“Yellowjackets” is a masterpiece of darkly comedic, horrific and supernatural TV writing. Its third season debuted on February 21, and there is still time to catch up before the season finishes airing.
“Yellowjackets” has a pretty simple premise. It, on first glance, is a gender-bent retelling of William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies.” In 1996, a team of New Jersey girls soccer players crash-land in the Canadian Rockies on their way to a national tournament in Seattle. They have to survive 19 months in the wilderness while slowly succumbing to their environment. In 2021, the four survivors of the wilderness cope with the trauma of their experience 25 years later when mysterious postcards drags them back together.
The writing of the show is tight, with aspects of the story being set up in the opening shots of the pilot episode. On top of this, the 2021 storyline provides horrific foreshadowing to the ’96 storyline. From the start of the series, you know exactly who survived the plane crash and subsequent 19 months in the Canadian wilderness. Out of the 21 survivors of the plane crash, only four make it out of the wilderness. This is what makes the show so horrifying. You know that only Nat, Shauna, Misty and Tai make it out of the woods, and the main horror of the ’96 segment is how they become the only people to survive.
On top of the excellent script, the actresses for both the ’96 and ’21 segments are fabulous. The older Yellowjackets, played by Melanie Lynskey (Shauna), Tawny Cypress (Tai), Juliette Lewis (Nat) and Christina Ricci (Misty), match the personalities of their younger counterparts, played by Sophie Nélisse, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sophie Thatcher and Samantha Hanratty respectively, to a tee. Additionally, the older Yellowjackets mesh well with occasional interactions with their younger selves or members of the ’96 cast.
The main four Yellowjackets paint drastically different pictures of trauma both in the ’96 and ’21 segments. Nat is constantly haunted by her time in the wilderness, using drugs to escape her life, which mirrors her younger self dealing with her home life. Shauna does everything in her power to repress her trauma from the wilderness as an adult. Tai uses her harrowing experience as political leverage for a NJ State Senate campaign. Missy handles her time in the wilderness in a drastically different way, being rather peppy with a side of slight psychopathy.
The supporting cast of 1996 Yellowjackets excel as well– especially Ella Purnell as team-leader Jackie, Courtney Eaton as pseudo-psychic Lottie and Steven Kruger as Coach Ben, the only adult to survive the crash. On top of the stellar ’96 cast, Shauna’s husband Jeff (Warren Kole) and Tai’s wife Simone (Rukiya Bernard) provide a balance to their spouse’s wilderness experiences, with both being unconditionally loving in different ways.
The show follows the twisted path of the girls in ’96 being absorbed into the wilderness, and the people who have tried so hard to forget the wilderness in ’21 being drawn back in.
“Yellowjackets” as a whole is a fabulously written, gory, horrifying and incredibly well-acted TV show. It will keep you on your toes from start to finish, through plot twists which are, on second watch, foreshadowed but not expected upon first viewing.
