Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for the Yellowjackets Season 3 premiere: S3E1, “It Girl” (written by Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson and Jonathan Lisco and directed by Bart Nickerson) and S3E2, “Dislocation” (written by Rich Monahan & Ameni Rozsa and directed by Bille Woodruff)
Yellowjackets Season 3 premiered with two episodes, so I’m going to take them together. In past recaps, I’ve often structured things around the characters, as there were felt resonances between what was happening with them in the 1996 timeline and the 2021 timeline. That may be the case again as Season 3 proceeds, but with S3E1 & S3E2, it largely isn’t. The end of S3E2 may lead us to draw a connection between the two timelines, but I’m ultimately going to argue that this is probably a red herring. So, rather than going through events episode by episode or going through them character by character, I’m going to take what happens in the wilderness in 1997 and then what happens in 2021.
Happy Summer Solstice!
When we left our Yellowjackets out in the wilderness as the end of Season 2, it was still winter and the cabin was on fire. As S3E1 begins, we’ve jumped to summer, which is clearly indicated by Lottie (Courtney Eaton) noting that it is the solstice. In the intervening months, the team has been raising ducks and rabbits, hunting deer, etc. Mari (Alexa Barajas) tells Ben (Steven Krueger) that they’re done with the cannibalism stuff, and, even if we know that’s not true, I do believe that she believes this.
Speaking of Mari, she and Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) apparently hate each other, and while they were never besties, this feels like a new development. Of course, Mari got really into the idea that Lottie had magical powers in Season 2, and Shauna has always scorned the woo-woo bullshit about the wilderness, so I guess it’s really just a matter of Shauna focusing her wrath on Mari and that makes enough sense for the plot to work.
Tai (Jasmin Savoy Brown) advises Nat (Sophie Thatcher), who has fully taken on her role as leader of the group, to address the problem, but Nat dismisses it as petty teenage girl squabbling. She’s not wrong, but Tai probably isn’t either when she offers the rebuttal that out there in the wilderness, everything might be a matter of life and death.
Regardless, the confrontation between Shauna and Mari during the game of Capture the Bone with which S3E1 begins seems to be just the latest in a series of altercations between the two, and things just get worse in the wake of it, as Shauna is on the losing team and thus supposed to be Mari’s servant.
At dinner, Shauna spits in Mari’s stew, which leads Mari to pour it on the ground and instigate a fight she quickly loses. Nat steps in and punishes both Mari and Shauna with “house arrest” for a week, which causes Mari to basically give everyone the finger and storm off into the woods.
I want to be clear that I’m totally on team Mari here. I’m always on team Mari, but Shauna’s loss doesn’t justify her pettiness. It might justify her refusal to take part in Lottie’s ceremonies and things like that, and we might be able to understand Shauna’s behavior by thinking about her trauma and so on, but spitting in the girl’s dinner? Come on, now, what is this, kindergarten?
It shows how far the team’s situation has improved that Mari is willing to waste food/skip dinner over this, and you could well argue she’s being stupid to do so. They may be flush now, but winter will come again and we can remember how they were starving. But, still, Shauna hocked a loogie in that stew, man, and that’s gross! Mari still has some humanity…
It also becomes clear in S3E1 that virtually the whole team believes that Coach Ben set the cabin on fire. After all, it doesn’t seem like anyone else could have done it. Nat has kept the group from looking for him, though, and if we think back to the last scene between Nat and Ben in Season 2 where she told him to stay away, it makes sense to think that Nat is protecting him. And that’s further bolstered when she and Misty (Samantha Hanratty) come across one of Ben’s traps while they’re looking for Mari and Nat tells Misty to ignore it.
In S3E1, Ben finds a stockpile of provisions buried underground, which is interesting in its own right. Did Cabin Daddy put them there? I don’t have any other theories to offer at the moment. Regardless, since he’s removed the wood planks that covered the area, Ben sets it up to try to trap a deer. Instead, he traps Mari.
Given that this is likely the pit from the series premiere and that many have theorized that Mari might be Pit Girl, it’s a nice wink from the writers to have Mari fall into this pit in the Season 3 premiere. She’s not dead, of course, but she has dislocated her knee. Ben finds her and helps her get out of the pit in S3E2, but then he kidnaps her. He insists he didn’t set the cabin on fire (and I think I believe him), but he also can’t have her run back to the rest of the group, who would surely come after him. He needs some time to think.
Back in the cave where Javi (Luciano Leroux) hid out for months in Season 2, Ben gives Mari some hot chocolate, and then we hear him talking to someone about how he needs to think. Is he talking to himself? Probably, but we should remember how Javi mentioned a friend who told him not to return to the group after he was found in Season 2, so there remains a possibility that someone else is out there somehow. I don’t know how that would be possible, but if we want to believe Ben when he says he didn’t even know about the cabin burning, maybe this other person is also the one who set it on fire.
A big question is how far Yellowjackets will go in the direction of the supernatural. There have been some indications since Season 1, from Lottie speaking French to Cabin Daddy showing up in Jackie’s (Ella Purnell) dying hallucination, that the talk of “it” isn’t just nonsense. It could be delusion, but the series has played on the line of the question.
In S3E1 & S3E2, Lottie is practically force-feeding Travis (Kevin Alves) hallucinogenic tea on the thought that he has some connection to the wilderness that will help them learn what it wants. He hears the trees screaming, and everyone in the group hears something similar after Mari storms off from dinner. What are we hearing? I have no idea.
During these scenes, I kept thinking about how Natalie (Juliette Lewis) insisted in Season 1 that Travis never believed in any of that stuff. What we saw in Season 2 complicated that question, and I think we’d have to conclude that Travis was more on the line about whether he believed there was something supernatural at play in the wilderness, but I find myself wondering more about whether Natalie ever bought into it. Maybe she just viewed the pseudo-religion as an effective way to create cohesion amongst the group.
It’s clear that Shauna doesn’t buy into it at all. She’s so pissed about Lottie trying to bring her dead baby into her woo-woo wilderness religion that she secretly moves his corpse. When she learns that Melissa (Jenna Burgess) saw her do so, she puts a knife to the girl’s throat. Then Melissa kisses her and they start making out. That’s hot.
It’s Not a Hotel, It’s an Experience
Yellowjackets S3E2 ends with Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) calling the restaurant where she and Jeff (Warren Kole) had just met with a couple of hotel guys to ask about a phone she found in the bathroom, and this is intercut with the 1997 scenes between her and Melissa. Someone came into that bathroom, turned off the lights, and basically threatened Shauna with a “Queen of Hearts” ringtone, so the editing implies that it might be Melissa.
I don’t buy it. I don’t think Melissa has been established as a big enough character, and also the big casting announcement for Season 3 was Hilary Swank, whose hair is a different color. That’s not a lot to go on, and I hesitate to put too much on non-diegetic things like casting announcements, but this struck me as a red herring. I’d be more prone to guess that it might be Mari, but really that’s just a shot in the dark.
Whoever is harassing Shauna, though, this isn’t the first incident. I’m presuming the same person (or team) left the envelope on her doorstep that Callie (Sarah Desjardins) finds. This simply says Shauna Shipman (note her maiden name) and has the symbol on it. Inside is a mini-cassette tape, which Callie pockets, but by the end of S3E2 she hasn’t checked out what’s on it (because she probably doesn’t have the tech) nor told her mother about it. That’s a bit disappointing, both because I want to know what’s on that tape, and because Callie seems to be otherwise invested in becoming part of the team.
She hears some girls at school suggesting that her mom et al. were into weird sex stuff involving pig’s blood, so Callie orders up some intestines and liver to throw at them at lunch. For this, she gets suspended, but Shauna actually thinks it’s funny. They’re bonding!
Then, Lottie (Simone Kessell) shows up at the Sadecki door. She’s gotten out of the psych ward, but her life has been ruined by the events of the Season 2 finale. She’s lost her cult community and has nowhere to go. Callie convinces her parents to let Lottie stay for at least one night, and it’s clear that she really wants to know what happened out in the wilderness.
Shauna doesn’t want Callie talking to Lottie, but she has to accompany Jeff to dinner with these stupid hotel guys, so she wrangles Misty (Christina Ricci) to “babysit.” That doesn’t work at all insofar as Callie knocks Misty out with a mix of alcohol and allergy meds, but it’s not entirely clear coming out of S3E2 what Lottie may have told Callie when the camera wasn’t watching.
As for Misty, she’s distraught about having killed her “best friend” even as she skips Natalie’s funeral. Walter (Elijah Wood) seems to be living with her now, but over the course of the two-episode premiere he mostly just expresses concern about her well-being. And, Misty is right: It’s too much! If you ever want an example of someone being too doting, this is it. Walter is not wrong to be worried, and he’s not wrong to say that the other surviving Yellowjackets aren’t really Misty’s friends, but I can’t fault her for kicking him out, even as I do hope the pair will reconcile.
Tai (Tawny Cypress) and Van (Lauren Ambrose) go to dinner at a fancy pants restaurant that Van loathes. So, after agreeing to get a pizza instead, the pair do a dine and dash like they did when they were younger. This turns Van on and she kisses Tai in an alley. I think Tai was into that from the get-go, but then she sees the Man With No Eyes and is really into it.
It’s interesting to think about how she seems to take this figure as a kind of dark encouragement. If you recall, she was about to quit her State Senate campaign back in Season 1 because it was wrecking her family, but then changed her mind after she had a vision of the Man With No Eyes in the crowd. But, the first time she saw him was when her nana got freaked out on her deathbed, so there is some tension here. I wonder how it relates to “the other one” and when she will re-enter our story.
In the meantime, Tai and Van’s dine and dash has led to the death of their waiter. To be honest, that guy was a bit overzealous in trying to chase them down, but it’s certainly sad that he almost got hit by a bus and then died of a heart attack. I was reminded of a certain scene in The Sopranos. If you know, you know.
What seems more important to the plot of Yellowjackets is that Tai hides this information from Van. The latter stepped on a glass and cut her foot, so she was at Urgent Care while Tai went to settle up the bill they’d skipped out on. I’m not sure how, or if, this will come back around into the narrative, but I could certainly see it feeding into how Lottie thinks they brought “it” back with them from the wilderness, and Van was always more on board with that belief system than Tai was.
The biggest question coming out of the Yellowjackets Season 3 premiere is probably the one in the 2021 timeline: Who’s coming after Shauna, and what’s on that tape? If anyone survived the wilderness besides those we already know about, I tend to think the show has to reveal this soon. It’s at least seemed as if the core cast wasn’t worried about anyone else being out there. This does open the possibility that there are others who survived that they don’t know about, which could be interesting, but it’s not a game Yellowjackets can keep playing every season.
We know Hilary Swank and Joel McHale are in Season 3. If they are survivors, I’d guess Mari and Coach Ben, but they could also be playing completely new characters and we just don’t know yet. But someone is threatening Shauna, and it’s not Jeff this time.
I continue to find the 1996 timeline to be more compelling than the present-day one. I want to see what leads to what out there in the wilderness, and, more importantly, how. That’s maybe the greatest strength of Yellowjackets as a series: to some extent, we know what will happen, but we want to know how it goes down.
See you next week.
