in the 1996 world.
As I hinted up top, as the show goes on to reveal the extent of the violence in the girls’ past, more and more it knee-jerks into B-horror tropes that break the spell of its reality and just don’t line up with the gravity of its overall mood and tone. This is foreshadowed by the one truly questionable choice in the pilot: a soccer injury so extreme as to constitute torture porn—even if it was intentional, which we never definitively confirm. It so happens that I recently met a real-life veteran of high-level high school girls’ soccer who told me, unprovoked, that this scene is totally beyond belief and instantly turned them off to the show.
There’s a subtler but still jarring problem in the show’s gaze. The editing has a skittishness, very often departing from a reaction or other key shot far too quickly, depriving us of the ability to linger long enough in a powerful image or really process what we’re meant to be seeing in a character’s face. It’s understandable to feel a certain pressure to keep the momentum snappy when you’ve got such a huge cast and such high plot density per episode—but there are just too many times where I feel my emotional resonance with a significant moment become clipped. This fearful editing style undermines the aforementioned acting and camera work that give the show life, and serves as a microcosm of how the show’s creators appear afraid to commit to the task they’ve set out for themselves.
Zooming out, I don’t love the show’s depictions of mental health struggles. One the one hand, I think it handles adult Natalie’s substance issues reasonably enough—and Juliette Lewis’s performance is so raw and unflichingly vulnerable that I often feel uncomfortable and voyeuristic watching her, as if I’m peeping in on a real person in crisis (like Misty literally does to her, lol).
On the other hand, the portrayal of Lottie’s whole “Is it a mental illness or is it a magical superpower?” deal is at times flirting with harmful tropes—and I say this as a proudly self-identifying Crazy Woman™ and a practicing Witch. This aspect of the story needed several more passes from mental-health sensitivity readers—if it got any in the first place—and plays in a way that gets caricaturish, minimizing the severity of psychosis-like symptoms and cavalierly validating the grandiose supernatural beliefs that can arise in such a state.
With all that said, the season finishes quite strong, with some utterly thrilling twists and cliffhangers that leave it feeling elevated and suggest some really exciting directions going forward. It’s hard to rate this season because of all these conflicting variables—and I’m trying so hard not to start giving out number ratings more granular than “X.5”—but this season probably lands somewhere above a 7.5 but below an 8/10.
SEASON 2 SPOILERS BEGIN HERE:
A Season of Nightmares
In order to make sure we don’t expect more from it than its makers believe in themselves to deliver, Season 2 almost immediately crushes our hopes, pulling back hard on the two most exciting reveals of the Season 1 finale.
Where S1 left us on the discovery that Lottie is still alive in 2021, insinuating that she’s become some kind of mastermind cult leader whose people are behind Nat’s kidnapping…S2 reveals her to be just kind of a wacky aunt archetype with some post-Goop branding, who’s mostly harmless and genuinely just kidnapped Nat to save her own life. At times it feels like we’re still meant to question her teachings and the subservience of her “intentional community,” but the actual text of her ideology as we’re shown it is just solid, straightforwardly correct self-actualization messaging. It could only sound spooky to a viewer with zero context for how spirituality spaces sound, or who equates all forms of faith with brainwashing.
And while the disturbing S1 reveal of the bloody shrine in adult Taissa’s basement does lead to further separation from her wife and child, this ends up serving to let her family—and the troubling extent of her sleepwalking issues—just kinda disappear from the story completely for the rest of the season. The two things in the S1 finale that most made S2 seem so ripe with dark possibility both get quickly discarded like so many empty campaign promises.
The season does get dark, of course. But when it does—finally revealing the truth and the origin point of the cannibalism heavily hinted at in Season 1—it happens so suddenly and with such unexpected unanimity (from all but one character) that it simply defies belief. Even though the first couple episodes do start to introduce greater desperation among the younger cast as winter takes root, it’s not sold to us effectively enough to justify that moral-compass characters like Taissa and Natalie would EAT THEIR FUCKING FRIEND ON A DIME just because her burning corpse smelled, like, sooo good, you guys.
I can buy it more from future serial killer Misty, or from Shauna who already had such a conflicted relationship with Jackie (and was losing her mind hanging out with Jackie’s corpse), or perhaps from Lottie who at that point is beginning to believe she’s some kind of Chosen One. But I’m not even sure I can buy it from a character like Van, who aligns with Lottie’s budding cult but from a place of looking for sisterhood and group unity, or from Travis who was on the verge of being killed and probably eaten himself during the traumatic, mushroom-fueled S1 highlight “Doomcoming.” At this point, Travis is also still looking for his brother Javi, who was lost the same night Travis was nearly killed, which further defies how easily Trav gets onboard with eating a lost party member.
Speaking of Travis, another disrespect to the lingering mysteries left by Season 1 comes even before the cannibalism of it all, in Episode 2, “Edible Complex.” Lottie finally reveals how Travis died: she was the one who pushed the button—but you know, it was all part of this, like, convoluted scheme gone awry where she was just assisting Travis with a near-suicide so he could see visions from beyond the veil, and she’s totally really sad and sorry that the button got jammed and he actually died. This plays exactly as it sounds: like a total fabrication we’re meant to dismiss out of hand—but then the hard-nosed, trust-deficient Natalie, who was just kidnapped by Lottie, just fucking believes it right away in a way that strongly signals we, too, are meant to. (And forget about how this is supposed to answer the question of what Travis’s “TELL NAT SHE WAS RIGHT” note meant.)
All of this should spell out the core problem with Season 2: it has an even worse pattern than S1 of playing fast and loose with believability—from moments of goopy, tone-breaking, B-horror corn-syrup blood, to inconsistent character motivations that completely shatter the world. Even examples that start small, like Natalie demanding a ride home from Lottie’s commune but then never mentioning it again when she’s just told that it’ll take until tomorrow, scale upward toward serious character breaks, like the cynical Nat buying into Lottie’s whole-ass belief system more than feels plausible by the end of the season.
Another “small” instance that really infuriates me is that when the team decides to burn Jackie, they first explicitly stop Shauna from taking off Jackie’s Yellowjackets jacket—tongue-twister intentional—which directly contradicts Shauna telling her daughter Callie, in Season 1, that the jacket Callie stole from Shauna’s closet was actually Jackie’s, not her own.
This may seem minor to some, but the way it so casually undoes a moment of character development from S1—a moment that showed us adult Shauna does still have some sentimental affection for long-dead Jackie—demonstrates an attitude that says: “Nothing matters, this is all fake anyway, we don’t even have to know our own material.” I have to wonder whether the writers of relevant episodes in S2 just straight-up didn’t know about this detail from S1…or simply chose to retcon it because their new idea felt cooler. I don’t know which would be worse.
The most strident breach of them all signals this pattern early, arising in the very first episode, which comes out swinging with—get this—NEW GIRLS among the team in 1996. You know, after the plane crash. Surviving with the familiar girls, out in the wilderness, like they were there all along. As it turns out, these three (!!!) were in Season 1 as non-speaking background extras in a tiny handful of shots; they may even have had speaking parts in S1 had it not been for COVID limitations during production.
But taking the series as-is, unless you’re the most eagle-eyed viewer in town, it absolutely feels like they’re trying to shoehorn in new characters and retcon us into believing they’d always been there—and it’s an absolutely incorrect and indefensible writing choice that sets up Season 2 to feel like a flimsy, nothing-matters self-caricature right away. The new girl who gets the most story is Crystal, a sort of Misty Junior who’s so rarely and obliquely acknowledged by anyone other than Misty that, right up until she dies, I was hoping and lowkey expecting she would turn out to be Misty’s self-serving hallucination. That would have been better writing, straight up.
(With that said, I do want to note that Season 2 finally puts some spotlight on the two least-utilized speaking roles from S1, team members Akilah and Mari in the 1996 arc—both women of color who felt pointedly neglected and sidelined in S1, though perhaps COVID restrictions were partly to blame there as well. The characters still feel C-listed in S2, but Akilah does get an emotional arc related to the hallucinatory themes we’re about to get into, and Mari does get to influence the main plot as a diehard Lottie-ist.)
It’s especially disappointing that the season’s plotting and verisimilitude go so far down this trajectory of acting entitled to our suspension of disbelief because, formally and stylistically, it’s actually quite daring and experimental. As characters gradually start to lose hope and spiral into darker places during the winter, especially after the cannibal seal has been broken, there’s an impressive push into using form to express the fragmentation of individual points of view.
A real highlight of the season for me, and the most persistent example of this, is how Coach Ben—the only character to react with appropriate horror to the new normal of fucking eating each other—starts drifting off into repeated, extended reveries with a tinge of 90s-TV serialization: imagining an alternate life where he never got on the plane and instead fully embraces his relationship with former city boyfriend Paul, and resolves to finally come out to his family as gay.
Directly related to this new fledgling surrealist tendency, the season does once again get stronger as it presses on. Once we’ve given up hope of seeing any more of adult Taissa’s family or finding out some dark secret hidden on adult Lottie’s farm, our dogged resignation is rewarded with two standout episodes back to back.
In “Qui,” Shauna finally gives birth to her forbidden lovechild, whom she struggles to learn to breastfeed before he gets swept up in Lottie’s cultlike activities—only for us to find out this was all another dreamlike extended fantasy, this time on Shauna’s part, and that her baby was in fact stillborn. It’s a play of a kind we’ve all seen before, yet it’s executed well, isn’t signaled too much to be surprised by, and hits with heartbreaking emotional resonance.
Straight from there is “Burial,” which deals with the brutal aftermath of that tragedy for the girls in the past, set in direct contrast to a slate of healing exercises and unexpected camaraderie on Lottie’s commune for the reunited women of the present. The tension between past trauma and present healing is both sweet, offering a ray of hope in an otherwise grim season—and bitter, playing off of ominous 2021 dialogue that suggests the women may not fully remember the events of 1996. The episode is further marked as special by a cheeky, playful, surreal fantasy sequence that Misty flies into while in a sensory deprivation tank.
The finale is a more muddled affair. To my extreme frustration, there’s another moment of unbelievable collective delusion, this time in the present—which makes it even harder to swallow—in which all the women suddenly decide to believe in Lottie’s cosmology and hunt Shauna for sport, even though only Van has shown any signs of being willing to play along that hard. Once again, this is hardest to believe from Taissa, who has returned to playing the voice of reason in the group—and just moments earlier was openly flummoxed that Van had killed their escape plan, a call for outside help. This is the most egregious plot contrivance of the season, directly contradicting the impression of healing that helped elevate “Burial,” but it’s far from the only one in the episode.
Toward the end there are some shining gems: adult Natalie’s dying vision is tender and beautiful—and the ultimate ending is again thrilling with possibility, using cliffhangers that seem like they should be harder to fumble than those of S1. However, it’s still possible for them to pull back on the outcome of Coach setting fire to the house—cue S3E1 showing us how Misty put it out with snowballs before there was any structural damage—and Lottie’s anointing of teen Nat as the new boss bitch is a confusing turn of events that seems to take us further away from the pilot episode’s implication that Misty will be wearing the presidential antlers by the time the team reaches the apex of their depravity.
Given how poorly this season has respected what was left for it to work with by the first, I’d call my expectations for Season 3 “cautiously pessimistic.” And yet, as in many such toxic relationships: “When it’s good, it’s so good…” While I doubt Season 3 will truly correct course with regard to this clear pattern of cheap script conveniences, I have to admit that they have indeed kept me hooked.
If we graciously assume they still remember that we’re all waiting to see how the 1996 story will ultimately arc toward the ritual sacrifice and Misty Nation foreshadowed in the pilot, the burning of the house and the twist appointment of King Natalie could foster a really interesting narrative direction toward getting us there: spiraling toward doom in the naked harshness of another winter, under the leadership of a troubled girl who has a strong moral compass but also a hunter’s utilitarian survival instinct. Exploring young Natalie’s rule when her adult counterpart is already dead could also be a beautifully tragic way of showing us just why she ended up in such dark places in her adult life—or, you know, they could just undo it by the third episode and put Misty in charge right away.
Even worse, they might have no plan to actually write toward that foreshadowed hook at all: it may have just been one more empty campaign promise to get us onboard with an agenda they never had any intention or sense of obligation to fulfill.
The cast and the baseline craft keep this series firmly anchored at a 7/10 minimum—unless the writing gets even looser next year—and it’s only the stylistic flourishes and perhaps the standout episodes toward the end that pull it above that, back to at most a 7.5.
Yellowjackets is a series that still has all the parts in place to grant it the potential for true greatness—if only its makers would own the gravity of the subject matter; let go of their outdated 00s “elevated B-movie” instinct; and take full responsibility for the tone and the expectations they set out for it.
They should also beg Karyn Kusama to direct all the episodes.
SINISTRA BLACK (she/her) is a Los Angeles-based writer-directress, Transgender Anarchist Sorceress, and real-life Lottie you wanna get purple for. Find all of her platforms right here.
© 2023 Sinistra Black, All Rights Reserved.
Images referenced under Fair Use.