See Why Yellowjackets Earned Its 100% on Rotten Tomatoes Before Season 2 Comes Out
Conversations with my sister Marielle usually go like this:
Her: “Cannot believe that show xyz didn’t win anything at the Emmys. You need to check it out.”
Me: “How am I supposed to stream all the good shows when there are so many streaming platforms?”
Her: “It’s amazing. The screenwriting, the acting–everything is amazing.”
Me: “Eh, I’m too busy. Plus, I don’t want to feel obligated to like something just because you like it. You’re my sister; I don’t have to be nice to you.”
Well, I hate to admit this, Marielle, but Yellowjackets really is that amazing.
Showtime’s original series is a riveting genre mashup: a survival epic with horror elements, a coming-of-age drama centered on teenage girls, and a thrilling mystery that begins twenty-five years later with four survivors desperate to quash an attempt at blackmail. Season 1 was slowly released week by week in the fall last year and garnered plenty of acclaim. There’s a bajillion reasons why season 1 has earned a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and I’m here to explain why.
Yellowjackets begins with a shot of a girl running frantically away from something we can’t see in a snowy wilderness. She falls into a pit and becomes impaled by a number of pointy stakes below. Ouch! Another girl steps onto the scene to view her catch. Woah! Total barbarians! What are they gonna do to that girl? Eat her? Yep. A few minutes later, we see the same girl being hung upside down for her throat to be slit and body to be drained of blood.
A little roleplay if you will: The year is 1996 and you are a teenage girl. Your soccer team won the state championship and now you’re on your way to Nationals in a ritzy, private plane. Great! But the plane crashes and you find yourself coming to terms with the fact that 1. some people just straight up died and 2. any connection to civilization seems miles away. Social dynamics have drastically shifted and the consequences of failure out in the wild are brutal.
It should be noted that the show runners, Ashley Lyle and Bart Nickerson, focus more on the shift in social dynamics among the group of survivors than the mundane reality of having to hunt for food and make water drinkable. In fact, the brutal conditions of living life off the grid seem less to send the girls into a frenzy of ultraviolence near the end of season 1 than something else I won’t spoil for you. This is to the show’s benefit, though, since it doesn’t get too bogged down in the details of plain survival. They don’t believe viewers should suffer from boredom because their characters are struggling to survive, thank God.
Anyway, 1996 is just one of two timelines. The other timeline begins twenty-five years later when four members on that high school soccer team desperately try to live normal lives and leave the past very much behind them.
Nat (played by the wonderful Juliette Lewis) is struggling with drug addiction and attends group therapy sessions. Taissa (Tanya Cypress) is an ambitious political candidate running for office and is clearly dedicated to her community. Shauna (Melanie Lynskey) initially comes across on a surface level as a bored housewife who indulges in an extramarital affair. Yet she knows how to gut a rabbit like it’s nothing. And Misty (Christina Ricci) is an outwardly cheerful hospice nurse who doesn’t hesitate to tell one patient “don’t fuck with me” after the patient knocks her food off her tray. The women try their best to cope with the trauma of their experience and seem to keep contact with one another to a minimum until all four of them receive the same strange postcard with the mysterious symbol they had seen in the woods twenty-five years earlier. It’s implicitly agreed among the women that the person behind this knows what they did in the wild and could spill their terrible secret.
Part of the fun in watching season 1 is piecing together how Misty, Nat, Shauna, and Taissa have changed irrevocably from their time in the wilderness and how they’ve struggled to let the past remain behind. The editor(s) play around in emphasizing some character traits with some interesting transitions between the two timelines.
We find out quickly that these survivors have solid, easily definable personalities. Young Nat is an independent outsider girl desperate to leave the squalid conditions of trailer life. Young Taissa is the reckless, ultra-competitive leader of her soccer team and the one people look toward for direction. Young Shauna is the meek, supportive friend who is in turn treated with condescension by her best friend. And young Misty is the team trainer who’s eager to please and make people rely on her for recovering from their injuries. There is a sense of her having a kind of munchausen syndrome by proxy, which has led to all sorts of wild fan theories about her.
The show has rightly developed a cult following. Season 1 has already spawned fervid podcasters and YouTubers who spot Easter eggs and posit fan theories. Who all survived? How quickly did these girls descend into warring, cannibalistic clans? Who’s trying to blackmail the four women? Are there supernatural events that take place in the 1996 timeline or are those hallucinations? What does the unique symbol represent and why are Misty, Nat, Taissa, and Shauna threatened by its appearance on a postcard mailed to them twenty-five years later? Some of these questions are answered as some narrative threads are tidily resolved while the screenwriters entice us with more questions at the end of season 1.
The show’s pacing never lags with its tight plotting. But the plotting is never too tight and allows for some rich characterization that makes us speculate what latent qualities became manifest among the girls when forced to survive. It’s fascinating, of course, to imagine how the characters have grown (or in some ways regressed) when given a gap of twenty-five years and mysterious traumatic events. Twenty-five years later, Shauna comes across as timid and non-confrontational but doesn’t grimace when she guts a rabbit she finds outside her house. Misty is callous to her patients as a hospice nurse and makes us imagine what other psychopathic qualities she may possess. Nat makes me wonder what boundaries, if any, she is afraid to cross when later on these four women pursue a villain. And Taissa makes me wonder what fuels her ambition to lead others. Even secondary characters (like Laura Lee) are made round, which makes clear that we are still getting to know the twenty or so survivors from the plane crash. Future seasons have plenty of characters to still explore.
Given a timeline of twenty-five later, we’re asked to answer these questions: Were these four women always like this? Or did they learn to become this way from spending 19 months in a dark and savage wild? Did these girls devolve into cannibalistic clan members or did they fulfill a strong sense of purpose and become who they always were meant to become? Early on in the pilot episode, older Nat says in a group therapy session that “after they rescued us, I… I lost my purpose. Thanks to my time here, I finally know how to get it back.” A good gritty survival story can address the paradox of a character feeling much more alive than before, despite being exhausted and hungry and injured in unforgiving terrain. (Contrast this 1996 timeline to the supposedly comfortable, yet quietly stultifying, humdrum life that Shauna lives at the beginning of season 1.) The ugly truth that Nat was given a purpose when stripped of her humanity makes any exploration of violence and degradation later on much more exciting to anticipate for the rest of the series.
Marielle, I finally watched one of your favorite shows, and let me say, the hype is real. Now I do agree that the show got snubbed at the Emmys. (It had been nominated for 7 Emmys, including outstanding drama series and outstanding writing for two of its episodes.)
Head on over to Showtime and start your 30-day free trial if you can. Or, watch the pilot episode on YouTube for free. Season 2 is expected to begin sometime in the spring of 2023.
