“Yellowjackets,” an arch survival drama on Showtime, is ostensibly centered on a mystery that’s planted in the pilot: Who was the girl running for her life as her hunters—former soccer teammates now uniformed in beast-hide regalia—waited for her to fall into a trap of spikes? Maybe the season finale, in mid-January, will reveal her identity. Maybe it won’t. Honestly, with apologies to the corpse—I forgot all about her, so addicted did I become to the character development unwinding around this twisty plot. You know a show is onto something when possible cannibalism is the least interesting thing about it.
The series, created by Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, depicts two main time lines: 1996, when a plane carrying the Yellowjackets, a New Jersey high-school soccer team, crashes in the Canadian wilderness, and 2021, when four survivors, who were rescued months after the crash, have reached middle age, and fear that the truth about their time in the wild is going to come out. The four protagonists are played by eight actors—one in each time line—all of whom are excellent. In 2021, we see Shauna (Melanie Lynskey), a stay-at-home mom, flay a rabbit with terrifying ease. How much bloodletting did she do as a teen, when she was stranded in a “Lord of the Flies” situation? The show’s title is a playful nod to Golding’s book; flies may have been a fine analogue for boys, but girls require the ferocity of wasps, with their venom and their stingers. And their intelligence. “Those girls were special,” an acquaintance recalls, in 2021. “They were champions.” In 1996, the squad is dominant, but it’s the lacklustre boys’ baseball team that gets all the credit. This underestimation ignites the Yellowjackets, who are overachievers in late-century girl-power style: mouthy and angsty and determined to escape dead-end suburbia. (The show’s soundtrack—PJ Harvey, Hole, Portishead—helps evoke the sardonic mood.) The girls are portrayed as fonts of intensity, wielding bodies they can’t fully control: when Taissa (Jasmin Savoy Brown), the team’s star, becomes annoyed with a freshman player, she sabotages her on the field, side-swiping her so viciously that her leg is broken, exposing bone.
“Yellowjackets” pulls no punches when it comes to gore. The show bluntly explores the vulnerability of the human body; the story is predicated on the tactile flow of blood. A girl is impaled when the plane hits the ground. One survivor looks up, after sensing moisture on her forehead, only to find the head coach’s body supine on a tree branch, dripping blood. The group’s survival initially depends on hunting animals; there are many scenes of butchery, of meat being gnawed. It takes the girls a while to acclimate—all except Misty (Sammi Hanratty), the team’s equipment manager. Misty is a sui-generis creep. Back in suburbia, she’d been teased for her eccentricities, but in the wild, where her triage skills outstrip any of her peers’, she is all-powerful. A baby Nurse Ratched, she amputates the shattered leg of the team’s assistant coach, whom she has a crush on, saving him, but also leaving him trapped. The adult Misty (Christina Ricci) becomes an actual nurse, still tormenting her charges. Misty’s willingness to cross boundaries, not just to menace but to endanger, puts into high relief the grief of Natalie, another outsider, who is also unstable. In the woods, young Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) and Travis (Kevin Alves), the head coach’s older son, form a romance over a shotgun, which they use to hunt. The adult Natalie (Juliette Lewis) wields a shotgun, too, but it serves more as a totem than as a weapon.
Taissa and Shauna also mirror each other as characters. Early on, the identity of the teen Shauna (Sophie Nélisse) is wrapped up in that of her best friend, Jackie (Ella Purnell). Jackie’s the bubbly popular teen captain, and Shauna’s the quiet intellectual. Back in New Jersey, Shauna had been clandestinely sleeping with Jackie’s boyfriend. In “Blood Hive,” the fifth episode, a great one about menstrual synchronicity, Shauna’s period is late, and—spoilers ahead—she tells Taissa that she is pregnant. Not even a hint of judgment crosses Taissa’s face. She’s a natural fixer, who knows something about the importance of secrecy: she and Van, another teammate, are, quite sweetly, hooking up. As adults, Taissa (Tawny Cypress) and Shauna continue to keep each other’s secrets, from an extramarital affair that Shauna has to the possibly supernatural antics of a woman, with dirt in her teeth and under her nails, who, perched in a tree, frightens Taissa’s son from outside his bedroom window.
“Yellowjackets” is a riot, but I can’t deny that it’s a queasy watch. Cutaways are rare; the camera lingers on slaughter. The dialogue is witty, but the show isn’t really about language: by the season’s end, the girls are nonverbal, howling. Their wordlessness feels like a response to the pop-cultural era, which praises female speech as a weapon to avenge the violated female body. The show’s cardinal image, the girl’s corpse from the opening, signals a shorthand in television grammar: the absence of female agency, the primacy of male crime. “Yellowjackets” reconstitutes the body’s meaning; whether as sacrifice, or as food, it’s life-giving.
The show’s latter time line is a spiky exploration of the feminist dream deferred. Before the crash, Shauna was accepted to Brown, but she never went. “Is this really how you thought your life was going to turn out?” a woman claiming to be a journalist asks, as Shauna unpacks groceries. Lynskey’s portrayal of a mid-life crisis is unnerving. Shauna is an impulsive transgressor; when we meet her, she is halfheartedly masturbating to a photo of her daughter’s boyfriend. Later, she cheats on her husband with a man she met in a car accident. She puts on a mask of meekness, disguising her recklessness. Meanwhile, Taissa, who fulfilled her potential, becoming a politician, is shielding a childlike, feral inner self. Natalie is in and out of rehab.
The adult Yellowjackets are objects of public fascination: one potential donor harasses Taissa with questions, and Natalie is similarly prodded by a patient during group therapy. On Halloween, Shauna’s daughter steals an old Yellowjackets jersey from her mother’s closet, to use as a costume, and Shauna, seeing her daughter from afar, mistakes her for a ghost. The presence of Lynskey, Lewis, and Ricci, indie idols of nineties teen rebellion, is part of the show’s meta commentary. The women became famous as children, too, and they must be aware of the disorientation that notoriety can bring.
The season climaxes with a bravura sequence of desire and ultraviolence, after an apocalypse-themed homecoming that the girls hold in the woods. Comparatively, the 2021 story line falters. The show needs a reason to reunite its protagonists, but the one it manufactures, a blackmail plot that ends in an explosion of glitter, is flimsy. A potential supernatural element—a recurring gynocentric symbol—hasn’t been fully baked into the story; perhaps next season will elaborate on this mystery. But these are hiccups, understandable in a show that operates on a high level. Naturally, everyone mentions “Lost” as the “Yellowjackets” antecedent, but “The Leftovers,” Damon Lindelof’s superior, baroque creation, is a better comparison. The cult following is gathering, spinning outrageous fan theories, dissecting dialogue. It’s not too late to sign up. ♦
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