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Yellowjackets Had Already Jumped the Shark. Then Came This Episode.
Three seasons in, we’re no closer to unraveling the Showtime thriller’s central mystery than we were at the beginning.
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This article contains spoilers for Yellowjackets Season 3, Episode 3.
One of the things that distinguishes serialized television from other, more self-contained art forms is that it’s based in a promise: Give me this many hours of your life, this many years of your sustained attention and your emotional involvement, and it will all be worth it. It starts a little slow, you’ll hear, or You have to power through the first season, but stick with it. The fact that shows stretch over long periods of time is ideally one of the medium’s strengths; you can forge a powerful connection with a story’s character in the two hours it takes to watch a movie or the two weeks it takes to read a novel, but it’s not the same as the bond you form when you’ve lived through a chunk of your life alongside them, spent the time between episodes or the long stretches between seasons wondering what might happen next.
The downside of this arrangement is that the streaming era has turned a profound connection forged by commitment and regularity into a situationship that has to be reestablished every time a show manages to get back on the air. It’s been close to two years since the previous season of Yellowjackets, a rocky string of episodes that had many who fell hard for its darkly funny first season wondering if the series was capable of sustaining itself long term or if this might be the moment to discreetly ghost and move on. Its strike-delayed third season, which debuted last week, seemed in a hurry to establish a new baseline, contracting its present-day storyline to focus more squarely on the principal characters (no more mysterious cult compounds) and jumping its teenage plane-crash survivors past their first winter in the wilderness so they can tap into food sources other than each other.
The third season’s third episode, “Them’s the Brakes,” is written by Yellowjackets creators Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson with co-showrunner Jonathan Lisco, a TV veteran who was brought on after the pilot was picked up to series. It’s the first time since the show’s second episode—the first after the series got a full-season order—the three have shared a writing credit, increasing the sense that all hands have been brought on to steady the ship. And yet the episode climaxes with a sequence, and one moment in particular, that will likely be some viewers’ cue to jump over the side.
The episode’s driving storyline takes place in the 1990s timeline, in which the beleaguered Coach Ben (Steven Krueger) has taken Mari (Alexa Barajas) hostage in his cave. The surviving Yellowjackets suspect Ben, likely correctly, of having set fire to the cabin they formerly occupied, and although the girls haven’t yet progressed to outright homicide, it’s clear they’re willing to put those they consider outsiders in a position where the wilderness they worship will do the dirty work for them. Ben, however, lacks that killer instinct, and he lets Mari escape. After a half-hearted-at-best effort to keep the secret that Ben is alive and hiding nearby, Mari tells the other girls everything, which leads to a search party headed straight for Ben’s cave. Three of the girls, Shauna (Sophie Nélisse), Van (Liv Hewson), and Akilah (Nia Sondaya), wriggle through a narrow passageway and get lost in the dark, unknowingly stumbling into an area of the cave where the air is either tainted or sufficiently deoxygenated enough that they start having visions. And that’s when things truly go off the rails.
Shauna’s vision is clear enough. She finds herself in the middle of a vast mountain lake, clad only in a white nightgown, and she sees a young boy waving from the shoreline. Recognizing him as an older version of the stillborn baby she gave birth to in the previous season, she swims and swims but never seems to get any closer. Van, meanwhile, finds a door in the cave wall that opens into the cabin, where she takes a seat by the fire. An ember falls to the floor and begins to smolder, and Van moves to stomp it out, but she finds herself stuck in her chair, which is also a seat from the plane in which she and her teammates went down. At first, it’s just a lap belt that’s holding her back, but then she’s grabbed by several soot-streaked arms, some of which are still sheathed in yellow-and-blue varsity jackets.
These visions aren’t exactly hard to interpret—indeed, one of Yellowjackets’ weaknesses, which has become clearer over time, is a difficulty in leaving room for interpretation without feeling evasive or, worse, undecided. The show is built around a central, unsettling ambiguity: Just how real is the unseen “it” whose will the girls believe they’re following? The presence of cryptic symbols that appear to predate their crash-landing in the wilderness seems to hint that “it” is not simply a figment of their collective imaginations, nor an ad hoc system of beliefs constructed for the purpose of deflecting responsibility for their more desperate and questionable actions. (The girls didn’t simply let Jackie and Javi die, then feast on their flesh; the wilderness chose.)
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But Yellowjackets, at least thus far, seems like a show that doesn’t openly believe in the supernatural or think that people need a push from demonic or chaotic forces to do monstrous things. The shimmering surf guitar that scores Van’s vision feels like an homage, deliberate or otherwise, to the otherworldly dreamscape of Twin Peaks. But David Lynch’s Black Lodge wasn’t a red herring. The show, and Lynch himself, behaved as if evil were a genuine force, malignant and comprehensible, one that even the pure-hearted Agent Cooper could fall suddenly and permanently victim to. Yellowjackets’ “it,” by contrast, feels more and more like a simple plot contrivance, one whose indeterminate nature can be stretched out for as long as Showtime keeps ordering new seasons.
The wear, however, is starting to show. Yellowjackets started off as a delightfully macabre riff on the mean-girls genre, a spooky, black-hearted comedy about the lingering wounds of high school trauma. When the adult foursome of Shauna, Natalie, Taissa, and Misty strolled into their 25th high school reunion in Season 1, all slow-motion swagger and fuck-you style, it felt as if the series had grafted something universal onto something highly specific (namely, the experience of spending 25 years keeping the secret that you ate some of your friends in order to survive). But three seasons in now, that delicate balance has been disrupted, and the writers can’t seem to find their footing. Which brings us back to Akilah’s vision.
Akilah’s cave-spawned hallucination starts with a pan down a white picket fence, which mirrors the opening of Lynch’s Blue Velvet. But instead of a severed ear nestled in a sunny field, she encounters something even stranger: a talking llama. (Yes, you read that right.) Among the chickens and sheep stands an Andean herbivore, whose mouth moves as it warns her, “Everything with teeth bites. … It can be easy, or it can be hard, but either way, it’s gonna get what it wants.” Like Van’s and Shauna’s visions, Akilah’s seems like a straightforward extension of her inner turmoil: Shauna is still reeling from the death of her child; Van is struggling with survivor’s guilt; and Akilah, whom Lottie, the leader of the girls’ burgeoning cult, has held up as a kind of prophet, is worried about what the future holds and what will happen the next time they run low on fresh meat. But where Twin Peaks’ cryptic divinations were issued in the backward-masked whoosh of a mysterious man, Yellowjackets has chosen another voice for its emissary from the other side: that of Big Pussy.
Although it may take a minute to process what on earth is going on, that is, in fact, the voice of Vincent Pastore, The Sopranos’ Salvatore Bonpensiero, coming out of the llama’s mouth. Indeed, even if you are tempted to rage-quit the show after this moment, it’s worth sticking around through the end credits, just to see the words Llama: Vincent Pastore. Why would the embodied spirit of wild savagery talk like a midlevel mobster? Well, these girls are from New Jersey, even if the ones who died in the mid-’90s never had a chance to see James Gandolfini pick up the Star-Ledger in his slippers. (Getting carved up for team dinner is one thing, but missing the dawn of prestige TV is a real tragedy.) It’s supposed to be funny and weird, to reflect the understanding that not everything the mind conjures up under extreme stress is going to be ominous or even sensible. But it feels like flailing, a big swing and a miss at a moment when the show cannot afford any more strikes.
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