It’s time to talk about the most captivating yet frustrating show of the year, “Yellowjackets.” Season 3 of this show wrapped up a little while ago, revealing some long awaited answers to questions that were established as far back as the very first scene.
Dissatisfaction
The consensus? It’s all just a bit unsatisfying and I couldn’t agree more. I absolutely love this premise for the show about a female version of “Lord of the Flies.” The story has the added mix of a conspiracy in the future, following a select few of the survivors. The problem is the writers seem to not know where the show is headed season to season, and they don’t seem to know what is going to happen from episode to episode. This leads to the most frustrating string of events. There’s a lot of potential but the events are never tied together, or stand on a foundation that makes any sense.
Spoiler alert!!
Spoilers for “Yellowjackets” all the way up to the end of Season 3.
I had first started to see the cracks forming in the writing towards the end of Season 1. A supposedly important character, Adam, is accidentally killed by Shauna after a misunderstanding. It turns out to be a nothing burger of Jeff, Shauna’s husband, trying to blackmail the Yellowjackets– just because. All of that tension and mystery is deflated, which I call the “Balloon Theory,” but that’s for another day.
Season 2 antagonist
Season 2 seemed to not clearly define the antagonist or give any specific character traits to anybody. Who is the one who’s losing their mind the most? Could it be Shauna, the first to indulge in cannibalism? Lottie is certainly insane, but she isn’t the leader of the Yellowjackets’ descent into madness? Is Taissa the most rational, or is Natalie? Does Van have anything going on outside of Taissa? What is Misty’s motivation?
By this time there are many weird plot points that are intriguing enough on their own. Most are either lame reveals or remain unanswered.
Some strange plot twists
Some of those plot elements include: the symbol, Taissa’s alter ego, Taissa’s son maybe having an alter ego too, the man with no eyes, whatever the hell Walter is doing here, Travis’ absolutely stupid death reveal, Crystal’s body disappearing, the cabin burning down. These are simply the ones that stand out the most, there are plenty of other ones there to nitpick.
The decision that I think messed up everything is when Misty killed Natalie–her supposed best friend–in the future timeline. Now that Natalie is dead in the future, it doesn’t hold a lot of weight when she and Shauna are playing out a Jack and Ralph type rivalry when we know the outcome of Natalie’s death. Her demise has actually little to nothing to do with Shauna.
Friends? Enemies?
Let’s just look at the character dynamics of these three characters: Misty, Natalie, and Shauna. In Season 1, we see the Yellowjacket that later is revealed to be Misty being subservient to the Antler Queen and delivers the plate of meat to everyone. Also later on in the season, teenage Misty sabotages the group by destroying the black box when she sees they value her to keep them alive. Misty is crazy, but this makes sense. So we know that Misty values being valued and is someone’s No. 2.
In the future, we see Shauna as relatively put together, despite the trauma she went through in the wilderness. Adult Misty is definitely shown to be Natalie’s No. 2 and they have an “odd couple relationship.”
By Season 2, Shauna is seen to be the first one who engages in cannibalism, implying that she may be the craziest one and a good candidate for Antler Queen.
Lottie, though exhibits many more traits of a cult leader, considering she literally runs a cult in the future, so I find it way more likely that she is the Antler Queen.
There’s already dissonance between our idea of Shauna in the past and Shauna in the future.
Natalie starts coming into her own as the leader of the Yellowjackets and that is basically undisputed.
Teenage Misty on the other hand doesn’t really have any close connective tissue with Natalie and in fact becomes friends with some other girl named Crystal–who she accidentally kills. Then in the future, Misty kills Natalie by accident…okay? I see what they are going for with Misty being unwittingly dangerous to her friends, but it feels clunky.
Season 3
In Season 3, at the beginning of the season, teenage Shauna explicitly complains in her journal about how the girls are in denial about what exactly is happening to them out in the wilderness. Yet, in the season before she was having conversations with her best friend’s corpse, then is the first to eat her. In addition, she flips back to being the most far gone when she is eventually crowned Antler Queen by Season 3’s end. There is very little development to show either of these elements.
Natalie is shown to be the most rational of the group and does her best to lead them. Natalie and Misty still don’t have much of a close dynamic, like we see in the future–just yet either.
Once the hikers come into play, though, Lottie is the first to opt to stay behind. Okay that makes sense since she’s the one who believes in The Wilderness the most, but then Shauna who has now been retconned into being sane again in the first episode, opts to stay with Lottie as well. What?
Misty decides to stay too, which makes sense with her finding a purpose in The Wilderness. This doesn’t add up to her and Natalie being the odd couple in the future, especially once Natalie finds out she sabotaged them. There’s no mending the friendship after that.
Has the time continuum been disrupted?
By this point, Season 3 teenager Shauna could never realistically become Season 1 adult Shauna. This is especially true because there were no hints that she was actually insane in earlier seasons, besides skinning a rabbit in her civilized suburban household. But, that could be chalked up to being changed by such a traumatic event.
They couldn’t really decide where she stood mentally in contrast to everyone else in the group until that point. If anything, Taissa and Van come off more irrational than Shauna by attempting to give The Wilderness what it wants by killing other people to save themselves.
Are you confused too?
Do you see how tangled and confusing all of these different character motivations are? And that is only three characters. Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea of Natalie vs. Shauna with Shauna losing it completely to become the Antler Queen, the “quasi-Big Bad” of the show. However, that development in Season 3 doesn’t gel very nicely with what we’ve already seen in the future timeline from past seasons.
Misty killing Natalie as an adult, revealing no real answers, gives me little to care about regarding the power struggle in the past. That’s apparent now knowing that from Season 1 Natalie and Shauna were working together. Further solidifying this, in Season 2, Shauna wasn’t the one to kill Natalie.
This doesn’t even take into account other seemingly random stories like; why Hannah is there, why the tone of the future storyline seems to be really dumb and quirky compared to the really serious tone of the past, and why the hell is Tai eating dirt? Are we going to have any follow-up on “other Tai” in any meaningful way?
The end of Season 2 was so monumental too. The cabin burned down! They have no shelter in the middle of winter! I would’ve loved to see at least a few scenes of how hard it was for them to survive in Season 3. Sophie Thatcher does an amazing job of showing just how dreadful it would be for them to go through another winter, but actually having the knowledge of their struggle in the first winter would’ve made that scene an absolute grand slam.
Sending out an SOS
Please for the love of God, writers, figure out where this is going before writing another word of this show, I beg of you. Honestly, and I’ve said this in my Letterboxd reviews, I want to rewrite this show for myself in my own headcanon and for my own sanity because I am absolutely enthralled with the idea and premise. The actual plot points are really good in a vacuum too, but they keep choosing the wrong characters and the wrong times to execute them. It’s so incredibly frustrating.
Well, anyway that is my vent about “Yellowjackets.” Remember to like, share, subscribe, and comment. And check out some of our other TV, movie, and entertainment reviews!
