Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Yellowjackets S3E3, “Them’s the Breaks” (written by Jonathan Lisco & Ashley Lyle & Bart Nickerson and directed by Jonathan Lisco)
One of the things I’ve always loved about Yellowjackets is how the series creates resonances between its timelines. It reminds me of Lost in the best possible way. But, through three episodes of Season 3, I’m afraid I haven’t been feeling many of those resonances. The timelines seem separate, and while I’m sure there will be at least one big way that they communicate by the end of the season, with S3E3 it continues to make the most sense to me to run through the events of one and then the other. I’ll start with the 2021 timeline.
Let’s Go for Ice Cream!
Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) is mad at Misty (Christina Ricci) for failing to keep Callie (Sarah Desjardins) from talking to Lottie (Simone Kessell), but agrees to meet with Misty a the promise of “interesting intel.” Misty does not have any such intel, however. She just wants to hang out with her friend Shauna and prove Walter (Elijah Wood) wrong.
Walter was not wrong, though, and it’s clear that Shauna is annoyed at Misty’s false promise of information, and further annoyed as Misty weasels her way into tagging along for Shauna’s errands. Things really go off the rails, however, when Shauna’s brakes go out and she has to veer into a field in order to stop her van. At this point, she accuses Misty of cutting her brakes, and of leaving the phone in the bathroom in last week’s episode.
Despite the fact that Misty disabled Natalie’s (Juliette Lewis) car in Season 1, I think we can be confident that she had nothing to do with what happened to Shauna’s brakes. As she notes, it wouldn’t make sense for her to do that when she was going to be in the car. Further, she has no idea about that phone in the bathroom and was clearly at Shauna’s house when that event happened.
It’s frustrating that Shauna is so willing to simply blame Misty and (apparently) move on, when thinking things through could have easily led her to conclude that Misty was right, and brought Misty into the fold of an investigation into the threats against Shauna. That might happen down the line, but for the moment we simply get Misty burning a photo of the group of adult Yellowjackets from their high school reunion.
We also still don’t know what is on the cassette tape someone left for Shauna at her house because Callie pocketed it, hasn’t told her mother about the threatening package, and hasn’t found a way to listen to the tape herself. I’m frankly not sure how well I think any of this fits with what we know about who these characters are, especially given what they’ve been through together. It feels like Yellowjackets is delaying for TV reasons. Also: Where is Jeff (Warren Kole)?
Callie meets up with Lottie for some shopping shoplifting, and while their growing relationship is intriguing—I’d like to hear how Callie would describe herself without fear or shame—it seems like Lottie still hasn’t told Callie anything she didn’t already know.
She does appear to have given her the heart necklace at some point during the day, though, which was a pretty stupid thing to do. Shauna may have accepted a delicious dinner and chilled out a bit about Lottie’s relationship with her daughter, but she rightly freaks out when she sees the necklace around Callie’s neck, and kicks Lottie out of the house immediately.
From what we’ve seen, that makes a lot of sense. This is the necklace they used to mark the girl they were going to kill and eat out in the wilderness! Lottie telling Shauna that it never meant what Shauna thought it meant is interesting, but also shows that Lottie should have known how Shauna would take seeing Callie wearing it.
The narrative point seems to be to fracture the relationships between the adult Yellowjackets, as though they’re destined to fall apart with Natalie gone. The one exception, so far, is the relationship between Tai (Tawny Cypress) and Van (Lauren Ambrose).
Van learns that her cancer is in remission, and (as I feared) Yellowjackets is playing with the idea that this is because of “it.” Tai thinks they fed it with the deaths of Nat and then the waiter. They gave it what it wants, and surely they will have to give it more.
It’s noteworthy that Van doesn’t really seem to be onboard with that way of thinking in S3E3, given that in the 1996 timeline Van (Liv Hewson) is much more of a believer in the wilderness than Tai (Jasmin Savoy Brown) is. I have to wonder if Tai has slipped into being her dark Other again, but it really doesn’t seem like that is the case.
Watching an old VHS tape of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, Tai and Van see an ad for an ice cream parlor that features the Man with No Eyes. That’s a weird marketing campaign, but, hey, there was some weird stuff on TV in the late 1980s. See, for instance, Pee-wee’s Playhouse.
Rather than writing off her visions as stemming from a childhood memory, though, Tai thinks the ice cream parlor must have a deeper significance. So, she makes Van go out there with her, despite the fact that it’s been closed for years. Once there, she breaks into the decrepit building, and then they see a wolf that’s just caught its prey. And… it seems like Tai is going to take this as a sign to kill more people.
Was this show always this melodramatic? Have we jumped a shark? I’m still having fun, anyway.
Are You Gonna Eat that Bat?
Back in 1997, Ben (Steven Krueger) gives Mari (Alexa Barajas) some bat to eat (yum!), she tries to seduce him, he tells her he’s gay, and then they end up macing each other in the face. Good times.
Ultimately, Ben realizes that Mari has a point—he can’t, or doesn’t want to, keep her captive forever. So, he lets her go, and even though she promised she wouldn’t tell the others he was alive, she proceeds to do so immediately.
Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) leads the charge to go and find Ben, over Natalie’s (Sophie Thatcher) protestations. And, given that everyone seems to think Ben set the cabin on fire except for Natalie, I have to wonder if these events are eventually going to lead to her losing her leadership role. For the moment, however, she goes along, and the episode ends with her pointing a gun in Ben’s face. But I’m almost certain she’ll be trying to protect him moving forward.
The meat of S3E3 is in the extended hallucinations that Van, Shauna, and Akilah (Nia Sondaya) experience after they enter a cavern that Ben later says is filled with some kind of poison gas. Van enters a cozy room and sits in a rocking chair in front of a fire. Akilah eats berries in a lush field. And Shauna has a vision of her son alive as a toddler.
Things quickly turn for each, however. Shauna cannot swim to shore, but seems to be stuck in place. The room Van is in catches fire and she’s grabbed by disembodied arms. And Akilah is threatened by a talking llama (Vincent Pastore).
The three then find themselves in a classroom, with Lottie (Courtney Eaton) in the role of the teacher. On the chalkboard, she writes, “Of all the ways to lose a person death is the kindest” and tells the girls that there is only one dream. The Man with No Eyes pushes a cart down the hallway, and then Jackie (Ella Purnell) asks if they want to play with a slap bracelet. Akilah does so just fine, but it cuts Van’s arm when she tries. Then Jackie slaps it around Shauna’s neck and she starts suffocating. Lottie tells Akilah she has to get it off or Shauna will die, and, further, they all will die.
But then, they awake in the cave, where Ben has dragged them to safety. He barely has time to say that line about poison gas before Nat arrives with the others, puts a gun in his face, and says he’s coming with them. End of episode.
Reading into References to Lost and The Sopranos
If you haven’t seen Lost or The Sopranos, I recommend that you remedy that. Mild spoilers pertaining to each show lie ahead. Or, actually, it’s a pretty big Sopranos spoiler, so beware if you’re worried about such things!
The most explicit reference to Lost in Yellowjackets S3E3 is the song that Callie and Lottie are listening to while they make dinner: “Make Your Own Kind of Music” by Mama Cass. This is, of course, an iconic song in its own right, but it also features in the Season 2 premiere of Lost as we’re introduced to Desmond (Henry Ian Cusick). It’s a moment that the way that Lost’s world is about to crack wide open, so I can’t help but wonder if it’s a sign that something similar is to come in Yellowjackets. Are there Others in the wilderness? Who was Javi (Luciano Leroux) referring to when he mentioned a friend who told him not to return to the group?
I also think that the noise the Yellowjackets keep hearing in Season 3 is strongly reminiscent of that made by the Smoke Monster in Lost. That was a security system for the Others, but also became imbued with a kind of metaphysical significance. See? Mild spoilers. But I continue to wonder if Yellowjackets is going to dive headfirst into supernatural weirdness at some point. For the record, I’m all for it.
The Sopranos spoilers is bigger, but I think it is worth going all the way with it. The starting point here is the fact that the llama that talks to Akilah is voiced by Vincent Pastore, who played Big Pussy in The Sopranos. Through the first two seasons of the show, he is one of the people Tony (James Gandolfini) is closest to, but in the Season 2 finale, “Funhouse,” Tony has a fever dream wherein Pussy is a talking fish that tells Tony that he has been working with the government. Thus, Tony proceeds to kill his friend, even though he really doesn’t want to.
I’m not sure why you’d get Vincent Pastore to voice your talking llama unless you want us thinking about that time he was a talking fish in The Sopranos, so it’s worth thinking about if there’s a clue in this reference. Maybe it’s (just?) a symbol of betrayals to come, but the llama tells Akilah that “it can be easy or it can be hard, but it’s gonna to get what it wants.” In other words, people are going to die either way. So maybe this is a seed of the idea of rituals to come and hard choices like Tony made when he killed his buddy.
Of course, Akilah wouldn’t get the reference. That Sopranos episode came out in 2000.
See you next week.
